the ‘political knight errant’ at bath: charles lucas's attack on the spa medical...

The ‘Political Knight Errant’ at Bath: Charles Lucas’s Attack onthe Spa Medical Establishment in An Essay on Waters (1756)jecs_476 1..17

A DA M M A S O N

Abstract: This article examines Charles Lucas’s Essay on Waters (1756) as a polemic thatilluminates the Bath waters as a subject enmeshed as much in politics as in medicine. Itshows how Lucas styled himself a ‘political knight errant’ in his treatise to portray thelocal medical fraternity at the spa as a corrupt oligarchy intent on monopolisingand stifling research into the famous mineral springs out of commercial self-interest andgreed. It further considers the critical response to the treatise by Tobias Smollett andSamuel Johnson, who were both forced to address the author’s libertarian concerns.

Keywords: Bath, Charles Lucas, Tobias Smollett, sulphur, libertarianism, Ireland

I. Introduction

Charles Lucas, a former apothecary, noted in his Essay on Waters (1756) that it had alwaysbeen his fate to have ‘too much of a kind of political knight-errandry [sic] interwoven withmy frame’. He compared himself to a chivalric figure of medieval romance who wanderedthe land in search of adventures and clashed with mighty foes. However, instead offighting giants or dragons, he supposedly engaged in combat with tyrannical governmentsand corrupt institutions, constantly on the watch for abuses of political power. Addressingthe subject of the Bath springs, he portrayed himself as a lone crusader engaged in a questto reveal their true nature: ‘I as yet stand single, and have multitudes to oppose: The task,I have cut out for myself, is nothing less, than the rescuing of the curious waters of Bathfrom stiff-necked, destructive empiricism.’1

This article considers Lucas’s contention that the publication of his Essay represented acontinuation of his episodic struggle against what he saw as oligarchic governmentalforms. I argue that the work departed dramatically from previous treatises addressing thethermal mineral waters of Bath in that it served as an expression of the author’s politicalbeliefs and libertarian ideals. I therefore elaborate on Anne Borsay’s assessment that Lucasconsidered there to be ‘a deep malaise’ at the spa that hinged on an ‘exclusive, anti-democratic political system’ and that his treatise highlighted ‘exclusiveness in politics noless than medicine’.2 Lucas drew on existing balneological debates to accuse thehonourably elected governors of the Bath General Hospital of stifling research into thebaths out of commercial self-interest. He pinned his attack on the assumption that these‘learned gentlemen’ had deployed both chemical analyses and patient histories toconvince the public that they were improving knowledge pertaining to the therapeuticpowers of the mineral springs, yet had merely ‘let their waters be supposed, as asserted tobe, impregnated with sulphur’ and had filled their books with ‘only names andprescriptions’.3 This was at a time when the hospital governors appeared to preside overthe most famous mineral waters in the country, with the city experiencing unprecedentedgrowth on the basis of their reputation.4

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Lucas’s conviction in the Essay that the hospital governors at Bath had misled the publicin confirming that the local waters contained the much-valued mineral sulphur has beenproven correct, although, as I argue, the patriotic and combative tone of his treatiseovershadowed its popular and critical reception.5 The work only went to one edition, withTobias Smollett noting of the author that his ‘political principles seem to glow warmerthan the waters of Aiken’.6 An anonymous reviewer further warned readers of ‘theasperity with which he treats those from whom he dissents’.7 Samuel Johnson wascertainly alone as a critic in recognising him as a ‘confessor of liberty’.8 However, despitethe Essay’s poor response, I intend to illuminate it as a highly ambitious work that wentbeyond the bounds of the ‘orthodox’ spa treatise as an emotionally charged polemic whichensured that politics continued to feature prominently in treatises addressing the waters.

In examining Lucas’s self-styled political knight errantry in the Essay, it is necessary toconsider the hospital’s assessment of the Bath springs within the context of the spa’smedical literature. I will first emphasise the importance of water treatises in promotingEnglish mineral wells under the banner of medicine from the sixteenth century onwards,showing how authors of these texts adopted chemistry in the process of identifying theBath waters with sulphur, while demonstrating that this ‘new science’ co-existed with therepresentation of patient histories as a means to attest to their therapeutic value. I will alsoshow how the hospital governors oversaw the publication of further treatises by whichthey endorsed the reputation of the springs as sulphurous and emphasised theinstitutional nature of their collated patient histories, while also provoking criticism.Having thus set the scene, I will go on to consider Lucas’s political journey to Bath bytracing his eventful career through his time as an apothecary in Dublin, to his campaignagainst unelected aldermen in the city, his candidature for the Irish parliament and hispursuit of anti-imperialist causes on the continent. I will then consider the expression ofhis libertarianism within his Essay, before, finally, assessing critical responses to the work,as well as its influence.

II. Water Treatises and the General Hospital at Bath

Water treatises published in England from the 1560s were instrumental in promoting theBath springs as a professionally approved cure for illness, while popularising thetherapeutic image of the springs, so crucial to the commercial prosperity of the city, assulphurous. These texts have been neglected in their contribution to the rise of domesticspa towns, for the study of such resorts has tended to lean predominantly towards theirsocial and urban history, with a focus on their exploitation of fashionable pursuits ofpleasure.9 Yet Roy Porter has invited a fresh approach to these works by placing the studyof spas within the context of the social history of medicine, a field concerned less withpinpointing major medical ‘discoveries’ than with understanding the cultural meaning ofmedicine in past eras.10 He argued, in 1990, that spas embody ‘past cultures of health’,while histories pertaining to them ‘can serve as illuminating epitomes of medicine’.11 Suchan emphasis demands that spa treatises should no longer be viewed simply as antiquatedmedical texts that have slid into insignificance along with our dismissal of the curativepowers of natural wells, but rather as valuable cultural artefacts that can be seen to haveformed a centre for wide-ranging theological, ethical and, indeed, political debate.

The sheer volume of texts published on spas during their heyday is a measure of theirimportance in stimulating debate over the significance of mineral springs, the historianRichard Warner having listed forty works printed on the Bath wells alone between 1562

and 1800.12 They had a significant role to play in aligning spas with the politico-religious

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© 2012 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

climate of the Reformation, to such an extent that their authors may be viewed asProtestant propagandists engaged in an effort to combat prevailing Catholic beliefs thatmineral waters were capable of miracle-working cures. Alexandra Walsham posits thatthese pioneering writers aimed to ‘theologically sterilize’ spas by proving them to besubject to natural rather than supernatural laws.13 I argue that they drew on two strandsof medical authority to achieve this end: a ‘modern’ or chemical approach, whichmaintained that the curative potential of particular waters could be ascribed to theirmineral properties; and a traditional, or ‘ancient’, view, which assumed that their healingpowers could be ascertained through the observation of their effects on patients, inaccordance with their ability to redress the balance of the Hippocratic four humours, seenas being central to individual health.

