JOHN

See also:

• MASON, FRANCIS (1799—1874)
• MASON, GEORGE (1725—1792)
• MASON, GEORGE HEMMING (1818–1872)
• MASON, JAMES MURRAY (1798-1871)
• MASON, JOHN (1586-1635)
• MASON, JOHN YOUNG (1799-1859)
• MASON, LOWELL (1792—1872)
• MASON, SIR JOHN (1503–1566)
• MASON, SIR JOSIAH (1795-1881)
• MASON, WILLIAM (1725—1797)

MASON

See also:

• JOHN MASON GOOD (1764-1827)

GOOD (1764-1827)  , English writer on medical, religious and classical subjects, was born on the 25th of May 1764 at Epping, Essex . After attending a school at Romsey kept by his father, the Rev . Peter Good, who was a Nonconformist minister, he was, at about the age of fifteen, apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary at Gosport . In 1783 he went to London to prosecute his medical studies, and in the autumn of 1784 he began to practise as a surgeon at Sudbury in Suffolk . In 1793 he removed to London, where he entered into partnership with a surgeon and apothecary . But the partnership was soon dissolved, and to increase his income he began to devote attention to literary pursuits . Besides contributing both in prose and verse to the Analytical and Critical Reviews and the British and Monthly Magazines, and other periodicals, he wrote a large number of works relating chiefly to medical and religious subjects . In 1794 he .became a member of the British Pharmaceutical Society, and in that connexion, and especially by the publication of his work, A History of Medicine (1795), he did much to effect a greatly needed reform in the profession of the apothecary . In 182o he took the diploma of M.D. at Marischal College, Aberdeen . He died at Shepperton, Middlesex, on the 2nd of January 1827 . Good was not only well versed in classical literature, but was acquainted with the principal European languages, and also with Persian, Arabic and Hebrew . His prose works display wide erudition; but their style is dull and tedious .

His

poetry never rises above pleasant and well-versified commonplace . His translation of Lucretius, The Nature of Things (1805-1807), contains elaborate philological and explanatory notes, together with parallel passages and quotations from European and Asiatic authors .