Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 11.djvu/227

 

COGAN, THOMAS (1736–1818), physician and philosopher, born at Rothwell in Northamptonshire on 8 Feb. 1736, was the half-brother of [q. v.] For two or three years he was placed in the well-known dissenting school at Kibworth Beauchamp, but was removed from this establishment at the age of fourteen, and spent the next two years with his father. He was then sent to the Mile End academy, where Dr. John Conder was the divinity tutor, but being dissatisfied with its management was transferred at his own request to a similar institution at Homerton. Doubts as to the truth of the doctrines of Calvinism prevented him from joining the dissenting ministry. While he was undecided an accident induced him to cross in 1759 from Harwich to Holland, where he found that the Rev. Benjamin Sowden, the English minister of the presbyterian church, maintained at Rotterdam, by the joint authority of the English and Dutch governments, with two pastors, required a substitute to enable him to revisit his native shores. Cogan promptly applied for and obtained the place. He still, however, continued to seek for a pastorate over a dissenting congregation in England, and about 1762 he was selected as the minister of a chapel at Southampton, where he soon publicly renounced Calvinism and adopted the doctrines of unitarianism. A quarrel with his congregation naturally followed, and Cogan thereupon returned to Holland, becoming the junior minister of the English church at the Hague. He was introduced to Mr. Graen or Groen, originally a silversmith at Amsterdam, and afterwards a banker, and was wooed and won, as the story goes, by the banker's only daughter, a beauty and an heiress, with a fortune of eight or ten thousand pounds. It was a condition of the marriage that Cogan should enter the more settled profession of medicine, and he accordingly matriculated at Leyden on 16 Oct. 1765, and took his degree of M.D. in 1767. Restlessness was his characteristic in early life, and he is said to have practised during the few years which he passed in Holland ‘successively at Amsterdam, Leyden, and Rotterdam.’ From the latter city he returned to London and settled in Paternoster Row, where he soon obtained a lucrative practice, especially in midwifery. This could not well have been later than 1772, and by 1780 he was once more in Holland. According to one account his labours had told on his health, according to another the fortune which he had inherited and the fees he had pocketed during his short term of professional life satisfied his desire for wealth. In 1780 at any rate he resigned his connection to Dr. John Sims, for many years the leading accoucheur in London, and retired to Holland to prosecute his studies in moral philosophy. To gratify his wife they rented the noble mansion of Zulestein, the ancestral home of the family ennobled in this country by the title of Rochford, and in this magnificent retreat they dwelt until the invasion of Holland by the French republicans in 1795 drove them once more back to Harwich. After resting for a time at Colchester, so as to be in a convenient position to return to Holland on its liberation from the invader, Cogan and his wife fixed their home at Bath. Although authorship was always his chief pleasure, a subordinate attraction was now found in farming. He rented a farm at South Wraxall, near Bradford-on-Avon, studied agriculture, practically and scientifically, competed for and won some of the prizes awarded at the meetings of the Bath and West of England Society, and if he did not by his exertions materially add to his resources, at least he found pleasure in his work and preserved the natural vigour of his mind. Farming remained a joy to him throughout his life; when he quitted Bath he took farms at Clapton and at Woodford, and at the time of his death he was the tenant of a farm near Southampton. Mrs. Cogan died at Bath in 1810 and was buried at Widcombe; her niece, Miss Gurnault, died soon after. Cogan gave up housekeeping at Bath and removed to London. The last years of his life were mainly passed in his lodgings in London or at his brother's house at Higham Hill. On the closing day of 1817 he caught a cold by walking in a thick fog from his rooms in Covent Garden to visit a friend. A few weeks later he went to his brother's with a presentiment that he could not recover, and died there on 2 Feb. 1818. On 9 Feb. he was buried at Hackney. His vivacity and good temper remained with him until the last.

Cogan's thesis for his medical degree at Leyden was delivered there on 20 Feb. 1767, and printed in the same year. It was entitled ‘Specimen Medicum inaugurale de animi pathematum vi et modo agendi in inducendis et curandis morbis,’ and could have been amplified by him had not a want of leisure at first and the subsequent labours of others rendered such a proceeding unnecessary. A society for the preservation of life from accidents in water was instituted at Amsterdam