daughters and one son survived her. On 14 Aug. 1724 Mead married Anne, daughter of Sir Rowland Alston of Odell, Bedfordshire. She bore him no children. In 1727 he was appointed physician to George II, and afterwards had Sir Edward Wilmot [q. v.] and Dr. Frank Nicholls [q. v.], his sons-in-law, as his colleagues. His second daughter married Charles Bertie of Uffington, Lincolnshire.
Mead did not write much himself. But he edited in 1724 W. Cowper's ‘Myotomia Reformata,’ the best general account of the anatomy of the human muscular system of its time, and from 1722 to 1733 he provided the means necessary for a complete edition of De Thou's ‘History’ in seven volumes, folio. He bought some materials which Thomas Carte [q. v.] had collected from that historian, who was a refugee in France, and paid Buckley to edit the work. On 11 Feb. 1741 he read a paper at the Royal Society on the invention of Samuel Lutton for ventilating the holds of ships, and, in relation to the same subject, wrote in 1749 ‘A Discourse on Scurvy,’ which is chiefly occupied with remarks on that disease as it was observed on Lord Anson's voyage round the world. He urged the value of Lutton's invention on the lords of the admiralty, and after ten years persuaded them to adopt it. He corresponded with Boerhaave, and made him a present of John Wigan's folio edition of Aretæus, when the Leyden professor was preparing his own edition, published in 1735, of that medical writer. He urged Dr. Samuel Jebb in 1729 to undertake an edition of the works of Roger Bacon, which appeared in 1733, and he gave pecuniary help to many lesser literary projects. In 1747 he wrote a preface to Chishull's posthumous ‘Travels in Turkey’ and published ‘De Variolis et Morbillis,’ and appended to it a translation of the first treatise on the subject by Muhammad ibn Zacharia al Rhazis, a physician of the ninth century, from an Arabic manuscript at Leyden, of which Boerhaave sent him a copy. The translation was edited by Thomas Hunt, Arabic professor at Oxford, from two versions made for Mead, one by Solomon Negri, a native of Damascus, and the other by John Gagnier. Mead praises Sydenham in these treatises, but adds very little of his own. In 1749 he published ‘Medica Sacra, a Commentary on the Diseases mentioned in Scripture,’ in which he explains Job's disease as elephantiasis, Saul's as melancholia, Jehoram's as dysentery, Hezekiah's as an abscess, Nebuchadnezzar's as hypochondriasis, and discusses leprosy, palsy, and demoniacal possession. In 1751 he published his last book, ‘Monita et Præcepta Medica,’ a summary of his practical experience. It is clear that he had not kept copious notes of the many cases he had seen, and hence the grounds of his opinions are not sufficiently clear, and the total of information contained in the book is small. A comparison of the elder William Heberden's [q. v.] ‘Commentaries’ with Mead's ‘Precepts’ shows of what permanent value a concise treatise may be when it is based upon a series of observations recorded at the time, and how empty it is when it rests on no such basis. He introduced the method of slowly compressing the abdominal walls during tapping for ascites, or abdominal dropsy, with a view to preventing fainting or collapse.
By a will proved 17 Jan. 1754 Erasmus Lewis [q. v.] made Mead a bequest of 100l.; before the end of the same month the doctor was observed to be himself declining in health (Letter of Dr. R. Pococke; Nichols, Illustrations, iii. 685), and he died on 16 Feb. 1754 at his house in Great Ormond Street, after an illness of five days only. He was buried 23 Feb. in the Temple Church. Dr. Johnson said, ‘Dr. Mead lived more in the broad sunshine of life than almost any man.’ The world in which he desired to live was that of learning, the taste for which in every branch began in his boyhood and continued to old age. He was a universal reader, but not a perfect observer in all directions. His natural history was that of a Londoner, as he shows in his account of the scene, familiar to all rustics, of small birds mobbing a hawk. He thinks that the small birds are trying to get away, but that fright prevents them, and fails to observe that their voices and actions are those of exultant pigmies in a crowd safely attacking a common enemy, and not of trembling victims. If, however, he was not an observer of the first order, he brought learning, careful reasoning, and kindly sympathy to the bedside of his patients, and very many sick men must have been the better for his visits. His life was an example of what Aristotle calls megaloprepeia, the magnificence befitting a great man. Of the many men who have grown rich in professions, few have expended their riches during their lives so generously and so wisely as Mead.
His bust by Roubiliac was given to the College of Physicians by Dr. Askew [q. v.], and stands in the censor's room of the college, which also possesses three portraits of him. A portrait by Allan Ramsay, painted in 1740, was purchased by the trustees of the National Portrait Gallery, London, in June 1857. Another, by Michael Dahl, was lent by Sir M. S. Wilmot, bart., to the second loan exhibition, South Kensington.
