Letter 2209

Woolhouse forwards a package from Scheuchzer. He could not find the two books Sloane requested, but will look for others ‘in return for Georgius Valla’. He reports that Woodworth’s cabinet of curiosities is the talk of Paris, though from what he understands it actually belongs to Gresham College. Woolhouse told Abbé Bignon that the collection belongs to the College. 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]).