ABSTRACT
There is a consensus that, if Gresham College flourished, it was before 1650, and the fruits were limited to mathematics, astronomy and possibly music.2 The Gresham professors of physic, it is generally agreed, signally failed to make an impact on their own subject.3 As a result, historians have understandably concentrated either on aspects of Gresham College's role unrelated to medicine, or upon institutional developments later in the seventeenth century connected with the Royal Society.4 It is ironical, in view of this adverse verdict, that those with medical qualifications formed a large proportion of the professoriate in the early modern period, and that it was the professors of physic who spent longest in their posts and were most likely to be resident in the college. From its foundation to 1660, the physic chair had fewest incumbents (five); of fourteen elections to chairs other than the
physic chair between August 1638 and January 1659, six involved victories for physicians.5 However, any contribution made by these men to life in the capital in terms of medicine or medical practice remains elusive. This is somewhat frustrating. The interactive model which was envisaged for the Gresham lectures, in which the auditors could question the speakers and thus 'resolve their doubts', should have been particularly well suited to medicine in early modern London.6 There was already a shared base of knowledge between practitioners and lay people, and almost universal and urgent interest in the practicalities of medicine as a subject.7 Unfortunately, evidence of such interchanges in and around Gresham College appears to be lacking. Failure, as I hope to show, can be well worth analysing, but with the Gresham professorship of physic there is, to date, too little evidence of the nature of that failure.8
