Author Arbuthnot John

his friends complained that he would not take credit for his own work. Arbuthnot was born in Kincardineshire, on the northeastern coast of Scotland, son of Rev Alexander Arbuthnot, an Episcopalian priest and Margaret, née Lammie. He may have graduated with an arts degree from Marischal College in 1685. Where John's brothers took part in Jacobite causes in 1689, he remained with his father. These brothers included Robert, who fled after fighting for King James VII in 1689 and became a banker in Rouen and half-brother George, who fled to France and became a wine merchant. However, when William and Mary came to the throne and the new Act of Settlement required all ministers to swear allegiance to them as heads of the Church of England, Arbuthnot's father would not comply. As a non-conformist, he was removed from his church, and John was there to take care of affairs when, in 1691 his father died. Arbuthnot went to London in 1691, where he is supposed to have supported himself by teaching mathematics (which had been his formal course of study). He lodged with William Pate, whom Swift knew and called a "bel esprit." He published Of the Laws of Chance in 1692, translated from Christian Huygens's De ratiociniis in ludo aleae. This was the first work on probability published in English. The work, which applied the field of probability to common games, was a success, and Arbuthnot became the private tutor of one Jeffrey Jeffreys, son of an MP. He remained Jeffreys's tutor when the latter attended University College, Oxford in 1694, and he there met the variety of scholars then teaching mathematics and medicine, including Dr. John Radcliffe, Isaac Newton, and Samuel Pepys. However, Arbuthnot lacked the money to be a full-time student and was already well educated, although informally. He went to the University of St. Andrews and enrolled as a doctoral student in medicine on September 11, 1696. The very same day he defended seven theses on medicine and was awarded the doctorate. He first wrote satire in 1697, when he answered Dr. John Woodward's An essay towards a natural history of the earth and terrestrial bodies, especially minerals... with An examination of Dr. Woodward's account &c. He poked fun at the arrogance of the work and Woodward's misguided, Aristotelian insistence that what is theoretically attractive must be actually true. In 1701, Arbuthnot wrote another mathematical work, An essay on the usefulness of mathematical learning, in a letter from a gentleman in the city to his friend in Oxford. The work was moderately successful, and Arbuthnot praises mathematics as a method of freeing the mind from superstition. In 1702, he was at Epsom when Prince George of Denmark, husband of Queen Anne fell ill. According to tradition, Arbuthnot treated the prince successfully. According to tradition again, this treatment earned him an invitation to court. Also around 1702, he married Margaret, whose maiden name is possibly Wemyss. Although there are no baptismal records, it seems that his first son, George (named in honor of the prince), was born in 1703. He was elected to be a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1704. Also thanks to the Queen's presence, he was made an MD at Cambridge University on April 16, 1705. Arbuthnot was an amiable individual, and Swift said that the only fault an enemy could lay upon him was a slight waddle in his walk. His conviviality and his royal connections made him an important figure in the Royal Society. In 1705, Arbuthnot became physician extraordinary to Queen Anne, and at the same time was put on the board trying to publish the Historia coelestius. Isaac Newton and Edmund Halley wanted it published immediately, to support their work on orbits, while John Flamsteed, the Royal Astronomer whose observations they were, wanted to keep the data secret until he had perfected it. The result was that Arbuthnot used his leverage as friend and physician to Prince George, whose money was paying for the publication, to force Flamsteed to allow it out, albeit with serious errors, in 1712. Also as a scholar, Arbuthnot took up an interest in antiquities and published Tables of Grecian, Roman, and Jewish measures, weights and coins; reduced to the English standard in 1705, 1707, 1709, and, expanded with a preface (which indicated that his second son, Charles, was born in 1705), in 1727 and 1747. Although Arbuthnot was not a Jacobite after the fashion of his brothers, he was a Tory, for national and familial reasons. Anne was advised (and many said controlled) by Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, who was a champion of Whig causes. In 1706, the Duchess of Marlborough fell out with Anne — a schism which the Tories were pleased