It is fitting that on the anniversary of the accession of the Hanoverians to Britain’s throne in 1714, Dr Richard Mead, who attended Queen Anne on her death bed, and who would become court physician to George II, should be celebrated by the exhibition The Generous Georgian: Dr Richard Mead. It is also appropriate that it is shown in London at the Foundling Museum since he was a key figure in the early history of the Foundling Hospital. Mead’s portrait, painted by Allan Ramsay (1747) and presented to the Hospital by the artist, hangs as a pendant to that of his friend, its founder, Thomas Coram, by William Hogarth, in the Museum’s Gallery. The formidable figure of Mead is depicted seated, wearing academic robes, beside a table in a classical setting with the figure of Hygeia in a niche behind him. His reputation in early eighteenth-century London as not only a leading physician but also a philanthropist and insatiable collector, famed for his sociability, generosity and hospitality, has not endured and this modest exhibition sets out to examine and connect the many aspects of his life and achievements. However, as an exhibition, mounted with the advice of Professor Ludmilla Jordanova of Durham University, it is difficult to review because of the paucity of the information made available by the labelling and her short biographical account (2pp.) in the accompanying A5 leaflet. Those visitors seeking additional information are directed to the ‘Further Reading’ noted in the leaflet, there being no modern study of Mead published as yet.

Born in Stepney in 1673, the eleventh child of a non-conformist Divine, he was educated in Utrecht and on his decision to follow a medical career went on to study in Leiden before completing his studies in Italy where he received his Diploma in Philosophy and Medicine from the University of Padua in 1695. Displayed in the exhibition, the Diploma text is bordered with flowers and bound in leather with two seals attached. Italy undoubtedly fuelled his interest in art and antiquities. On his return to London the following year he set up a practice in Stepney, and amongst the publications exhibited is his Mechanical Account of Poisons (London, 1702), with which he made his reputation. He was appointed Physician to St Thomas’s Hospital in London and elected to sit on the Council in 1703. In the same year he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society, contributing a paper to their Transactions on the parasitic nature of scabies. A friend of Sir Isaac Newton, he was soon well connected and moved in influential circles. On the death of the famous Dr John Radcliffe in 1714, Mead moved into his house in Bloomsbury Square and soon became a fashionable and prosperous physician, a Fellow, and later a Censor, of the Royal College of Physicians.

Amongst the most striking exhibits is the famous ‘Gold-Headed Cane’ which, according to tradition, was passed on to him from Dr Radcliffe and became closely associated with the College as a symbol of culture and art in medical practice. Such canes have a small cavity in the handle in which aromatic substances such as rosemary, camphor or Marseilles vinegar were carried. A sniff of these substances was thought to prevent contagion and also to have counter-acted offensive odours. Having been carried by five leading physicians Mead’s cane finally came to rest in the Royal College of Physicians. An anonymous satirical print published shortly before the death of Sir Robert Walpole, shows the politician portrayed as a messenger setting off to hell astride an ass endowed with the head of George I. The physician in the background has been identified as Mead, who had attended Walpole, shown holding the gold-headed cane and his recipe for curing the ‘bite of a mad dog’ (Wellcome Library). After Mead’s death in 1754 the ‘gold-headed cane’ passed to Dr Anthony Askew, with whom he had been friends in Leiden. Askew in turn commissioned the very fine marble posthumous bust from Louis François Roubiliac, displayed here, which he presented to the Royal College of Physicians and is normally displayed in the Censors’ Room.

A collection of Mead’s treatises and recipes for treating conditions such as rabies illustrates the wide range of his medical researches. Following the outbreak of plague in Marseilles and Provence in 1720, the British Government asked Mead, Sloane and John Arbuthnot to provide advice as to how the plague might be prevented from reaching Britain, which he published as A short discourse concerning pestilential contagion and methods to be used to prevent it (London, 1720). This ran to 7 editions. He believed in the theory of contagion and recommended quarantining infected ships in ports for 30 to 40 days. Furthermore, smallpox was rife and a feared killer, encouraging Mead to promote inoculation. It was championed by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu – here shown in a print after C F Zinke – who had herself been a victim and had subsequently witnessed the practice of inoculation in Turkey from where she returned in 1718, having had her son inoculated in Constantinople. Mead was asked by Princess Caroline to inoculate the royal princesses but not before it had been tried out on six Newgate prisoners awaiting execution, all of whom survived and were consequently released. Mead later wrote A Discourse on smallpox and measles (London, 1748). John Freind published one of Mead’s letters on smallpox which advocated purging patients suffering from a particularly malignant sort. Mead’s methods were strongly criticised by Dr John Woodward of Gresham College, the antiquarian and fossil collector, whereupon Mead commented that Woodward was “a man better qualified to discover what passed in the bowels of the earth than those of the human body”. This led to a vicious pamphlet war and eventually a duel during which Woodward’s foot slipped and he fell. “Take your life” exclaimed Mead, “Anything but your physic” replied Woodward.

