Letter 3506

Woolhouse sends a book that contests Newton’s Chronology. He comments on the controversy. Woolhouse has been made aware of a wondrous cure. He notes that ‘The secret of the gold drops is in very great request’ in Paris. His son Beaumont was able to perform the operation and Woolhouse claims it cured ‘a great fluxion I had on my breast’. He hopes to have interpreted His Majesty’s visit with Sloane correctly. 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]).