Author of A Medicinal Dictionary and Inventor of a Fever Powder
Born 15 August 1703, Shenstone, Staffordshire
Died 23 March 1776, London
The James family were well-established gentlemen farmers in the area of Kinvaston and Penkridge in Staffordshire. James would have been a fee-paying, boarding pupil at Lichfield grammar school from sometime after 1710. Fellow students included Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), who was a day boy at the school from the age of 7 ½ to 15 years, being six years junior to James, and Edmond Hector (1708-1794), who became a surgeon in Birmingham.
Both James and Hector remained good life-long, medical friends of Johnson. Whereas Johnson’s two-volume folio dictionary (1755) is world-famous, James’s three-volume folio medical dictionary (1743-45) is largely forgotten. Two massive dictionaries coming from the same grammar school can hardly be a coincidence!
James preceded Johnson at Oxford, graduating Bachelor of Arts on 5 July 1726 from St John’s College; he became an extra-licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians (1728), was awarded MD by royal mandate (George II) in Cambridge (1728) and became a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians (1745).
James may have had some medical training in Leiden under Herman Boerhaave. One of the translators of Boerhaave’s chemistry textbook[1] was Peter Shaw (1694-1763), born and baptised in Lichfield. Shaw’s father was Robert Shaw (d. 1704), master at Lichfield Grammar School. Peter Shaw’s education is unknown, but it is possible he attended the Grammar School, along with James. James entrusted Shaw with the secret of the ingredients of his fever powder ‘when I some years ago met him at a noble Earl’s, then in Bruton Street.’[2]
James followed Johnson to London in 1740 after a relatively unsuccessful medical career in the Midlands. Johnson probably facilitated introductions of James to two key publishers in London – Thomas Osborne junior, and John Newbery, and his son Francis Newbery. The first gave James the opportunity of compiling and publishing a medical dictionary (A Medicinal Dictionary (1743-1745), for which Johnson contributed to the Proposals and to some of the biographies within the dictionary, and wrote a dedication to Dr Richard Mead. The second gave James the outlet and advertising for his fever powders making him famous and wealthy. James’s encyclopaedic, three folio volume, dictionary made an important contribution to the Enlightenment.
James’s dictionary was the third medical dictionary to be published in English,[3] and was the largest and most comprehensive medical dictionary published in the eighteenth century. It was intended for both reading and reference and was part of the spread and sharing of ideas that were key elements of the Enlightenment. It was well illustrated with copper plates. James’s grasp of all branches of medicine, natural history, chemistry and therapeutics was deep and wide. He quoted extensively from medical literature and supplemented information from his own clinical experience in the Midlands. Johnson considered that his ‘knowledge of physic, I learned from Dr James’.
James’s dictionary had little direct impact on Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language. The indirect impact may have been greater as Johnson’s first experience in lexicography came from collaborating with James, and they may have been working alongside each other when Johnson was cataloguing the Harleian collection for Osborne. James’s dictionary played a part in the development of the L’Encyclopédie, a key publication of the Enlightenment. Denis Diderot started work translating James’s dictionary into French, and there is evidence that James met Diderot.[4] The writing of the Encyclopédie followed, being compiled by Diderot and Jean d’Alembert, with Chevalier de Jaucourt a major contributor on ‘Médecine’ and other medical essays. Jaucourt copied much material from James’s preface. Not surprisingly, some of James’s illustrations (or from a common source) were used in the Encyclopédie.
James’s dictionary (1743-45) therefore sits within key encyclopaedic publications of the Enlightenment, John Harris’s Lexicon Technicum (1704), Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1728), Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-1772), and Colin Macfarquhar, Andrew Bell and William Smellie’s Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768-1771).
[1] Herman Boerhaave, A New Method of Chemistry, trans. by Peter Shaw and Ephraim Chambers (London: J. Osborne, T. Longman, 1727)
[2] Robert James, A Dissertation on Fevers, and Inflammatory Distempers, 8th edn. (London: Francis Newbery, junior, 1778), pp. 88-89. Bruton Street in Mayfair, London
[3] Stephen Blankaart, A Physical Dictionary (1684) was the first; John Quincy, Lexicon Physico-Medicum (1719) was the second
[4] Diderot described James as ‘fanatique froid’ – coldly fanatical/bigoted (Dennis Wood). James’s opinion on Diderot has not been recorded
Contributor: Alex Wright is a part-time PhD student in Medical History at Birmingham University studying A Medicinal Dictionary (1743-1745) by Dr Robert James MD. James – a school friend of Samuel Johnson – followed Johnson from Birmingham to London in 1740. James is better known for his fever powders than for his publications.