Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 62.djvu/254

 wrought by the blood of Charles I, yet he married the granddaughter of a regicide.

A miniature in watercolours, dated 1660, by Samuel Cooper, is at Belvoir Castle in the possession of the Duke of Rutland, and is the picture of a man aged about forty years. A life-size half-length in oval attributed to Sir Balthazar Gerbier (1591–1667) is in the secretary's office at the Royal College of Surgeons of England in Lincoln's Inn Fields. It represents Wiseman about ten years older than Cooper's portrait, and obviously in delicate health.

Wiseman's works are written in so plain and simple a style that they were selected by Dr. Johnson, in the compilation of his dictionary, as a mine of good surgical nomenclature. They are: 1. ‘A Treatise of Wounds,’ London, 1672, 8vo (printed by Richard Royston). 2. ‘Severall Chirurgical Treatises,’ London, 1676, fol. (Royston and Took); 2nd edit. 1686; 3rd edit. 1696; 4th edit. 1705; 5th edit. 1719; 6th edit. 1734. A pirated edition was published by Samuel Clement at the Swan in St. Paul's Churchyard in 1692. It is called the second edition, but it seems to have been made by printing a new title-page and inserting it into copies of the 1676 and 1686 editions.

[Longmore's Biographical Study of Richard Wiseman, London, 1891; manuscript account by the late James Dixon; contributions towards a memoir of Richard Wiseman, Medical Times and Gazette, 1872, ii. 441; Asclepiad, 1886, iii. 231–255; Wiseman's Works.] 

WISHART, GEORGE (1513?–1546), Scottish reformer, was a cadet of the family of Wishart of Pittarrow, near Montrose [cf. ], but whether he was a younger son of James Wishart of Pittarrow, who was justice clerk between 1513 and 1520, or his nephew, both of which conjectures have been made, is uncertain. The supposed date of his birth is taken from the inscription ‘1543 ætatis suæ 30’ on a portrait which belonged to Archibald Wishart, W.S., Edinburgh, who died in 1850, and is now in the National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh. It is believed by good judges to be genuine, though its ascription to Holbein, who died in 1543, is very improbable. Wishart first appears on record as witness to a charter by John Erskine (1509–1591) [q. v.] of Dun on 20 March 1535 (Great Seal Register, No. 1462), in which he is styled ‘Master G. Wishart;’ and, as he is unlikely to have acted as witness under the age of twenty-one, his birth can scarcely have been later than 1514, and so corroborates the date on the portrait. It has been conjectured that he was educated and graduated in arts at King's College, Aberdeen; his designation on the above portrait as master appears to show he had taken a degree in arts. Alexander Petrie [q. v.], in his ‘Compendious Church History,’ 1662, says he heard when young, ‘from very antient men,’ that Wishart ‘had been a schoolmaster at Montrose, and there did teach his disciples the New Testament in Greek.’ If so, it was no doubt at the grammar school of that town, whither Erskine of Dun had brought in 1534 a Frenchman, Marsilier, to teach Greek, the first introduction of that language into the schools of Scotland. Wishart probably acted as assistant after learning the language from Marsilier. Richard, the father of James Melville [q. v.], is said in his son's diary to have been one of Wishart's companions at Montrose. Petrie also relates that in 1538 Wishart was summoned on a charge of heresy by John Hepburn, bishop of Brechin, for teaching the Greek New Testament, and fled the country, but after six years returned ‘with more knowledge of the truth and more zeal.’

In 1538, or more probably in 1539, a Scotsman, Wishart, is mentioned in two English documents as lecturing in Bristol, at that date in the diocese of Worcester, of which Hugh Latimer [q. v.] was then bishop. He was accused of heresy by John Kerne, dean of Worcester, and sent to the archbishop of Canterbury, by whom, the bishops of Bath, Norwich, and Chichester, and other doctors, he was convicted and condemned; he bore his fagot (i.e. recanted his heresy) on 15 July in the church of St. Nicholas, and on 20 July in Christ Church (, Kalendar, Camden Soc., p. 55; cf. Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, i. 184, 1095). It has been doubted by Dr. Grub (Ecclesiastical History of Scotland) whether these documents refer to George Wishart; but as they name George ‘Wischarde,’ a Scotsman born (the difference in spelling the name meaning nothing at that date), and correspond precisely to the time when he fled from Scotland, where also he had been accused of heresy, the inference is strong that they do. Dr. McCrie, in his ‘Life of Knox,’ through the miswriting of the word ‘nouther’ as ‘mother’ in the copy sent him of the Bristol entry, was misled into the belief that Wishart's heresy was a denial, not of the merit of Christ, but of the Virgin Mary; but Dr. Lorimer (Scottish Reformation, 1860) corrected this by inspection of the original record, which has been also correctly printed in Seyer's ‘Memoirs of Bristol.’ It may be doubted, however, whether the denial of the merit of Christ attributed to Wishart was not the misrepresentation of