Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/125

 London, and was on 8 April admitted a candidate of the College of Physicians. He was appointed physician to the exiled king, an office certainly without emolument and without duty, for Charleton's works show him to have remained in London. He published two books in 1650, was prevented from writing by an attack of dysentery in 1651, and between 1652 and the Restoration brought out eight more books. During this period he lived in Russell Street, Covent Garden (Preface to Physiologia), and was true to the royal cause, receiving no favour from the Commonwealth, and complying with the times no further than by suppressing the word 'king' on the title-page of his 'Physiologia' (1654), where he describes himself as physician to the late Charles, monarch of Great Britain. He was continued in his office of physician at the Restoration, and published in 1661 a eulogium on Charles II, which describes the profligate king as one to whom no interest is so dear as religion; a man in whom clemency, justice, piety, fortitude, and magnanimity are found in perfect union. Charleton was one of the first elected fellows of the Royal Society in 1662 (, History of Royal Society, 1812, p. 3), and on 23 Jan. 1676 was admitted a fellow of the College of Physicians (, Coll. of Phys. 1878, i. 390). He gave the first lectures delivered in the Cutlerian Theatre in Warwick Lane, in 1680 delivered the Harveian oration, and was president in 1689, 1690, and 1691. Between 1660 and 1692, in which year straitened circumstances compelled him to leave London, he published, besides the king's 'Character' and the Harveian oration, six separate books in Latin, and seven in English. The one which attracted most general attention was 'Chorea Gigantum' (1663), a treatise intended to prove that Stonehenge was made by the Danes, and used by them as a place of assembly, and of the inauguration of kings. The only argument is that similar stone works exist in Denmark, and this had been supplied to Charleton by the Danish antiquary, Wormius, with whom he had corresponded on the book of Inigo Jones, in which Stonehenge is said to be a Roman temple. The 'Chorea Gigantum' will always be kept in memory by the fine epistle (, Dryden, 1760, ii. 154) which Dryden wrote in its praise, the noblest poem in which English science has been celebrated by an English poet. The 'Epistle to Dr. Charleton' is prefixed to what was probably the first published copy of the 'Chorea,' that presented to the king, which, bound in red morocco, with a double crowned C on the sides, is preserved in the British Museum. After his last year of presidency at the College of Physicians, Charleton left London for a time. He had been the physician of many of the old royalists, and as his patients disappeared had no modern views to attract new ones, nor enough purely medical repute to retain his practice. He retired to Nantwich (, Hist. et Antiq. Oxon.), but soon returned to London, and was senior censor in the College of Physicians from 1698 to 1706, and delivered Harveian orations in 1702 and 1706, and in the latter year was appointed Harveian librarian. He died 24 April 1707. Two portraits of Charleton are to be found in his works. The earlier (Immortality of the Human Soul, 1657) represents him as a slim young man with a high forehead, large eyes, flowing hair, a small moustache, and a shaven chin. The later portrait (Inquiries into Human Nature, 1680), of which the original is at the College of Physicians, shows him as a stout, rather heavy-looking old man in gown and bands. Charleton's printed works and manuscript remains (Sloane MS. 3413 is his 'Commonplace Book') show him to have been a man of wide reading both in medicine and in classical literature. He was an exact scholar, critical of Latin (see manuscript notes by Charleton on a copy of 'Needham de fœtu' in British Museum, which once belonged to Charleton), but too diffuse in expression in both languages. His medical books are hard reading, and contain no new observations of his own, but they show the transition from the old scholastic way of writing on medicine to the new method of stating observations and drawing conclusions from them. Charleton valued all the discoveries of his time, but in setting them forth he could not free himself from the scholastic forms in which he had been bred. He had in early life read too much in Van Helmont, and his academic success was probably injurious to him as a physician by encouraging him to spend too much time in reading and composition, and too little at the bedside of patients. He nowhere shows any genius for medicine, and, though he sometimes relates cases, exhibits no acuteness of observation. Hobbes and Lord Dorchester, Prujean and Ent were his friends, and all that is known of his character is in his favour. He mentions (Immortality of the Human Soul, 1657, p. 13) that he was subject to fits of depression, which is probably what Wood (Hist. et Antiq. Oxon.) means by calling him an unhappy man. In 1653 he had already learned (Immortality of Soul, p. 11) 'that sapere domi, to endeavour the acquisition of science in private, ought to be the principal scope of a wise man,' and his voluminous works prove that he was consistent in this opinion throughout life; and though enough of personal vanity is to be found in his writings to show that he