Letter 2207

Andreas Walla sends his regards to Sloane. Woolhouse returns two books that could not be found in France. There was some difficulty in procuring and sending the Academie des sciences’s Memoires de l’Academie. He praises Sloane’s library as one of the best in Europe and requests several books on ophthalmology, including the ‘Madagascard traitant d’une Centaine de Maladies des Yeux’. Trade has resumed in Marseilles after the abatement of the Great Plague (1720-21). Several new treatises on the plague are in print. John Thomas Woolhouse was an English oculist and physician. He practiced physic in London, served James II for a time, and in 1711 secured a position at Paris’s Hospice des Quinze-Vingts. He served as the King of France’s oculist, was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1721, and a member of both the Berlin Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Sciences of Bologna. Woolhouse was criticized for charlatanry by some contemporaries (Anita McConnell, Woolhouse, John Thomas (16661734), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29954, accessed 17 July 2013]).