Medical authors on spas presented the field of chemical analysis as being a vital newcomponent in the promotion of mineral waters as rationally explainable cures for illnesswithin published essays. Christopher Hamlin states that ‘our neglect of these often lengthyand passionate medical and chemical treatises and pamphlets is surely unwise’, as they‘probably vitally affected the fortunes of every spa’, arguing that chemistry provided ameans to ‘legitimize’ waters and ground them in ‘objective reality’. He insists that residentphysician-authors incorporated chemistry within these texts with the aim of persuadingreaders that the healing effects of mineral springs had a basis in progressive science,although contesting that they also had commercial motives: it was ‘for the most part notan independent source of authority, but a product of controversy’, because ‘much of thechemistry done was done in the service of vested interests’.14

Profit-seeking physicians of individual waters can certainly be seen to have exacer-bated balneological debate through their engagement with chemistry in spa literature.Noel G. Coley argues that controversy originated in the immense difficulty involved inascertaining the properties of particular springs, one of the most contentious pointspertaining to sulphur, the mineral being ‘misunderstood by all protagonists’.15 G. S.Rousseau demonstrates that there was no consensus in defining sulphur against the morecommon brimstone, both having ‘acquired so many different meanings, especially inscientific circles, that it is not always possible to differentiate them accurately’.16 At Bathsulphur was considered to be one of the three principal constituents of the waters, andthere was much room for debate in the notion that it originated in the supposed fierydepths of the earth and served as the source of their thermal powers. Roger Rolls indeedclaims that ‘people believed the waters were heated by underground fires of brimstoneakin to volcanic activity’ and that a layer of scum covering the baths signified sulphur‘because it burned with a blue flame when dried’, when this was in fact ‘due to the growthof algae’.17

The first treatise writers of Bath demonstrated a specific affinity with Europeaniatrochemistry in debating the issue that subterranean furnaces impregnated the waterswith sulphur. They deferred to such figures as Giovanni de Dondi (1289-1359) andGeorgius Agricola (1494-1555), who, in their association with the University of Padua inItaly and its relative autonomy from the Catholic Church, sought to apply chemical laws tothe natural world, an endeavour that encompassed natural wells, through such meansas evaporation tests and distillation comparisons.18 Informed by their discoveries, theProtestant preacher and Bath physician William Turner, in his Book of the Bathes inEngland (1568), professed that the ‘chefe matter whereof these bathes in this citye havetheir chefe vertue and strength, after my judgement, is brimstone’, in deference toAgricola, who, ‘in his bokes of those thinges whiche flowe oute of the earth’, shows that‘the bathes of brimstone soften the synewes, and do heate’.19 John Jones, in The Bathes of

The ‘Political Knight Errant’ at Bath 3


Bathes Ayde (1572), further alluded to ‘Georgius Agricola [who] in his booke which heehath written, De Subterraneis’, stated ‘that the subject preserving fyre under the earth, isBitumen’.20 Moreover, Tobias Venner, in The Baths of Bathe (1628), asserted that the‘original of the [waters’] heate [comes] from one matter, namely, Sulphur, burning in thecavities of the earth’.21 However, Edward Jorden, in his Discourse of Naturall Bathes (1631),formulated an alchemical theory to explain the heat of the waters, claiming that the‘generation of minerals in the bowels of the earth’ acts ‘like a ferment’ and procures an‘actuall heate’. He further stated that ‘there bee not competencie of ayre to nourish thefire’ in the bowels of the earth, while asserting of the waters: ‘I will not deny some touchof sulphur in them [...] but the proportion of sulphur to bitumen is very little.’22

As a resident physician at Bath, Jorden was influential in positing that chemistry shouldcoexist with patient histories as a means of demonstrating the curative potential of thelocal waters. He believed that such accounts would attest to successful recoveries beingmade at Bath as a way of providing practical information to potential patients in thefurther use of the wells: ‘if wee had a register kept of the manifold cures which have beendone by the use of our Bathes principally, it would appeare of what great use they are.’23

Thomas Guidott filled this apparent gap in medical discourse with the publication of ARegister of Bath in 1694, this being the collation of ‘two hundred observations containingan account of cures performed and benefits received’. In each observation Guidott detailedthe name, age and symptoms of an individual patient and the specific therapeuticprocedure that had proved effective at the baths as an appeal to readers with similarsymptoms to attend the spa, such an example being:

Joan Lowther of Bristol, Thirty-eight Years of Age, lame on the Right side after Lying in. Thebeginning of May 1685, 17 July following came to Bath, and using the King and queen’s Bathevery Day for six Weeks, had 1200 Pumps on the Side affected: And whereas, at her comingto Bath, she could not move at all without Help, she hung up her Crutches, and walkedwithout a Staff, returning well Home, 28 Aug 1685.24

In accordance with Guidott’s Register, the first William Oliver of Bath, in his Dissertationon the Bath Waters (1704), argued that the traditional method of attending to individualinvalids at the baths should serve as the only means by which to attest to the waters’therapeutic powers. He asserted that the era of Hippocrates embodied ‘the true Epoche ofPhysick’ and that chemical analysis was forever prone to inaccuracy, for the ‘componentParticles [of waters] are so intimately united and blended together by Nature, that no Artwill ever be able, I am of Opinion, to make a compleat Separation of their Ingredients’. Asan ‘ancient’, he subscribed to the practice of observing the influence of the waters onindividuals: ‘I wave all doubtful Speculations, as of no Use at all in Physick; all the curiosityI have, being only to know practically what Effects they have on the Constitutions ofMankind.’25

While the merits of chemical experiment and practical observation remained acontested issue among individual practitioners, the resident physicians of Bath whoformed an exclusive alliance of governors at the General Hospital in the 1740s stated anintent to stamp institutional authority on the subject of water analysis at the spa. AnneBorsay argues that the new voluntary infirmary was promoted as an ‘organ of society’,offering unprecedented prestige to local physicians under the banner of charity rather thatprofit, while initiating a new era of clinical medicine at Bath.26 Ralph Allen, havingfacilitated the development of the city through his acquirement of the stone quarries atCombe Down, served as its founder-governor and chief benefactor. He appointed thesecond William Oliver as physician-governor, and assigned Richard ‘Beau’ Nash and

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General George Wade as governors, further awarding posts to the established Bathpractitioners George Cheyne, John Quinton and George Randolph.27 Thereafter, thegovernors published A Plan and Elevation (1737) to promote public funding for theinfirmary, stressing that it would provide unparalleled evidence of the waters’ healingeffects through the quantitative nature of its published patient histories. They claimedthat, in ‘a few years’, it would furnish ‘more Histories of Cases, which may be dependedupon (if the Physicians keep due Registers of the Sick under their Care) than any Man’sprivate Practice could have done in any Age’, by which ‘the Knowledge and Use of theBath Waters will be greatly improv’d to the Benefit of all Succeeding Generations’.28

