Letter 3692

Woolhouse has taken to the liberty to write Sloane before his son Beaumont returns to France. He sends thirty five theses on medicine and surgery from Montpellier as well as the latest Memoires de l’académie with Thomas Carte. Mr Carte was a good friend of the prosecutor Prys, ‘l’homme du monde le plus injuste’. Woolhouse describes his son Beaumont’s travel arrangements. He requests that Sloane provide protection for Beaumont, whose wife is sick and pregnant. 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]).