Letter 3786

Woolhouse is glad the 35 theses have finally reached Sloane. Zollman carried the package. Woolhouse was sorry to hear of Dr Rutty’s death, as he had recently sent a new book titled ‘Banister’s Breviary’ to him. Rutty was to forward the book to the Royal Society and collect subscriptions. Woolhouse thinks that some of Rutty’s papers may be worth publishing in the Philosophical Transactions. Horatio Walpole was in Paris and is leaving for Compiègne. Woolhouse was frustrated in his attempt to visit Walpole to gain his protection and laments a recent law passed by Parliament, which will lead to his estate on the Strand being appropriated by the state. Mr Price is Woolhouse’s lawyer. Woolhouse requests that Sloane petition Sir Robert Walpole for help. 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]).