SIR

See also:

• SAMUEL

SAMUEL

See also:

• SIR SAMUEL GARTH (1661-1719)

GARTH (1661-1719)  , English physician and poet, was born of a good Yorkshire family in 1661 . He entered Peterhouse, Cambridge, in 1676, graduating B.A. in 1679 and M.A. in 1684 . He took his M.D. and became a member of the College of Physicians in 1691 . In 1697 he delivered the Harveian oration, in which he advocated a scheme dating from some ten years back for providing dispensaries for the relief of the sick poor, as a protection against the greed of the apothecaries . In 1699 he published a mock-heroic poem, The Dispensary, in six cantos, which had an instant success, passing through three editions within a year . In this he ridiculed the apothecaries and their allies among the physicians . The poem has little interest at the present day, except as a proof that the heroic couplet was written with smoothness and polish before the days of Pope . Garth was a member of the Kit-Kat Club, and became the leading physician of the Whigs, as Radcliffe was of the Tories . In 1714 he was knighted by George I. and he died on the 18th of January 1719 . He wrote little besides his best-known work The Dispensary and Claremont, a moral espistle in verse . He made a Latin oration (1700) in praise of Dryden and translated the Life of Otho in the fifth volume of Dryden's Plutarch . In 1717 he edited a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, himself supplying the fourteenth and part of the fifteenth book .