Letter 3936

Robinson hopes the letter finds Sloane well in St Iago ‘notwithstanding the great reports at London of the Dks dying at sea, and his being taken by Pyrates’. He assures Sloane that he ‘sacrificed daily to Neptune for your preservation’. A doctor was recently fined by the College of Physicians. The College received a mandamus ‘to make one Cox (an Anabaptist Preacher) Honorary fellow’. Robinson gossips about the latest happenings in the Royal Society and the fact that Monsieur Papin was to go to Germany the coming week. He believes the Society is in decline. The Lord Chief Justice Herbert had two windfalls recently, one valued at £1500 and the other at £7000. Mr Charleton was well and claims that Sloane’s health was drunk to ‘in Noble Florence’. Tourenfort was at Montpellier and Helevius died in Danzig. Robinson was a naturalist, physician, and fellow of the Royal College of Physicians from 1685. He was appointed physician-in-ordinary to King George I 1714 (G. S. Boulger, Robinson, Sir Tancred (1657/81748), rev. Kaye Bagshaw, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2010 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/23873, accessed 26 June 2013]).