house occupied the site of the present Hospital for Sick Children. It was standing till a few years ago, and much of the old oak remained on the walls and staircase. The present writer has often seen out-patients there in a wainscotted room which formed part of Mead's library.
Mead's collection of books, of manuscripts, and of statuary, coins, gems, and drawings was the largest formed in his time. It contained more than ten thousand volumes, and after his death sold for 5,518l. 10s. 11d. (Nichols, Literary Anecdotes, vi. 218); his pictures, coins, and other antiquities realised 10,550l. 18s. (Notes and Queries, 2nd ser. xi. 443). Pope, who was his patient, as he records in the epistle to Bolingbroke,
I'll do what Mead and Cheselden advise,
has also commemorated his bibliographical tastes (Epistle, iv. 10):—
Rare monkish manuscripts for Hearne alone,
And books for Mead and butterflies for Sloane.
The poet drank asses' milk by Mead's order (Elwin, Pope, ix. 326), and was interested in his pulvis antilyssis, a powder for curing hydrophobia (ib. p. 129). Warton mentions that when Mead objected on critical grounds to the expression ‘amor publicus,’ Pope could find no better defence than that he could allow a doctor of medicine to understand one Latin word, but not two together. The story is probably as untrue as Warton's suggestion that the description of John Woodward [q. v.] as Mummius in the ‘Dunciad’ is intended for Mead. His classical attainments were the result of careful training of the best kind, followed by much reading for pleasure in after-life, and were respected by the greatest scholars of the day. He had an enormous circle of friends, but Richard Bentley and Dr. John Freind were the two with whom he was most intimate. His intimacy with the master of Trinity was close and unbroken, and Monk states that ‘he was the only friend who in the latter part of Bentley's life possessed any material influence over him’ (Life of Bentley, ii. 114). He had in 1721 persuaded Edmund Chishull [q. v.] to publish the inscription in boustrophedon found at Sigeum, and Bentley wrote him a long epistle the day after he read the book. It was at his instance that Bentley revised the ‘Theriaca’ of Nicander, and the copy of Nicander edited by Gorræus given by Mead to Bentley, with the latter's notes and a prefixed Latin epistle to the physician, is preserved in the British Museum (Dr. Monk in Museum Criticum, Nos. iii. and iv.). With Dr. Freind his intimacy was still closer; they spent much time together, and though Mead was a whig and Freind a tory, they had many opinions and tastes in common. Both had studied chemistry, but both were at first attached to the mechanical school in medicine. They were elected fellows of the College of Physicians on the same day, and ate sweet cakes together as censors. They were chosen at the same court of the Barber-Surgeons to lecture on anatomy to the company. Both were devoted to classical learning, and they were agreed in the motto of Freind's medal, ‘Medecina vetus et nova unam facimus utramque.’ Both had read the medical writers of the middle ages as well as those of classical times. Mead enjoyed the ‘Schola Salernitana’ (Letter to Dr. E. Waller, 19 April 1720), and had the earliest edition of the ‘Rosa Anglica’ (his copy is now in the library of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society), books on which Freind dwells with pleasure in his ‘History of Physic.’ Mead wrote on 1 Sept. 1716, in reply to a request from Freind, a letter on the treatment of small-pox, and Freind's ‘De Purgantibus in secunda Variolarum Confluentium Febre adhibendis Epistola,’ 1719, is addressed to Mead, of whom he says in the introduction that they had long been accustomed ‘idem sentire atque idem judicare.’ When Freind was committed to the Tower at the time of Atterbury's plot, he wrote thence, ‘indulgentia Præfecti, in presentia Warderi,’ to Mead, ‘De quibusdam Variolarum Generibus Epistola,’ dated 30 March 1723. Mead visited him in the Tower, and ultimately procured from Walpole, when prescribing for that minister, an order for his release. He had sent Freind Le Clerc's ‘History of Medicine,’ and asked his opinion of it. The result was the admirable ‘History of Physick from the Time of Galen, in a Discourse written to Dr. Mead.’ Garth and Arbuthnot, and most of the physicians of his time, except Cheyne and Woodward, were his friends. It is difficult to ascertain whether there is any truth in the story that he fought with Woodward (it is, however, circumstantially narrated in ‘Mist's Journal,’ 13 June 1719), and that the tiny figures at the gate of the stable-yard in the picture by Virtue of Gresham College (opposite p. 33, John Ward, Lives of the Professors of Gresham College; cf. Hawkins, Life of Johnson, p. 245) represent Woodward laying down his sword in submission to Mead.
Numerous dedications were addressed to Mead, some against his will. Smart Lethieullier and Martin Foulkes used to consult with him about antiquities (Nichols, Illustrations, iii. 535). The Rev. F. Wise addressed him about the Berkshire White Horse in 1738; Nathaniel Cotton [q. v.] on a