As the hospital governors made their claims of superior scholarship, elaborateprocedures were being set in place to ensure professional exclusivity within the infirmarywalls. John Wood detailed the hospital’s completion in 1738 and revealed how thefounding governors intended to confer honorary posts on those with adequate wealth: ‘theGeneral Court of Governors of this Charity is to consist of nine Members at least’, investedwith ‘a Power to elect Governors in the Place of such as shall happen to depart this Life’and to declare ‘any Person that gives the sum of Forty Pounds to the Hospital a Governorof the Charity’.29 Local physicians predominantly filled the governor posts, and thehospital reflected the wider medical hierarchy in relation to apothecaries, for while theformer were considered to be university-educated professional gentlemen, the latter wereregarded as mere tradesmen and therefore confined to paid positions.30

After the infirmary opened its doors to the sick poor, the governors approved RiceCharleton’s apparent identification of sulphur’s physical presence at the baths in hisChymical Analysis of Bath Waters (1750), for they would go on to appoint him as anhonorary physician in 1752. The chemist conducted a practical test to try and differentiatethe prized mineral from brimstone. He proceeded to ‘make artificial Brimstone Waters, andto add a diversity of Mixtures to them, and to the Bath Waters at the same Time’, fromwhence it would be ‘easy to discover how far the Phaenomena produced in each agreed’.He added ‘salt of tartar’ to the brimstone water and observed how it ‘changed instantly toa fine Orange Color’, noting the adverse reaction with the Bath water, where ‘at length aScum arose, and cover’d its Surface’. This signified, he believed, ‘the sulphureous principleof the Bath Waters’.31

The hospital governors further endorsed the publication of John Summers’s ShortAccount of the Success of Warm Bathing in Paralytic Disorders (1751), which divulged thequantitative data pertaining to the study of the waters that they had promised to achievethrough the accumulation of patient histories. Summers reported that patrons of theinfirmary had ‘a Right to be inform’d’ of ‘how far their noble Intentions have beenanswer’d’, while exploiting the hospital records to publish statistical informationpertaining to the treatment of patients at the infirmary:

We have a great Variety of paralytic Patients, and upon examining our Books from the firstopening of the Hospital to the present Time, I find the Account to be as follows:

Admitted in Nine Years 310, Cur’d 57, Much better 151, No better 44, Incurable 42, Dead12, Remain in the Home 3.32

Responding to Summers’s work, Smollett was immediately scornful of the hospitalresearch made public. In his Essay on the External Use of Water (1752) he alluded to thegovernors’ aforementioned Plan and Elevation, which was ‘handed about to solicitsubscriptions’, and the claims made therein to deliver ‘histories of cases’, complaining that‘the public hath not, as yet, been favoured with the history of one cure performed underthe auspices of that charity.’ He commended Summers for publishing ‘an accurate



account of the success of Warm Bathing in paralytic disorders’ from ‘the books of thehospital’, but concluded that this statistical material had no meaningful significance as asource of knowledge on the Bath waters, such as can ‘only be conveyed in a succinct detailof all the cases in which the Warm Bath has proved serviceable or detrimental’. Smollettthus accused the governors of failing to fulfil their promises, owing, he stated, ‘to ashameful laziness in those who belong to the hospital, in a medical capacity’. He then wenton to make recommendations for improving the administration of the baths, specificallythat separate bathing facilities for males and females be installed, as ‘[d]iseased persons ofall ages, sexes, and conditions, are promiscuously admitted into an open Bath’. He furthercommended the implementation of ‘an apparatus for confining the vapour, and directingit in full steam to any part of the body’.33

Lucus would certainly draw on Smollett’s condemnation of the hospital governors inthe grandiose depiction of himself as a political knight errant in his own Essay. As I willnow show, he came to Bath in the belief that a powerful minority had gained influenceover research into the waters and had overseen treatises that merely affirmed thetraditional view of the waters as sulphurous and referred only vaguely to a register ofpatient histories. In doing so, he seized on an opportunity to pursue his own anti-authoritarian political agenda by depicting it as his role, as one supposedly unmotivated byvested interests in the baths, to expose corporate deceit and greed among the medicalestablishment of the spa.

III. Lucas’s Political ‘Quest’

Lucas assumed the mantle of a moral crusader at Bath on the back of his reputation as apolemical writer on the subject of libertarianism in Ireland. Jacqueline Hill argues that hispolitical stance within the context of Dublin civic culture in the 1740s had widerepercussions in transforming ‘a purely municipal struggle for the restoration of “ancientrights” into a campaign of national (and, in the eyes of some supporters, international)significance’.34 Lucas began producing political pamphlets while working in anapothecary’s shop in Dublin; he published his first work, A Short Scheme for PreventingFrauds and Abuses in Pharmacy (1735), in an attempt to professionally monopolise thepreparation and sale of drugs within the city, demonstrating early on, therefore, that hewas not averse to professional monopolies so long as they represented his interests. He alsomade a study of the mineral waters of Lisdoonvarna, before being nominated to representthe barber-surgeons’ guild within the local council, when he turned his attention to thesupposed undemocratic proceedings of the Dublin Board of Aldermen. He became a fierceopponent of the ‘New Rules’ act, established at the behest of the British crown in 1672 tostrengthen the role of the lord mayor and aldermen by investing in them the power toappoint representatives in the council.35 As such, he published Divelina libera: An Apologyfor the Civil Rights and Liberties of the Commons and Citizens of Dublin (1744), presenting itas his duty to open the eyes of commoners to the supposedly corrupt forces at work in localgovernment:

As the Advocates for Liberty and Truth are but few among us, and but inconsiderable in theirstations in Life, compared to those of the prevailing Faction, who have the Advantages ofPower and Opulence, to open the Ears of the Great to their Clamors, to gain Sanction for theirdisguised Abuses, and to give weight to all the false Insinuations and foul Calumnies they canvend against us, however unjust and injurious; it is high time for some to appear, more openly,in this Cause, to undeceive the abused Populace.36

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Lucas’s presentation of himself as a champion of civic rights in Dublin was in line withthe earl of Chesterfield’s benign lord-lieutenancy of Ireland between 1745 and 1746.Chesterfield expressed concern at Ireland’s ruling elite infringing the rights of Irishcommoners as he arrived in Dublin in August 1745. He wrote ironically to Thomas Priorof his intention to enhance the lives of the populace instead of assigning posts onpreferment to political careerists:

I am sensible that I shall be reckoned a very shallow politician, for my attention to such triflingobjects as the improvement of your lands, the extension of your manufactures, and theincrease of your trade, which only tend to the advantages of the public; whereas an ableLord-Lieutenant ought to employ his thoughts in greater matters. He should think of jobs forfavourites, sops for enemies, managing parties, and engaging Parliaments to vote away theirown and their fellow-subjects’ liberties and properties.37

