Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 30.djvu/207

  

JORDEN, EDWARD, M.D. (1569–1632), physician and chemist, born in 1569 at High Halden, Kent, the younger son of a gentleman of good family, was educated at Oxford, probably at Hart Hall. Having left the university without, apparently, taking a degree, he travelled on the continent, and spent some time at Padua, where he graduated M.D. On his return he practised in London, and became licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians on 7 Nov. 1595, fellow 22 Dec. 1597. Jorden acquired the confidence of James I, and was probably successful in practice; but after some years he removed to Bath, where he died on 7 Jan. 1632, in his sixty-third year, and was buried in the Abbey Church. He married the daughter of a Mr. Jordan, and left one daughter.

While in London Jorden was employed by James I to examine the case of a girl believed to be bewitched or possessed by an evil spirit, whom the king, interested in such matters, had caused to be brought to London. Jorden detected the imposture, and brought the girl to confess. In connection with the same subject he wrote a small but important tract, in which he had the singular boldness and enlightenment to maintain that cases of so-called demoniacal possession were really due to ‘fits of the mother,’ or, in modern language, hysteria (‘A Briefe Discourse of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother, written upon occasion which hath beene of late taken thereby to suspect possession of an evill spirit, or some such-like supernatural power. Wherein is declared that divers strange actions and passions of the body of man, which are imputed to the Divell, have their true natural causes, and do accompanie this disease,’ London, 1603, 4to).

Another work by Jorden of curious interest is ‘A Discourse of Natural Bathes and Mineral Waters,’ London, 1631, 4to; 2nd edit. 1632, 4to; 3rd edit. 1633, 4to; 4th (called 3rd), edited by Thomas Guidott, with some particulars of the author's life, London, 1669, 8vo (portrait, but usually wanting); 5th (called 4th) edit. London, 1673, 8vo. Jorden was also interested in the manufacture of alum, and claims to have improved the process, though his outlay thereon did not turn out profitably for himself. The knowledge of chemistry displayed in his discourse on baths is not remarkable, even for the age in which he lived. Jorden seems to have deserved Guidott's eulogy as ‘a learned, candid, and sober physician,’ who had ‘the applause of the learned, respect from the rich, prayers from the poor, and the love of all.’ 

JORTIN, JOHN, D.D. (1698–1770), ecclesiastical historian and critic, was born in the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, London, on 23 Oct. 1698. His father was Renatus Jortin (d. 1707), a Huguenot exile from Brittany, of good family, educated at Saumur, who came to London about 1687, altered his name to Jordain, was appointed in 1691 gentleman of the privy chamber, and was secretary successively to Admirals Sir Edward Russell (afterwards first earl of Orford), Sir George Rooke, and Sir Clowdisley Shovell, and perished with the last-named in the wreck of the Association off the Scilly Isles on 22 Oct. 1707. Jortin's mother was Martha, daughter of the Rev. Daniel Rogers of Haversham, Buckinghamshire. He was registered at his baptism by the name of Jordain, but after the father's death he and his mother always used the name of Jortin. He was educated at the Charterhouse School, and admitted pensioner at Jesus College, Cambridge, on 16 May 1715. While an undergraduate he was selected by his tutor, Styan Thirlby, to translate some passages from Eustathius for the notes to Pope's ‘Homer,’ and noticed an error in Pope's translation, which Pope silently corrected in a later edition. He graduated B.A. January 1719, was elected fellow of his college on 9 Oct. 1721, and graduated M.A. 1722, when he published a small volume of Latin verse. In 1723 he was taxator to the university. He took holy orders in 1724, and in January 1727 was presented to the vicarage of Swavesey, Cambridgeshire, a college living, which he held along with his fellowship till his marriage in 1728.

On 1 Feb. 1731 Jortin resigned his living, and became reader and preacher at a chapel-of-ease in New Street, within the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields. He started in 1731 a magazine, ‘Miscellaneous Observations upon Authors, Ancient and Modern,’ which came to an end in 1732 (see list of contributors in Nichols and Disney). The two volumes were republished (1732–4) in a Latin translation at Amsterdam, where the serial (‘Miscellaneæ Observationes Criticæ’) was continued by Jacques Philippe D'Orville and Peter Burmann the younger. Some critical papers by Jortin, probably written for his own magazine, were published, one in a magazine called ‘The Present State of the Republick of Letters’ for August 1734, others separately; the most im-