John Radcliffe is familiar to anyone living in or around Oxford as the name of the major Oxford hospital, while for the many tourists and visitors to Oxford undoubtedly the finest and most architecturally distinguished building in the heart of the city is the Radcliffe Camera. Dr John Radcliffe was the leading physician in London at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Unmarried, he amassed an enormous fortune most of which, at his death in 1714, he left to his old university, Oxford. The Bodleian Library has marked this anniversary with an exhibition Remembering Radcliffe: 300 Years of Science and Philanthropy. This modest exhibition is packed with information, firstly about Radcliffe himself, followed by the greater part devoted to his legacy, and thirdly a section on the charitable activities supported by the Radcliffe Trust which makes Radcliffe relevant to us today in ways he would never have dreamt of! There is no catalogue proper but two excellent publications accompany the exhibition, Dr John Radcliffe and his Trust: An Introduction by Ivor Guest (The Radcliffe Trust, 2014) and Dr Radcliffe’s Library: The Story of the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford by Stephen Hebron (Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, 2014).

A Yorkshireman, Radcliffe was baptised in Wakefield in 1650 and after a grammar school education he came to Oxford and University College which had links with Yorkshire. Its Master, Thomas Clayton, was a Yorkshireman, likewise the senior Fellow and his tutor Obadiah Walker. Radcliffe successfully gained his BA and went on to become a Fellow of Lincoln College to study Natural Sciences as a preliminary to medicine. Unwilling to take Holy Orders, he left Lincoln College to set up in practice in Oxford, where he quickly flourished and was soon known for his skill at diagnosis and his “sensible” methods of treatment. Pocket book almanacs used by him between 1676 and 1697 list his patients together with his fees. Following his award of Doctor of Medicine in 1782, he soon moved to London where his practical good sense and confident tone led to a meteoric rise in his career and reputation. He attended members of the royal families of James II, and William and Mary, becoming principal physician to Princess Anne, later Queen Anne. He cured her infant son William Duke of Gloucester from convulsions but when, ten years later, he fell ill on his birthday, in 1700, with suspected smallpox, two physicians, unable to agree on a diagnosis, bled him. As he deteriorated, in desperation, Radcliffe was summoned and he berated them: “You have destroyed him and may finish him”. He applied blisters but to no avail and was unable to save him. This opened the important question of succession, dividing the supporters of the Hanoverians from those who remained faithful to the Stuart line. Radcliffe was made the scapegoat being accused of neglect. Included in the exhibition are reports by George Sayer and John Radcliffe on the death of H.R.H the Duke of Gloucester (30-31 July 1700). In 1714 he declined to answer Queen Anne’s call for help as she lay dying on the grounds that “Her Highnesses distemper is nothing but the vapours”. A letter from Sir George Beaumont, on display, warns of the strength of feeling for his failure to attend Queen Anne in her final illness but, in his defence he was himself a sick man who would die only a few months later at his country house at Carshalton. While Radcliffe had a certain reputation as a ‘bon viveur’, enamoured of the tavern, he was very tight with his money, though his London house in Bloomsbury Square was well furnished and decorated with paintings attributed to Rubens and Frans Hals. At his death his wine cellar contained two hundred bottles of Château Lafite (Thomas Hearne called him “a great sot”). He expressed his wish to be buried in the University Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford and a precise account in Thomas Hearne’s diary of his lavish funeral, together with a detailed bill for £579.15, which was sent from a Mr Evans the funeral director to Radcliffe’s executors by their agent Mathew King, whose accompanying letter described the bill as “extravagant and extortionate”, records what an amazing spectacle it was.

The biggest single bequest in his will was of £40,000 for the construction of a new library in Oxford with £150 per annum for a librarian and £100 for the purchase of books. The seeds of this project had evolved during the last two years of Radcliffe’s life in his idea of extending the Bodleian Library. A number of drawings show designs for a rectangular library attached to the Selden end of the Bodleian, which would have encroached on Exeter College garden, and two studies for a rotunda. The exhibition provides a wonderful opportunity to see the fine drawings of the elevation and interior section, and the latter reveals a low basement and above it a vaulted ground floor supporting a first floor room that rises up to the roof of the inner dome. This is difficult to imagine as a library space; rather it gives the impression of a classical mausoleum. The design is attributed to Nicholas Hawksmoor, a pupil of Sir Christopher Wren who had earlier proposed a circular library for Trinity College, Cambridge, which was never executed. Radcliffe changed his mind and Hawksmoor produced further drawings of a circular building, articulated with attached columns, surmounted by a dome resting on a low drum, the whole set on a square rusticated base with open arches and attached to the south side of the Schools building. Featured in the exhibition are five plates from the Oxford Almanacks and one, dated 1716, shows Hawksmoor’s design positioned against the south wall of the Schools building, but isolated, with a panorama of Oxford behind and enlivened with figures dressed in classical garb gesturing towards the building. A wooden model of Hawksmoor’s library, made by John Smallwell (1734-35) for the Trustees, has survived and has been much restored, having been used as a doll’s house, but Hawksmoor did not live to see his design built as he died in 1736. A large drawing reveals that Hawksmoor’s designs for the Radcliffe Library were part of a much more ambitious, unrealised scheme which he had proposed for the redevelopment of central Oxford from Cornmarket to Longwall Street. Existing buildings were to be combined with new spaces and structures to create a ‘forum universitatis’ with a sequence of vistas, gates and public buildings in the tradition of ancient and Renaissance Rome.

