Letter 3204

Abbé Bignon thanks Sloane for sending the second volume of his Natural History of Jamaica. It has not yet ‘come to his hands’ because the Ambassador at Fontainebleau is absent. Woolhouse hopes Sloane’s bookseller sends copies of the first volume so the two volumes can be sold together, increasing sales. He discusses recent scholarship in the ‘Journal des Scavants’ and the ‘Journal des Trevaux’. Abbé Bignon wants a copy of Dr Freind’s new book. The surgeon Sloane recommended to Woolhouse turned out to know little about opthalmology. 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]).