In the year 1501, Arthur, Prince of Wales, came up to Oxford, and resided for a short time at Magdalen College, under the care of Richard Mayhew, the President. It was settled that, after the marriage contract with the Infanta, Catherine of Arragon, had been completed, the Prince, now in his fifteenth year, should be placed under the charge of a tutor. For this important post Linacre was selected and sent for to London; and Tanner speaks of him as "præceptor in linguâ Italicâ" to both Prince Arthur and Princess Catherine. He is also said to have been "Archiater," or chief medical attendant, of the King.[1] The unsettled state of physic as a science before the revival of learning in the fifteenth century rendered the practice of it rather a necessary accomplishment to the priesthood, with which it was generally united, than a distinct art cultivated on fixed and certain principles. To the ecclesiastics of the Middle Ages degrees in medicine conferred equal privileges with those in their proper faculty; but they gave to the possessor no claim to public confidence or to a remuneration for their services as practitioners.[2] The practice of medicine was in those days chiefly confined to men of no scholastic learning, and was closely allied to the arts of alchemy and necromancy.[3] The fitness and ability of Linacre to discharge the duties of his new appointment had been shewn by his recent translation of the "Sphere" of Proclus, the first edition of which he dedicated to his Royal pupil.
- ↑ Tanner's Biblio. Brit. Hibernica, p. 482.
- ↑ Dr. J. N. Johnson's Life of Linacre, p. 163.
- ↑ Some curious information on this score was given in evidence at Archbishop Grindal's visitation of the college at Manchester in 1571. Nicholas Danayell deposed of his brother-fellow, Sir Edward Holt, who kept an ale-house himself, frequented ale-houses, and was a drunkard, that "he doth minister a dirmatorye in physicke to dyvers, which all do dye after the same; and also he doth let blode and cut vayne of divers, whoe after the same be done they dye; and when he should serve God he runneth about his phisicke and surgerye." (ex inƒ, J. E. Bailey, Esq.) On Linacre's monument in St. Paul's Cathedral it is said of him that he was "Fraudes dolosque mirè perosus." It is highly probable that this bears some reference to the tricks of the medical practitioners, and is intended to distinguish him from the ordinary travelling "physicians" and mountebanks of the day.