The commission for Radcliffe’s library was in the event carried out by James Gibbs, who accepted the theme of a circular domed building which was to be freestanding in the square between Schools and the University Church. This choice of site had led to a complicated process of purchase by the Trustees and the demolishing of properties in Catte Street which eventually succeeded by virtue of an Act of Parliament in 1721. Gibbs produced five drawings intended to be engraved (1737) and given to all the heads of houses so that any objections could be raised before work started in what was to be named Radcliffe Square. On view here are an elevation and a section of the library superbly drawn and shaded. Unlike the designs prepared by Hawksmoor, the drawings by Gibbs show windows and bookcases as befits a functional library rather than a mausoleum. Gibbs wrote to Lord Charles Noel Somerset, later the 4th Duke of Beaufort (one of the Trustees), on 10 March 1738, “My Lord, all buildings should have three Essential qualities, use, strength, and beauty. There is none fitter to consider these better than your Architect, yet this he cannot do, unless he sees the building as it advances”. He signed an agreement with the Trustees whereby he would be paid £100 annually for “directing and supervising the Building of the Radcliffe Library and drawing all the plans that shall be necessary for completing the work and corresponding with the Builders and going down four times in every year to see the Building” (Hebron, op.ct., p 46). Gibbs had worked in Rome and his building was likened to an Italian Baroque church, and the technical problems of having to replace the planned stone dome with one of timber covered with lead all led to further delays. The library was finally opened in 1749 for which Gibbs produced a book of twenty-one architectural engravings: Biblioteca Radcliviana: or a short description of the Radcliffe Library at Oxford. At first the library lacked any books. With his practical approach to medicine Radcliffe had been no bibliophile and the word had got around that he had really intended it to be his mausoleum!

The subsequent history of the Radcliffe Library is well documented in the exhibition, and a succession of gifts and bequests is celebrated. These include the Hebrew manuscripts bequeathed by the second librarian, Benjamin Kennicott, who had persuaded the Trustees to purchase the Kennicott Bible (1476), one of the great treasures of the Bodleian Library. Here on display is a 13th-century Ashkenazi Bible in contrast to the splendid illustrated Birds of Australia, by John Gould (1848). On a rather different note there is a description and table plan of the great banquet given by the University in the Radcliffe Library on 14 June, 1814 for the Prince Regent, the Tsar of Russia and the King of Prussia and two hundred guests. The public could watch from the gallery but the crowd had been underestimated and it provoked an undignified scrum, whereupon the military were called in and order was restored. In 1861 the Library was handed over to Bodley’s librarian, H. O. Coxe, and became known as the Radcliffe Camera as it is today and part of the Bodleian Library.

The next major building to bear his name was the Radcliffe Infirmary, for which the Trustees decided to give £4000 in 1758, and in the following year the foundation stone was laid on a site adjoining the Woodstock Road in a semi-rural setting. Built by private philanthropy, it was to depend “on benevolence and voluntary subscription of the public” and it remained an independent hospital until the National Health Service was established in 1948. Acquired by the University in recent years, the original building is now occupied by the University’s Humanities Divisional Office. Close by is the Radcliffe Observatory (now part of Green College) whose foundation stone was laid in 1772 and was to be the second permanent astronomical observatory in Britain after the Greenwich Observatory. The Radcliffe Trustees equipped it with instruments made by the best instrument maker of the day, John Bird, and Thomas Hornsby, the Savilian Professor of Astronomy, was appointed the first Radcliffe Observer (1774-1803). Designs for the building were first drawn up by Henry Keene, only to be superseded by James Wyatt, whose tower echoes the Hellenistic Tower of the Winds in Athens. Here it is illustrated by a water-colour by John Malchair of 1786 ‘Drawn for Miss Anne Hornsby the Professor’s eldest daughter and my scholar’.

In the early nineteenth century the Radcliffe Trustees were concerned to turn the Radcliffe Library into a comprehensive and medical collection. However, under the sixth Radcliffe Librarian, Henry Wentworth Acland, the contents were moved to the new University Museum, and in 1901 into a new building, the Radcliffe Science Library. In 1934 this was extended utilising funds from the Rockerfeller Foundation, and had a pair of wooden doors to its Rare Books Room depicting six great Oxford Scientists, designed by Eric Gill and carved by Donald Potter.

The final section of the exhibition provides a fascinating insight into the many areas which the Radcliffe Trust supports today as demonstrated by a beautifully evocative piece of silver entitled ‘Spiritus’. This centrepiece was made by Theresa Nguyen at Bishopsland where silversmiths and jewellers after leaving college have the unique opportunity to spend a year refining their craft while being introduced to the disciplines of the commercial world. Funds provided by the Trust are made available to train students and conservators in many different crafts, such as stone cutters and stained glass restoration at the York Glaziers Trust. In a personal video, Felix Warnock, Chairman of the Trust, explains what it does. At the suggestion of the scientist Sir Fred Hoyle in the 1960s, The Radcliffe Trust Music Grant Scheme was set up especially for classical chamber music, as well as many other projects concerned with music, and in the exhibition one can listen to a variety of recordings of chamber music played by performers who have been supported by the Trust. In 1970 the Trust sold the agricultural estate bought by Radcliffe in 1713 for the new town of Milton Keynes. This gave the Trust an increased endowment and investment income, and has assured its future. This scholarly and fascinating exhibition gives a revealing insight into the character and achievements of a leading physician of the early eighteenth century. Radcliffe’s great legacy and the outstanding contribution he made to Oxford, imaginatively displayed, provide a very fitting commemoration of this remarkable person.

Remembering Radcliffe: 300 Years of Science and Philanthropy was at the Bodleian Library, Oxford from 28th November 2014 to 20th March 2015.