Lucas reflected Chesterfield’s views as he continued his patriotic campaign to restore whathe saw as ancient democratic rights with the publication of A Letter to the Free Citizens ofDublin in 1747, its title page emphasising his working-man credentials as ‘a Freeman,Barber and Citizen’. He also published The Complaints of Dublin (1747) and became acandidate for the Irish parliament in 1748, now under the earl of Harrington’s lord-lieutenancy. Hill argues that Lucas in fact used his position as a former apothecary of thecity to advance his own candidature, giving freemen ‘the chance to elect a tradesman whowas one of themselves’. He can thus be seen to have drawn heavily on his prior professionto rally people to his democratic cause, publishing a flood of political pamphlets inpreparation for the Dublin by-election of 1749, via his weekly election newspaper TheCensor, or Citizen’s Journal.38

Lucas’s political campaign became increasingly radical as he ran for parliament, for inhis Tenth Address to the Free Citizens and Free-Holders of the City of Dublin (1749) he tackledthe matter of Irish independence. He attempted to justify previous uprisings againstBritish imperialism in his contention that ‘there was no general Rebellion in Ireland, sincethe first British Invasion, that was not raised or fomented, by the Oppression, Instigation,evil Influence or Connivance of the English.’39 He also repeated his critique of the Dublinaldermen in his Eighteenth Address (1749), objecting to their being ‘able sometimesunobserved, or unopposed, to steal, or wrest any thing from the Commons’.40 He furthertranslated and published The Great Charter of the City of Dublin prior to the Dublinelection.41 However, the controversy that he stirred during his candidacy came to a headin the autumn of 1749, when Harrington encouraged the Irish House of Commons tomount an investigation into his writings during his opening speech to the Irish Parliamenton 10 October 1749. Following this investigation, the House voted to have himdisenfranchised.42 Lucas subsequently depicted himself in The Complaints of Dublin (1749)as a martyr to Irish liberty:

Some Years ago, I dreaded nothing more, from the general Depravity, visible to all that arenot blinded with Offices or prospect of Preferment, than out-living the Constitution of myCountry. Now mine own [health] is reduced, by a chronic, hereditary Disease, to suchInfirmity, that all that Anxiety is pretty much abated.43

Threatened with trial and imprisonment, Lucas was forced to flee to the Isle of Man, withthe Dublin election going ahead without him on 24 October 1749.44 At this timeChesterfield, in a letter dated 26 October, expressed bemusement that a seller of medicinesshould make such a controversial impact in Irish politics, believing Lucas to be ‘the firstapothecary that ever was voted an enemy to his country’.45



Finding political exile in London, Lucas addressed wider causes in the name of patrioticfreedom with The Abuse of Standing Parliaments, and the Great Advantage of FrequentElections (1750), before migrating to Europe and resuming his medical career by studyingat Leiden University, where he gained an MD in 1752. He developed his interest in mineralwaters by visiting the continental spa resorts of Spa and Aachen.46 He then returned toEngland and published Free Will to Freeholders (1753), in which he denounced the role ofreligion in government: ‘[i]n Italy, Spain, and Portugal, where the Clergy govern, the Laityare as absolute Slaves.’47 He continued to pursue his libertarian cause with respect to hisnative country by publishing An Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland in 1754, once moreprojecting himself as a martyr to Irish liberty and hoping that his work ‘will have a properinfluence’ upon ‘Leaders in the present Opposition’, be they not ‘forsaken, and given up, asI was; naked, and defenceless; to the Resentment of the Powerful’.48

Lucas went on to publish An Appeal to the Commons and Citizens of London in 1756,wherein he offered further evocations of self-sacrifice and persecution. He recalled how he‘threw aside the political Pen’ when he saw ‘nothing further for any Room to hope for goodEffects from my pressed Labours’, and how he took refuge in the study of medicine: ‘beingwearied, and almost worn out, with long incessant Toils and Watchings for the Health ofthe Body politic, I betook myself to obtaining the means of preserving the Body natural.’He further described being ‘forced to fly for an Asylum from the Tyranny, then raging likean horrid Pestilence in mine ill-fated Country’, before detailing his subsequent relocationto Europe, where he ‘determined to prosecute the Study of Physic’.49 However, Smollett,reviewing the work in the first volume of his Critical Review for March 1756, warnedreaders against judging Lucas purely on the basis of his disenfranchisement and theoverblown view of himself in his Appeal as a heroic political rebel and hounded libertarian:

Some people unacquainted with the real character of [Lucas] might be apt, from thecircumstances of his expulsion and the nature of this appeal, to look upon him as a turbulentpartisan, who wanted to fish in troubled waters; who having miscarried in his own country,endeavours to foment factions and disturbance in the city of London: to us, however, heappears in the light of a weak, enthusiastic democratic; who, had he lived in the reign ofCharles I, would, with Leighton, Pryn [sic], and Lilburn, have received more flagrant marks ofthe ministry’s regard.50

As I have illustrated, Lucas drew on his status as an apothecary, supposedly untarnishedby political power, to publish polemics to encourage constitutional reform in Ireland. Heclearly aimed to provoke discontent among his readers within the realm of Irish politicsand then as an exile in London, where he criticised the imperialist British government. Hecan further be seen to have pursued his radical cause in Europe, where he depicted himselfas a selfless man of the people who, in precarious health, presented it as his duty to take astand against undemocratic policies. Thus having focused on Lucas’s reputation as awandering anti-authoritarian, I will now examine the manner in which he took hisprofessed political ‘knight errantry’ to Bath, and how he depicted this relocation as acontinuation of his international struggle against governmental oppression.

IV. Lucas at Bath

Lucas, as an apparent interloper to Bath’s hospital fraternity, considered the researchpublished within infirmary-endorsed treatises as demonstrative of a further example of aninstitutional abuse of power to be reckoned with. He published his Essay on Waters with

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the intention of stirring up popular indignation against what he saw as a greedy andunelected minority deliberately peddling a misrepresentation of the waters under theguise of superior professionalism. Therefore, while the Essay is on the face of it a watertreatise, it should perhaps be viewed as an accompanying piece to Lucas’s previouspolitical polemics, especially as, when approaching the three-volume, multi-subsectionedwork, the reader is confronted with an extensive prefatory discourse on patriotismaddressed to the prince of Wales, where Lucas affirms: ‘[w]ithout political health, life, withfull enjoyment of natural health, and even with the greatest affluence of the goods offortune, would be very far from desirable, in mine estimation.’51

In his Essay Lucas brings his personal experience of exile and supposed destitution tobear on his current endeavour, noting how his ‘time and circumstances will not permit meto write and collate carefully and deliberately: since tyranny banished me [from] my nativecountry, and corruption left me no means of a restoration’. He claims that it ‘is easier toconceive, than describe, the uninterrupted series of affliction, anxiety, care, and perplexity,that has ever since attended me’, insisting that he has already made enemies at Bath, whoare supposedly conspiring against him in their planned rebukes to his treatise: ‘Some ofthese, I am told, have long since got their criticisms ready for the press, upon a work, ofwhich they never saw a line.’ Lucas implies that the supposed antagonistic nature of theBath medical fraternity towards him is itself symptomatic of a localised confederacy.Indeed, he accuses hospital-affiliated physicians of being insecure in their medicalpronouncements on the waters and wary of an outsider expressing contrary views to theirown, to the point of showing inappropriate degrees of aggression:

There, a set of learned gentlemen, for none other crime, than that of differing from them inopinion; a privilege become proverbial in the profession; have not contented themselves withthe most inhospitable flights of a stranger, in their city; but have chased their righteous spiritsto a most tremendous, I dare not say unbecoming, pitch of wrath and indignation against me.