Mead was a governor of six major London hospitals and as the foremost physician of the day was one of the founding governors of Coram’s Foundling Hospital. The steering group first met in a pub in the Strand with the Duke of Bedford in the chair, where they agreed to approach foreign hospitals to find out how they were run. The group, which included many important figures of the day, not least George Frideric Handel, met at Somerset House on 17 October 1739, where Coram received the Royal Charter from George II, shown here in a print. From the archives of the Foundling Museum come the minutes from the first Governors’ Meeting held on 29 November 1739, and a Daily Committee Minute Book is displayed, opened showing the entries for 27 March 1741. Mead’s advice as a physician was often sought by other governors and he was asked to attend sick children and give advice on the wages of nurses working in the infirmary. His inoculations against smallpox performed at the Foundling Hospital were to save many lives in the 1740s. Apart from the Hogarth portrait, Thomas Coram is represented in the exhibition by a powerful posthumous portrait drawn in chalk by Mason Chamberlin, and displayed alongside Mead, in profile, etched by Jonathan Richardson. The Foundling Hospital is the only charity to which he left a legacy of £100. However, he was able to persuade his bookseller friend Thomas Guy, who had amassed a great fortune in the South Sea Bubble, to set up a hospital to help those rejected by St Thomas’s as incurable. Guy’s Hospital opened in 1725 with Mead as one of the governors, and is depicted in a reproduction of an engraving by William Woolnorth, inscribed “Entrance into that most Noble Public Charity and admirable medical Establishment Guys Hospital” (1799).

In 1720 Mead moved into a house in Great Ormond Street which backed onto the Foundling Hospital grounds and was later to become the site of the Great Ormond Hospital for Children. Here he amassed his collections and welcomed scholars and artists, holding a salon at his home on Wednesdays. James Gibbs was employed to build a gallery at the end of his garden, and the interior of his library, which boasted 10,000 volumes, is recorded in a contemporary print. Mead’s collections were comparable but different in scope to those of his friend and contemporary Sir Hans Sloane. Whereas Sloane’s collections and natural history specimens were to form the foundation of the British Museum, and thereby provide him with a permanent memorial, Alexander Pope’s comment was “books for Mead and butterflies for Sloane”. Due to his “generous spirit” Mead’s collection had to be broken up and sold after his death in 1754. The auction sales catalogues give an idea of just how impressive his collection was. It comprised paintings by many important artists, a vast number of prints and drawings – many with dedications to Mead – classical marbles, bronzes, gems, and antiquities, as well as fossils and animals preserved in spirit, mathematical instruments and other curiosities. He was an avid collector of coins and in his Harveian Oration in 1724 he argued, using some ancient coins from his collection, that physicians in ancient Rome and Greece were of high standing in society. His enthusiasm for classical antiquity is demonstrated by the black chalk drawing, c1720, by Antonio Maria Zanetti the Elder (1680-1767), showing an Hermaphrodite formerly in the Palazzo Colonna, Rome, which is inscribed in Latin: “Per Illustri Celeberimo Excellentissimoque Viro Doctori Mead, Antonio Zanetti delinearit le dedicate”, celebrating Mead’s virtues. The quality of his collecting is exemplified by the superb and extremely rare bronze head, 2nd century B C, then called the Head of Homer, which came from the Arundel Collection and since 1760 has been in the British Museum. It is displayed beside Allan Ramsay’s arresting half-length portrait of Mead as learned physician and collector (1740). The classical figure of Aesculapius, the god of medicine, is in the background and, to the left, the Arundel Head.

Mead supported painters and sculptors and, for example, provided letters of introduction for Ramsay to use on his tour of Italy. George Vertue claims Ramsay enjoyed a successful portrait practice with “people of first qualities”, as a result of having been recommended by Dr Mead, which later led to his appointment in 1767 as Painter in Ordinary to the King. Mead is probably best known for having treated Antoine Watteau when he came to London (1719-2), to consult the great doctor. Mead commissioned two paintings from him, Les Comédiens italiens, now in the National Gallery in Washington and L’amour paisible, now lost. The composition of the latter is recorded by an etching in the British Museum, inscribed in French and Latin below the image “Gravé d’apres le Tableau original peint par Watteau de la même grandeur de l’estampe Tiré du Cabinet du Dr Mead medecin du Roy de la grande Bretagne [sic] á Londre/á Paris avec privilege du Roy/Watteau pinx/Baron sculpt”. Watteau’s work alone would have helped to secure Mead’s reputation as a man of outstanding taste and perhaps one serious omission from this exhibition is not to have stressed their connection further.

This small and stimulating exhibition brings together both science and art in the personality of this polymath physician of whom Dr Johnson said he “lived more in the broad sunshine of life than almost any man”. He was a major figure in his own time, and is still relevant today.

The Generous Georgian: Dr Richard Mead is at the Foundling Museum from September 26th 2014 to January 4th 2015.