Letter 3239

Horatio Walpole, the English Ambassador, has arrived in Fontainebleau. Abbé Bignon received the second volume of the Natural History of Jamaica, which Sloane sent to him. Woolhouse has not spoken to Geoffroy or De Jussieu. He complains that the surgeon whom Sloane had given a recommendation to knew nothing about opthalmology. Bernard de Jussieu, of the Faculty of Medicine at Montpellier, is planning on publishing a second edition of the ‘Histoire des plantes qui naissent aux Environs de Paris’. 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]).