JOHN

See also:

• ARMSTRONG, ARCHIBALD (d. 1672)
• JOHN ARMSTRONG (1709-1779)
• ARMSTRONG, JOHN (1758—1843)
• ARMSTRONG, SAMUEL CHAPMAN (1839—1893)
• ARMSTRONG, WILLIAM GEORGE ARMSTRONG, BARON (1810—1900)

ARMSTRONG (1709-1779)  , British physician and writer, was born about 1709 at Castletown, Roxburghshire, where his father was parish minister . He graduated M.D . (1732) at Edinburgh University, and soon afterwards settled in London, where he paid more attention to literature than to medicine . He was, in 1746, appointed one of the physicians to the military hospital behind Buckingham House; and, in 176o, physician to the army in Germany, an appointment which he held till the peace of 1763, when he retired on half-pay . For many years he was closely associated with John Wilkes, but quarrelled with him in 1763 . He died on the 7th of September 1779 . Armstrong's first publication, an anonymous one, entitled An Essay for Abridging the Study of Physic (1735), was a satire on the ignorance of the apothecaries and medical men of his day . This was followed two years after by the Economy of Love, a poem the indecency of which damaged his professional practice . In 1744 appeared his Art of Preserving Health, a very successful didactic poem, and the one production on which his literary reputation rests . His Miscellanies (1770) contains some shorter poems displaying considerable humour .