Lucas satirically portrays the spa’s professional elite as a prejudiced and gossipy set whoare anxious to discredit him as an authority on the waters by snobbishly alluding to hispast as an apothecary and political outcast:

Of all the various ill-natured means of detraction, that have yet been devised by these angrysages, the most remarkable, are the calling my moral and political character, and even mineunderstanding, in question, and attempting to cast reflections on my late profession. – ‘Whois this,’ says one, ‘that is come to decry our waters?’ – ‘A fellow,’ answers another, ‘that wasforced to fly his own country, and will never be quiet, till he is forced to fly this.’

In response to such reputed taunts, Lucas once more attributes his expulsion from Irelandto governmental persecution, appealing to his readers for justice: ‘let the tyrant slaves thatbanished me, tell why; and then, the judicious and dispassionate may discern who, by myexile, stands most disgraced.’

As Lucas had highlighted his position as a former apothecary to win popular support inthe Dublin elections, he again draws on this background in his Essay to paint himself asa man of the people, representing the public interest. He invokes previous anti-authoritarian chemical authors in doing so, with Nicholas Culpeper (1616-1654)providing a famous example of an apothecary making a reputation for himself by railingagainst the monopolies of university-educated physicians and stagnant medical tradition;Benjamin Woolley argues that in ‘writing the English Physitian or Herbal Culpeperestablished the principle of the public right to know’ and did ‘challenge the principle that



medical knowledge belonged solely to physicians’.52 Lucas can thus be seen to echo such aprecedent by portraying his supposedly unqualified status as being superior to elitelearning in terms of its benefit to the public, and he aims to subvert the hospital governors’prejudice towards him in this way:

They are pretty unanimous; that is, in pronouncing my name with a, ‘The Apothecary.’ – Aterrible stigma! – I proudly own the charge; I was, I hope I still am, An Apothecary. It had beenhappy for the public, that they, who cast this, as a term of reproach, could say as much forthemselves: Since it is most plane, that he, who is not an Apothecary [...] can not deserve thename of physician.53

Supposedly in the face of great professional hostility, Lucas stresses that he has a purelyaltruistic intention in publishing his Essay – namely, to discover the true nature of thelocal waters for the public good: ‘I went to Bath in quest of physical truths, not privategain; that in pure regard to the public, and for the general honor of the profession.’ Heinsists that ‘I do not in fact, decry Bath waters’, but rather show ‘their powers in a differentand more just light’, further claiming that he engaged in the study of them in an openmanner and with no ill intent: ‘that the impartial may be able to judge of my blamelessconduct towards the frighted faculty at Bath, let it be remembered, that mine enquiriesconcerning their famed waters, were not made in a corner.’ He states that his currentquest is to oppose entrenched medical opinion with regard to the mineral springs, statingthat in ‘the following work, I have the authority of the dead and living writers, almost tounanimity against me.’ Indeed, he proposes that a scholarly malaise exists at Bath in hisassertion that he should not ‘be obliged to subscribe to all the errors of grey beardedpredecessors’, when ‘it would be most pleasing to the city, as well as to the guardians of herhealth, to let their waters be supposed, as asserted to be, impregnated with sulphur’. Lucascontests vigorously the seemingly accepted opinion among local physicians that thewaters are sulphurous, depicting it as yet another form of political oppression: ‘Is it notrather brave, just and necessary to oppose the tyrant custom, wheresoever he is found torear his obstinate hoary head, in defence of error or ignorance?’54

Specific to his assumed political quest at the spa, Lucas addresses the third volume of hisEssay – ‘Of the City and Thermal Waters of Bath’ – to ‘the Right Honourable The Earl ofChesterfield’, for it is with Chesterfield’s patronage that he endeavours to expose aconfederacy among the local medical fraternity.55 Chesterfield evidently puts his privatelyexpressed disdain for the ‘apothecary’ aside in his apparently genuine interest to helpdevelop contemporary understandings of the waters, and Lucas makes it evident in hiseffusive address that his supposed humanity and judiciousness are integral to his politicalpurpose in the treatise: ‘My Lord, The man, who aims at the Public Good, though in thelowest sphere, is intituled [sic] to the attention of the Public and the countenance of everygood man. And the more important the attempt he makes; the more potent the Patron hedeserves and requires.’ Lucas reveres Chesterfield for his political accomplishments,paying tribute to his earlier lord-lieutenancy in ‘poor Ireland’, where ‘[y]our image stillmakes a part of the household Gods of every grateful family’. He publicly acknowledgeshis debt to his patron in his bid to oppose the reputed tyranny of the Bath medicalestablishment: ‘my Lord, I am imbarqued [sic] in an undertaking, of too great moment, forany private, single man to hope to succeed in fully, without the active aid of a person ofdignity and influence suitable to the importance of the design.’56

Lucas is adamant that Chesterfield’s patronage is instrumental to his supposedoverthrowing of the dead weight of medical tradition at Bath. He states that he must dispel‘deep-rooted, perverse prejudices’, and that ‘without a Chesterfield, my best endeavors, in

10 ADAM MASON


this instance, may be frustrated, in a great measure’. He argues that the former lord-lieutenant had himself been ‘perfectly sensible of the gross mistakes in the receivednotions of the nature and qualities of these waters’ and notes how he had dispelled theopinion that they contained sulphur: ‘You were, by the testimony of your own sense andjudgement, convinced, that the exquisite composition of these waters had not before beenfairly explored; that they were neither sapaceous nor sulphureous.’ Indeed, it is in thisregard that Lucas aims to convince his readers that it is his ‘fate to have too much of a kindof political knight-errandry interwoven with my frame’. Lucas clearly deems his currentcampaign to be a protraction of his earlier political battles by portraying himself as a lonewarrior fighting against a neglectful and stagnant professional faculty:

Your Lordship can not wonder at my calling for aid, for protection upon this occasion; as Yousee, I as yet stand single, and have multitudes to oppose: The task, I have cut out for myself, isnothing less, than the rescuing the curious waters of Bath from stiff-necked, destructiveempiricism; abolishing vane, though fondly confirmed, notions and groundless, though long-established, prejudices.57

Lucas presents his most polemical material in volume III of his Essay, setting out hisforthright opinions regarding what he sarcastically refers to as ‘that most excellentcharitable institution, the General Hospital or Infirmary’. He echoes Smollett’s harshcriticism of the hospital, made four years earlier, in accusing the governors of publishinginaccurate patient histories in order to hide the ineffectiveness of their treatments and offailing to deliver their promised research:

One great purpose, and probably not one of the less considerable ends of the institution, Imust, with concern, observe, is not attended to, as it merits. Nothing could prove moregenerally beneficial, than giving histories of the cases treated at the Bath. As private personsmight not choose to have their names and cases made public, this hospital furnishes fitsubjects and means to convey such histories to the public.

