Dr John Radcliffe and his Trust. Essay review.

IVOR GUEST, Dr John Radcliffe and his Trust, London, The Radcliffe Trust, 1991, pp. xvi, 595, illus., £45.00 (0-9502482-1-5). When this volume of 600 pages of detailed history of the Radcliffe Trust arrived on my desk, it seemed a daunting task. The author, who has been the Secretary to the Trustees since 1966, was asked to undertake this work by Sir Ralph Verney, the Chairman of the Trust, and it is published by the Radcliffe Trust. It is, in other words, an inside job. The problems of institutional histories are, of course, well known. Authors who are members of the institution have the advantage of easy access to sources and inside knowledge, but they may lack the skills of a professional historian. They may also have such strong loyalties that they find it it hard to remain detached. Historians who are hired to write an institutional history will, or should, possess those skills; but as outsiders they may miss some of the feel, the nuances, of the institution. They may also find that access to confidential sources is restricted, and their work may end up by offending certain members of the institution, leading to disputes about authorial independence and an institution's right to censor the manuscript. I can say at once there is none of those problems here. This is historical scholarship of the highest standard, the style is superb. and the detail is justified by the amount of new material about John Radcliffe and the work of the Trust. As a consequence, far from being daunted, I have become entranced by this book, although I must declare a personal interest. I write within a stone's throw of the Radcliffe Observatory and the Radcliffe Infirmary, and I have been associated with both in various ways since 1948. The libraries I use most often are the Radcliffe Science Library and the Radcliffe Camera. Further, when I or anyone else in this part of Oxfordshire falls seriously ill, we will probably be taken to what has become known to everyone as "The J.R."-the new John Radcliffe Hospital on Headington hill, an unappealing conglomeration of white-tiled blocks, like a vast bathroom turned inside out. Radcliffe is a household word around here. John Radcliffe (1652-1714) was an interesting but not a lovable physician. He could be very abrasive. He told his protege, Mead, that the sure secret of making a fortune was to "use all mankind ill" (p. 35). He made his fortune by persuading his patients to believe what he believed himself, that he could cure where others could not. He cultivated the rich, charged high fees, and invested his money skilfully. True, in 1688 he put £5,000 in a risky overseas venture which was totally lost when the goods were captured on the high seas by a French warship. But it was typical of Radcliffe that he laughed it off, saying he had only to climb 250 pairs of steps to recover his loss (p. 38). His rise in London was "meteoric". In the early 1690s it was estimated that his fortune amounted to £30,000. By 1707 it had grown to £80,000 and at the end of his life it was rumoured, with some exaggeration as it turned out, to be £140,000 (pp. 27 and 47). Like so many of the very rich, he combined episodes of compulsive large-scale generosity with miserliness and a suspicion bordering on paranoia of being cheated of ha'pence by innkeepers and tradesmen. Radcliffe liked to eat and loved wine. He was convivial, cultivating many friends and admirers as well as the enemies he made by his outspokenness. He owned grand houses and a collection of paintings which included a Rubens, a Frans Hals, a Jan Brueghel the elder, and two important Rembrandts. In his early days, when asked where his study was, he pointed to some phials, a skeleton and a herbary, and said, "Sir, this is Dr Radcliffe's library" (p. 9). Even at the end of his life his library consisted of no more than 200 books for he was not an author, and certainly not an academic. It is therefore all the more surprising that when he died, after bequests to family, friends, servants and University College, he left £40,000 to be used, after the decease of his sisters, to build a library. This is the Radcliffe Library (now generally known as the Radcliffe Camera), probably the most beautiful eighteenth-century library in the world. He also left £150 per annum for a "Library Keeper" and £100 per annum for the acquisition of books. A number of designs were produced, and it is a pity that the illustrations of these in