to encourage. The marriage of lady-in-waiting Abigail Hill to Samuel Masham, which was the first overt sign of Anne's displeasure with Sarah Churchill, took place in Arbuthnot's apartments at St. James's Palace. The reasons for the choice of apartment and the degree of involvement of Arbuthnot in either the love match or Anne's estrangement, are not clear. As a Scotsman, Arbuthnot served the crown by writing A sermon preach'd to the people at the Mercat Cross of Edinborough on the subject of the union. Ecclesiastes, Chapter 10, Verse 27. The work was designed to persuade Scots to accept the Act of Union. When the Act passed, Arbuthnot was made a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He was also made a physician in ordinary to the Queen, which made him part of the royal household. Arbuthnot returned to mathematics in 1710 with An argument for Divine Providence, taken from the constant regularity observed in the births of both sexes (linked below) in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions, where he analyzed birth data and demonstrated that males were born at a greater rate than females. This being against probability, he deduced that divine providence accounted for it, because males die young more often than females. In 1710, Jonathan Swift moved to London. Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford (who was then the secretary of the treasury and not a peer) and he produced the Tory The Examiner, and Arbuthnot made their acquaintance and began to provide "hints" to them. These "hints" were ideas for essays, satirical gambits, and facts, rather than secrets of any sort. From 1711 to 1713, Arbuthnot and Swift formed "The Brothers' Club," though Arbuthnot characteristically gave away his ideas and even his writings, never seeking credit for them. In 1712, Arbuthnot and Swift both attempted to aid the Tory government of Harley and Henry St. John in their efforts to end the War of the Spanish Succession. The war had profited John and Sarah Churchill, and the Tory ministry sought to end it by withdrawing from all England's alliances and negotiating directly with France. Swift wrote The Conduct of the Allies, and Arbuthnot wrote a series of five pamphlets featuring John Bull. The first of these, Law Is a Bottomless Pit (1712), introduced a simple allegory to explain the war. John Bull (England) is suing Louis Baboon (i.e. Louis Bourbon, or Louis XIV of France) over the estate of the dead Lord Strutt (Charles II of Spain). Bull's lawyer is the one who really enjoys the suit, and he is Humphrey Hocus (Marlborough). Bull has a sister named Peg (Scotland). The pamphlets are Swiftian in their satire, in that they make all of the characters hopelessly flawed and comic and none of their endeavor worth pursuing (which was Arbuthnot's intent, as he sought to make the war an object of scorn), but it is filled with homespun humor, a common touch, and a sympathy for the figures that is distinctly unSwiftian. In 1713, Arbuthnot continued his political satire with Proposals for printing a very curious discourse... a treatise of the art of political lying, with an abstract of the first volume. As with other works that Arbuthnot would encourage, this systemizes a rhetoric of bad thinking and writing. He proposes to teach people to lie well. Similar lists and systems are in Alexander Pope's Peri Bathos and John Gay and Pope's Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. Also in 1713, Arbuthnot was made a physician of Chelsea Hospital, which provided him with a house. It was this house that hosted the meetings of the Scriblerus Club, which had as its members Harley (now Earl of Oxford), St. John (now Vicount Bolingbroke), Pope, Gay, Swift, and Thomas Parnell. According to all the members of the Club, Arbuthnot was the one who contributed the most in ideas, and he was the only source they could draw upon when satirizing the sciences, and his was the idea for the Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, a hyperpedantic man who, like Arbuthnot's earlier opponent, Dr. Woodward, would read three or four lines of Classical literature and deduce a universal (and absurd) truth from them. The Club met for only a year, for Anne died in July of 1714, and the Club met for the last time in November of that year. When Anne died, she had no will. Consequently, all her servants were left without positions and entirely at the mercy of the next administration — an administration that would be chosen by the enemies of Arbuthnot and the other Scriblerans. When George I came to the throne, Arbuthnot lost all of his royal appointments and houses, but he still had a vigorous medical practice. He lived at "the second door from the left in Dover Street" in Piccadilly.