Letter 2817

Floyer asks Sloane about some papers. Smith has a receipt for some papers and will inform Dr Grim of this fact. Smith forwards Floyer’s note to Sloane along with some papers and a flyer. Sir John Floyer was a physician, advocate of cold bathing, and advised Dr Samuel Johnson, when the latter was a child, to visit Queen Anne to cure his king’s evil, which was done 1714 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Floyer_(physician)). Samuel Smith apprenticed to the book trade in 1675 and was indentured to the bookseller Samuel Gellibrand followed by Moses Pitt. Smith joined the Stationers Company and became freeman of the company and then freeman of the city of London in 1682. Smith published the Royal Society’s Philosophical Transactions from the beginning of his career and he and his partner Benjamin Walford were officially named ‘printers to the Royal Society’ in 1693 (Marja Smolenaars, Ann Veenhoff, Smith, Samuel (bap. 1658, d. 1707), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/63289, accessed 27 June 2013]).