Lucas argues that the full publication of both successful and unsuccessful patient historieswould contribute to the public good by providing evidence of how the waters should betaken. However, he sees it as one of the hospital’s monumental flaws that having searchedfor such information, he has not found it: ‘upon looking over the physicians’ books at thehospital, I could find only names and prescriptions, without any regular state of the case,or history of the progress, set down.’ He concludes from this that a self-serving exclusivityhas prevented the governors from performing their stated altruistic design, in languagethat recalls his earlier tirades against the oligarchic dominance of the unelected Dublinaldermen:

If more of the physicians were admitted to attend this hospital, without the mean distinction,which a pitiful, sordid jealousy alone could keep up, [...] a generous emulation might bestirred up; and if all the hospital physicians did not, some of them might, set down andpublish the histories of their particular patients, for the good of the hospital, the honor of theprofession, and the just satisfaction of the public in general, of the founders and supporters ofthis charity in particular.

Lucas is certain that more ‘histories’ might have been published ‘had not one particularset of physicians at Bath apprehended, that they had a right to make a monopoly of all thehonors and all the emoluments of the profession’. He further harbours contempt for allresident physician-writers of Bath in his belief that they are operating out of self-interest:



‘One system indeed appears to predominate among all, without which, the generalitymight appear anomalous [...]; I mean SELF, Dear little Self !’ He therefore laments thesupposedly impossible task of challenging all spa authors, particularly chemicalphysicians, who have propagated misconceived notions regarding the waters:

I should neither trouble myself nor the readers of this tract with opposing, and expresslyexposing, the endless errors of all the writers of this subject; such as their talking offermenting minerals, attributing to waters mixtures, that can not exist together; such assuperabundant acids and sulphur, with several like absurdities.58

Lucas further echoes Smollett’s opinions when presenting plans to reform the baths ofBath in his Essay. Without acknowledging the author, he proposes that ‘Vapor baths,which are unknown in this city’, should be built, while observing that separate facilities formen and women would ensure that there ‘need be no promiscuous bathing of the sexes’and ‘no danger of imbibing the foulness of diseases of an other body’. Moreover, whileSmollett had accused the hospital governors of ‘indolence or indifference’, Lucascomplains of the ‘Sloath, Indolence or Ignorance of those, that should have payed greaterattention to the health of the public’. He further laments ‘the opposition of some, withwhose private property such a scheme might seem to interfere’.59

Lucas goes on to dismiss the idea, forwarded by Charleton, that a layer of froth orsoapiness about the baths signifies sulphur. Taking a ‘survey of these waters’, he insteadconsiders this to be an entirely commonplace phenomena:

I could not be a stranger to a body, I had so often seen, upon the surface, as well as at thebottom, of shallow stagnant waters; [...] I do not remember a ditch or pond of such water, oftwo years standing, any where, free from this production, in the same seasons, in which it isfound at Bath.

He claims that his ‘greatest astonishment’ is how the body ‘passed with all the authors,and all the inhabitants of the city, and all the physical fraternity, from the highest to thelowest, that I saw or heared of, except one, for either actual sulphur, or a sulphureous orbituminous, or bitumoso-sulphureous substance’. Lucas instead attributes the perceivedfrothiness to ‘putrification’ [sic], considering the waters to be ‘in no sense sulphureous’.60

As we have seen, Lucas, while certainly not repudiating the clinical value of the Bathwaters, expressed contempt at the governors of the hospital for issuing seeminglyineffective institutional patient histories and continuing to popularise the idea thatsulphur formed the basis of their healing properties. I have demonstrated how an essentialclash of medical opinion over methods of analysing the waters served as the provoca-tion he needed to present himself as a ‘political knight errant’ within his treatise.Distinguishing himself as such, he can be seen to have attempted to elevate his challengeto the infirmary oligarchy into the status of an epic libertarian contest to quash a tyrannyof orthodoxy that he deemed to have been extenuated entirely out of corporate self-interest. Having shown how Lucas attempted to denounce the ethics of the hospitalgovernors, I will now turn to the critical reception of his work, questioning how far hiscontemporaries gave any credence to his claims that he was ‘rescuing’ the local waters.

V. Critical Reception

Critics responding to Lucas’s Essay, and specifically his material on Bath, were, of course,forced to address the issues of his combative writing and his political views. Smollett,

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having already critically mauled his Appeal, rebuked Lucas for choosing to bring hispugnaciously voiced libertarian concerns to a treatise on waters. He combined hisscathing anonymous review of the Essay, for the May 1756 edition of the Critical Review,with another work by an apothecary turned political writer, John Shebbeare, who hadsimilarly published a series of controversial polemics. Shebbeare had been imprisoned forhis criticisms in The Marriage Act (1754) of Lord Hardwicke’s efforts to bring marriageunder the regulation of the church, going on to publish A Third Letter to the People ofEngland (1756), wherein he challenged parliament’s supposed pandering to theHanoverian concerns of the king: ‘Have ye not just Right to complain, whenever theLabour of your Hands, the profits of your Trade, and the Blood of your Fellow-Subjects,shall be wantonly lavished in Defence of Foreign Interests, to father the sterile soil, and fillthe empty Purses of more favourite Subjects?’61

In his review Smollett plays on Lucas’s and Shebbeare’s similar career paths frommedicine to political radicalism. He makes ironic use of elevated language to express hisdistaste for what he views as their patronising treatment of the public, stating that ‘weknow not whether most to admire, the acuteness of penetration, the extent of learning,the strength and solidity of argument, the candour, modesty, patriotism, or singularity instation, study and circumstance, that denote them so consummate and congenial.’ Hesatirises both authors for their pretensions to be learned polymaths and enlighteninglibertarians, noting their reputations for controversy: ‘Both are apothecaries, chemists,physicians and politicians. Both have shone like Phosphorus amidst the mists ofignorance and prejudice [...] and both have been over-whelmed and well nigh dissolved inthe discharge that ensued.’ He further criticises what he sees as their presump-tuousness in attempting to dislodge accepted opinion, noting that ‘[m]any moons havenot revolved since one of these illustrious adepts obliged the world with a performance,in which he plainly demonstrated the absurdity of the practice adopted by all hiscontemporaries, and blew up their whole medical system by means of a mine kindledwith electrical fire.’62

Further in his review, Smollett wonders at the manner in which Lucas presumed tobring his libertarian quest to bear on the subject of the thermal springs in his Essay.He notes that ‘[s]uch is his patriotic Zeal, that even in this performance, his poli-tical principles seem to glow warmer than the waters of Aiken.’ He further has a strongcase in insisting that the Irishman had in fact borrowed much of his material,expressing bemusement that he should fail to acknowledge his sources when forwardinghis recommendations for improving the administration of the baths: ‘The candour ofthis curious chymist, would have [...] appeared more conspicuous, had he taken somenotice of those gentlemen and others from whom he seems to have almost literallyborrowed many of his most valuable hints of reformation.’63 Thus, although Smollett isclearly Lucas’s ally in respect of soliciting practical improvements to the baths, the criticcannot endorse his Essay, allowing his personal objections to the author to dominate hisreview.

