Richard Mead 1673-1754

Richard MEAD 1673-1754

Biographical Note

Born in Stepney, one of the sons of Matthew Meade, nonconformist minister. He was educated at home and at the University of Utrecht; he enrolled as a medical student at the University of Leiden in 1693, but did not graduate. During the mid 1690s he toured in Italy, receiving the MD degree from the University of Padua in 1695 before returning to London and setting up a medical practice. He became very successful as a physician, publishing works which enhanced his reputation; in 1703 he became physician at St Thomas's Hospital, Southwark and reader in anatomy for the Company of Barber-Surgeons. He was elected to the Royal Society in 1705 (Vice-President, 1713) and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1716. By 1720, when he moved to the house in Great Ormond Street which later became the Children's Hospital, he was a famous, wealthy and sought-out physician; he held numerous appointments, was physician to George II, and continued to publish influential medical works.

Books

Mead began buying books seriously during his trip to Italy in 1695, and went on to assemble one of the most celebrated libraries of his time, which in his later decades was housed in a purpose-designed building in his Great Ormond Street garden (built 1732-4). He had a wide circle of acquaintances, at home and abroad, and opened his library up to many of them. By the end of his life he owned over 10,000 books, dispersed after his death in a sale lasting 56 days; many were noticed as being handsomely bound. Besides extensive holdings of medical books, the library ranged widely over all subjects, including ca.150 incunabula; he was also noted for owning the copy of Shakespeare's Second Folio which had previously belonged to Charles I. He subscribed to many books, had at least 35 dedicated to him, and encouraged scholarship by patronising other writers and editors. He was also a serious collector of paintings and miniatures, sculptures and coins. His cabinet of curiosities included fossils, scientific instruments and anatomical specimens. Before his death, he sold his collection of Greek manuscripts to Anthony Askew.

Sources

• The Generous Georgian, Foundling Museum exhibition.
• Royal College of Physicians, Inspiring Physicians.
• Bibliotheca Meadiana: sive catalogus librorum Richardi Mead, [London, 1754].
• Besson, A. (ed), Thornton's medical books, libraries and collectors, 3rd rev edn, Aldershot, 1990, 278-9.
• Campbell, J., The library of Dr Richard Mead, University of Chicago Graduate Library School Dissertation, 1962.
• De Ricci, Seymour, English collectors of books and manuscripts, Cambridge, 1930, 47.
• Fletcher, W. Y., English book collectors, 1902, 160-4.
• Guerrini, Anita. "Mead, Richard (1673–1754), physician and collector of books and art." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
• McKendrick, Scot, Collecting Greek manuscripts in eighteenth-century England, Transactions of the Cambridge Bibliographical Society 17 (2020), 85-130.
• Russell, K. F., The anatomical library of Dr Richard Mead, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences Winter 1947, 97-109.