Johnson reviewed the Essay in the Literary Magazine, or, Universal Review for August1756 and offered a far more positive perspective on Lucas’s claimed political knighterrantry. This was the only work on a medical topic that Johnson reviewed directly in theperiodical, in all likelihood because it was in keeping with its largely political nature.64

Brian Hanley argues that the critic almost certainly consulted Smollett’s harsh reviewbefore he came to address Lucas’s ‘public-spiritedness and moral courage’ in his ownpiece. He maintains that Johnson attempted to rival Smollett by in fact validating theIrishman’s depiction of himself as a heroic libertarian, insisting that he offered ‘a spirited



endorsement of the self-image Lucas himself sought to project’.65 Johnson indeed paidtribute to Lucas’s patriotic campaigning in general in the review, addressing his supposedradicalism, moral substance and bravery:

The author of this book is a man well known to the world for his daring defiance of powerwhen he thought it exerted on the side of wrong, the popularity which be obtained, and theviolence to which the Irish Ministers had recourse, that they might set themselves free froman opponent so restless by his principles, so powerful by his conduct, and so specious by hiscause; they drove him from his native country by proclamation, in which they charged himwith crimes of which they never intended to be called to the proof, and oppressed him bymethods equally irresistible by guilt and innocence.

Johnson further praised Lucas as a heroic opponent of corporate corruption and tyranny:‘Let the man thus driven into exile for having been the friend of his country be received inevery other place as a confessor of liberty, and let the tools of power be taught in time thatthey may rob but cannot impoverish.’66 However, the isolated nature of his enthusiasmfor Lucas’s political antagonism can be seen in the fact that an anonymous writer forthe Monthly Review, also for August 1756, was altogether dismissive of the essayist’saggressive writing style:

the candid Reader will be more offended by the asperity with which he treats those fromwhom he dissents; and which often makes such near approaches to ill manners, that evenwhen we are pleased with the sagacity and learning of the Chymist, we regret the absence ofthe Gentleman.67

With critical reaction to Lucas’s Essay being focused on its political content, the workwent on to fuel controversy in further water treatises concerned with Bath. In 1757

William Baylies, himself a former apothecary, published Reflections on the Use and Abuse ofBath Waters, in which he drew on Lucas’s writing to further question contemporaryresearch into the thermal baths. He also published A Narrative of Facts (1757), wherein heaccused the hospital of forming a ‘physical confederacy’ against the Irish writer, which heconsidered to have been ‘made known’ in the ‘printed letters of Dr Lucas and Dr Oliver’.Baylies further published An Historical Account of the Rise, Progress, and Management, of theGeneral Hospital in 1758, issuing ‘some queries, to the principal conductors of thatcharity’. Moreover, because of his arguments in the Essay, Lucas became involved in adispute with John Rutty, who published a Methodical Synopsis of Mineral Waters (1757), aswell as The Argument of Sulphur or No Sulphur in Waters Discussed (1762), which he jointlyanswered with A cursory examination of the methodical synopsis of mineral waters and of theargument of sulphur or no sulphur in waters discussed (1762).

VI. Conclusion

This article has sought to analyse Lucas’s depiction of himself as a political knight errantin his Essay by assessing his accusations against the governors of the General Hospitalwithin the wider context of the waters literature of Bath and his own political experiencein Ireland and abroad. It is evident that an elite and influential minority of infirmaryphysicians assimilated the methods of chemical analysis and the collation of patienthistories in an effort to impress on the public that they were implementing more effectiveinstitutional methods by which to evaluate the curative properties of the local baths. It isfurther evident that Lucas, as a former apothecary, continued an ongoing political

14 ADAM MASON


campaign against supposedly corrupt administrations by arguing that the governors hadinstead stifled research into the waters to secure financial reward from the charitableinfirmary, with little regard for the public good. Yet it is impossible to determine fully thevalidity of his professed moral quest. One cannot know if the governors deliberatelysought to mislead the public over the hospital’s patient histories and by endorsing thehistorical view that the waters were imbued with sulphur, especially when contemporarychemistry was so unreliable and when sulphur was so indefinable. Lucas was, to someextent, convincing in his critique of the infirmary, with Chesterfield’s approval of his workhelping to add gravitas to his case. However, one must take into account the sensationalistand mob-rousing character of his writing in the Essay, and the vein of self-importancerunning through it. Furthermore, it is clear that his criticisms of the infirmary were hardlyrevelatory in light of Smollett’s own Essay of 1752.

Whether or not Lucas was justified in his mission to rescue the thermal wells fromcorporate indolence in his treatise, there is little doubt that as a self-styled moral crusaderat Bath he challenged the benevolent reputation of the hospital governors and posed athreat to the commercial fortunes of the city, which were inextricably tied to the popularperception of the waters. His influence can be seen in the way he appeared to signal aprofessional crisis at the spa that was less to do with the relative merits of ancient ormodern medical approaches than with disputation between two separate factions: thosewith a vested interest in the hospital and those without. Despite his altruistic affirmations,however, there is little doubt that Lucas also had self-aggrandising motives in opposing theestablished physicians of the spa in his discussion of the famous baths. Indeed, one mayview him as a careerist who wished to further his standing as a physician as well asadvance his political reputation by publishing his Essay, for certainly he ran a successfulpractice at the spa before climbing the political ladder in Dublin.

In the manner of a knight errant, Lucas continued to relocate his political struggle afterhis assault on the medical fraternity of Bath, when, after the death of George II in 1760,he received a pardon from George III that enabled him to return to Dublin and become acandidate in the Ireland elections of 1761, whereby he became an MP.68 Chesterfieldcommented in a letter to the bishop of Waleford in 1766 that had Lucas ‘not beenpersuaded under Lord Harrington’s Government, I believe he would have been, longbefore this, only a good apothecary, instead of a scurvy politician.’69 However, despite theearl’s poor opinion of Lucas’s political abilities, the Dublinite showed that in the courseof his episodic journey from dispenser of medicines to parliamentarian, he could,persuasively, transfer his wide-ranging political effort against corrupt administrations tothe city of Bath, through the unlikely form of a medical treatise.

NOTES1. Charles Lucas, An Essay on Waters (London, 1756), p.ccxiii, ccxiv.2. Anne Borsay, Medicine and Charity in Georgian Bath: A Social History of the General Infirmary, c.1739-1830

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), p.140.3. Lucas, Essay, p.xxvii.4. See Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1990), p.227.5. For a general scientific history of Bath, see Roger Rolls, Spa Therapy through the Ages: A History of Medical

Uses of the Hot Springs of Bath (Bath: Bath and North East Somerset Council), p.5.6. Tobias Smollett, The Critical Review or Annals of Literature: 1756-1763, ed. James G. Basker, 16 vols

(London: Pickering and Chatto, 2002), vol. I.334.7. Anon., Monthly Review XV (1756), p.205-8.8. Samuel Johnson, The Literary Magazine: or, Universal Review I (1756), p.167.9. See, for instance, Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town,

1660-1770 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).



10. See, for instance, Roy Porter and Dorothy Porter, In Sickness and in Health: The British Experience, 1650-1850 (London: Fourth Estate, 1988).

11. Roy Porter, ‘Introduction’, The Medical History of Waters and Spas (London: Wellcome Institute for theHistory of Medicine, 1990), p.14.

12. Richard Warner, The History of Bath (Bath, 1801), p.377-80.13. Alexandra Walsham, ‘Reforming the Waters: Holy Wells and Healing Springs in Protestant England’,

in Diana Wood (ed.), Life and Thought in the Northern Church c. 1100-c. 1700 (Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1999),p.231-50.

14. Christopher Hamlin, ‘Chemistry, Medicine, and the Legitimization of English Spas, 1740-1840’, in Porter(ed.), The Medical History of Waters and Spas, p.67-70.

15. Noel G. Coley, ‘Physicians, Chemists and the Analysis of Mineral Waters: “The Most Difficult Part ofChemistry”’, in Porter (ed.), The Medical History of Waters and Spas, p.56-66.

16. G. S. Rousseau, ‘Matt Bramble and the Sulphur Controversy in the XVIIIth Century: Medical Backgroundof Humphry Clinker’, Journal of the History of Ideas 28 (1967), p.580.

17. Rolls, Spa Therapy through the Ages, p.5.18. Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485-1603 (Cambridge: James Clarke,

1999), p.5.19. William Turner, A Book of the Bathes in England (London, 1568), p.1-2.20. John Jones, The Bathes of Bathes Ayde (London, 1572), p.9, 11, 13.21. Tobias Venner, The Baths of Bath (London, 1628), p.1.22. Edward Jorden, A Discourse of Naturall Bathes (London, 1631), p.57, 65.23. Jorden, Discourse, p.88-9.24. Thomas Guidott, Register of Bath (London, 1696), p.353, 362.25. William Oliver, A Dissertation on the Bath Waters (London, 1704), p.207-8, 242.26. Borsay, Medicine and Charity in Georgian Bath, p.21-4.27. Benjamin Boyce, The Benevolent Man: A Life of Ralph Allen of Bath (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1967), p.31.28. ‘Plan and Elevation of a New General Hospital Intended to be Erected at Bath’, reproduced in Roger Rolls,

The Hospital of the Nation: The Story of Spa Medicine and the Mineral Water Hospital at Bath (Bath: BirdPublications, 1988), p.16.

29. John Wood, A Description of Bath (London, 1742), p.291.30. Anne Borsay, ‘An Example of Political Arithmetic: The Evaluation of Spa Therapy at the Georgian Bath

Infirmary, 1742-1830’, Medical History (2000), p.163.31. Rice Charleton, A Chymical Analysis of Bath Waters (Bath, 1750), p.20-29.32. John Summers, A Short Account of the Success of Warm Bathing in Paralytic Disorders (London, 1751), p.i.33. Tobias Smollett, An Essay on the External Use of Water (London, 1752), p.31, 34.34. Jacqueline Hill, From Patriots to Unionists: Dublin, Civic Politics and Irish Protestant Patriotism, 1660-1840

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p.87.35. Francis Godwin James, Ireland in the Empire 1688-1770: A History of Ireland from the Williamite Wars to the

Eve of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), p.183.36. Charles Lucas, Divelina libera (Dublin, 1744), p.3-4.37. Philip Dormer Stanhope, The Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, ed. Bonamy

Dobree, 6 vols (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1932), vol. III.772.38. Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p.86.39. Charles Lucas, Tenth Address (Dublin, 1749), p.24.40. Charles Lucas, Eighteenth Address (Dublin, 1749), p.13.41. Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p.87.42. Edith Mary Johnston, Ireland in the Eighteenth Century (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1974), p.111-2.43. Charles Lucas, The Complaints of Dublin (Dublin, 1749), p.6.44. Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p.113.45. Stanhope, Letters, vol. IV.1426-7.46. Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p.122.47. Charles Lucas, Free Will to Freeholders (London, 1753), p.3.48. Charles Lucas, An Address to the Inhabitants of Ireland (London, 1754), p.6.49. Charles Lucas, An Appeal to the Commons and Citizens of London (London, 1756), p.1-2.50. Smollett, The Critical Review, ed. Basker, vol. I.169-70.51. Lucas, Essay, p.xiv.52. Benjamin Woolley, Heal Thyself: Nicholas Culpeper and the Seventeenth-Century Struggle to Bring Medicine to

the People (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), p.351.53. Lucas, Essay, p.xvi-xvii.54. Lucas, Essay, p.xix-xxviii.55. Lucas, Essay, p.776.56. Lucas, Essay, p.ccx.57. Lucas, Essay, p.ccxi-ccxiv.58. Lucas, Essay, p.242-53.

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59. Lucas, Essay, p.263.60. Lucas, Essay, pp.272-83.61. John Cardwell, Arts and Arms: Literature, Politics and Patriotism during the Seven Years War (Manchester:

Manchester University Press, 2004); John Shebbeare, A Third Letter to the People of England (London, 1756),p.29.

62. Tobias Smollett, Critical Review I (1756), p.321-2.63. Tobias Smollett, Critical Review I (1756), p.344, 341.64. John Wiltshire, Samuel Johnson in the Medical World: The Doctor and the Patient (Cambridge University

Press, 1991), p.113.65. Brian Hanley, Samuel Johnson as Book Reviewer: A Duty to Examine the Labors of the Learned (Newark, DE:

University of Delaware Press, 2001), p.170-71.66. Samuel Johnson, Literary Magazine I (1756), p.167.67. Anon., Monthly Review XV (1756), p.205-8.68. Hill, Patriots to Unionists, p.124.69. Stanhope, Letters, vol. VI.2709.

adam mason received his PhD in Literature from the University of Bristol in 2010. His dissertation is entitled‘The Political, Religious and Moral Significance of the Thermal Springs in the Waters Literature of Bath,1630-1756’.



the ‘political knight errant’ at bath: charles lucas's attack on the spa medical...

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