Messenger Monsey (baptised 30 October 1694, died 26 December 1788) was an English physician and humorist. He became physician to the Royal Hospital, Chelsea, a home for injured and elderly soldiers. Known for his eccentricity and ill manners, he is described in the diaries of Fanny Burney as "Dr. Monso, a strange gross man". [1]
Monsey, son of Robert Monsey, a non-juror cleric, and Mary (daughter of Roger Clopton, rector of Downham), [2] was born at Hackford with Whitwell, Norfolk, and educated at home, then at Woodbridge School and Pembroke College, Cambridge (BA, 1714), before studying medicine under Sir Benjamin Wrench MD of Norwich (died 1747). Monsey was admitted to the Royal College of Physicians in 1723. He then practised in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, where he never earned more than £300 a year, but married well. [3]
Monsey was lucky enough to be called to treat Francis Godolphin, 2nd Earl of Godolphin, who was taken ill with apoplexy on the way to Newmarket. [2] Godolphin – taken with Monsey's skill, raucous sense of humour and insolent familiarity – persuaded him to move to London, where he introduced him to patients such as the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, Lord Chesterfield and other prominent Whigs. Monsey also built up literary connections. For many years he paid court to the bluestocking Elizabeth Montagu, writing rhymed letters to her in the style of Swift. His friendship with David Garrick was broken after a quarrel. Dr Johnson disapproved of his coarse wit. [3]
According to William Munk, "Monsey maintained his original plainness of manners, and with an unreserved sincerity sometimes spoke truth in a manner that gave offence; and as old age approached, he acquired an asperity of behaviour and a neglect of decorum.... As a physician he adhered to the tenets of the Boerhaavian school, and despised modern improvements in theory and practice." Monsey was a free-thinker in religious matters, or as Munk put it, "he shook off the manacles of superstition [and] he fell into the comfortless bigotry of scepticism." [2] One man whom Monsey admired was the Dutch-born physician, philosopher and satirist Bernard Mandeville. Monsey's copy of Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees survives in the library of Sir John Soane's Museum, London, to which he presented it in 1781. [4]
Anecdotes about Monsey's eccentricities and unseemly language were collected after his death. [5] He held his appointment to Chelsea Hospital, also obtained through Godolphin, until his death there on 26 December 1788 aged 94, after which he was dissected in a post mortem examination before students of Guy's Hospital, as he had requested. [3] An extensive medical and personal correspondence between Monsey and the noted Norwich physician and philanthropist Benjamin Gooch survives in the British Library. [6] On his death Monsey left £16,000 to his only daughter Charlotte, who had married William Alexander, brother to James Alexander, 1st Earl of Caledon. [7]
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Frances Burney, also known as Fanny Burney and later Madame d'Arblay, was an English satirical novelist, diarist and playwright. In 1786–1790 she held the post of "Keeper of the Robes" to Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, George III's queen. In 1793, aged 41, she married a French exile, General Alexandre d'Arblay. After a long writing career and wartime travels that stranded her in France for over a decade, she settled in Bath, England, where she died on 6 January 1840. The first of her four novels, Evelina (1778), was the most successful and remains her most highly regarded, followed by Cecilia (1782). Most of her stage plays were not performed in her lifetime. She wrote a memoir of her father (1832) and many letters and journals that have been gradually published since 1889, forty-nine years after her death.
Sir Hans Sloane, 1st Baronet, was an Anglo-Irish physician, naturalist, and collector, with a collection of 71,000 items which he bequeathed to the British nation, thus providing the foundation of the British Museum, the British Library, and the Natural History Museum, London. He was elected to the Royal Society at the age of 24. Sloane travelled to the Caribbean in 1687 and documented his travels and findings with extensive publications years later. Sloane was a renowned medical doctor among the aristocracy, and was elected to the Royal College of Physicians at age 27. Though he is credited with the invention of chocolate milk, it is more likely that he learned the practice of adding milk to drinking chocolate while living and working in Jamaica. Streets and places were later named after him, including Hans Place, Hans Crescent, and Sloane Square in and around Chelsea, London – the area of his final residence – and also Sir Hans Sloane Square in Killyleagh, his birthplace in Ulster.
Charles Burney was an English music historian, composer and musician. He was the father of the writers Frances Burney and Sarah Burney, of the explorer James Burney, and of Charles Burney, a classicist and book donor to the British Museum. He was a close friend and supporter of Joseph Haydn and other composers.
Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, a Welsh-born diarist, author, socialite and patron of the arts, is an important source on Samuel Johnson and 18th-century English life. She belonged to the prominent Salusbury family, Anglo-Welsh landowners, and married first a wealthy brewer, Henry Thrale, with whom she had 12 children, then a music teacher, Gabriel Mario Piozzi. Her Anecdotes of the Late Samuel Johnson (1786) and her diary Thraliana, published posthumously in 1942, are the main works for which she is remembered. She also wrote a popular history book, a travel book, and a dictionary. She has been seen as a protofeminist.
Bluestocking is a term for an educated, intellectual woman, originally a member of the 18th-century Blue Stockings Society from England led by the hostess and critic Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), the "Queen of the Blues", including Elizabeth Vesey (1715–1791), Hester Chapone (1727–1801) and the classicist Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806). In the following generation came Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741–1821), Hannah More (1745–1833) and Frances Burney (1752–1840). The term now more broadly applies to women who show interest in literary or intellectual matters.
Elizabeth Montagu was a British social reformer, patron of the arts, salonnière, literary critic and writer, who helped to organize and lead the Blue Stockings Society. Her parents were both from wealthy families with strong ties to the British peerage and learned life. She was sister to Sarah Scott, author of A Description of Millenium [sic] Hall and the Country Adjacent. She married Edward Montagu, a man with extensive landholdings, to become one of the richer women of her era. She devoted this fortune to fostering English and Scottish literature and to the relief of the poor.
Francis Godolphin, 2nd Earl of Godolphin,, styled Viscount Rialton from 1706 to 1712, was an English courtier and politician who sat in the English and British House of Commons between 1695 and 1712, when he succeeded to the peerage as Earl of Godolphin. Initially a Tory, he modified his views when his father headed the Administration in 1702 and was eventually a Whig. He was a philanthropist and one of the founding governors of the Foundling Hospital in 1739.
Deopham is a village and civil parish in the English county of Norfolk. Deopham is located 3.9 miles west of Wymondham and 12 miles south-west of Norwich.
Lady Louisa Stuart was a British writer of the 18th and 19th centuries. Her long life spanned nearly ninety-four years.
Elizabeth Vesey was a wealthy Irish intellectual who is credited with fostering the Bluestockings, a society which hosted informal literary and political discussions of which she was an important member.
Sarah Harriet Burney was an English novelist. She was the daughter of the musicologist and composer Charles Burney and half-sister of the novelist and diarist Frances Burney. She had some intermittent success with her novels.
John Browne,, was an English landscape engraver.
William Briggs was an English physician and oculist.
John Ranby (1703–1773) was a prominent English surgeon, who served in the household of King George II and wrote books on surgery. His influence helped to instigate a corporation of surgeons distinct from barbers.
George Owen Cambridge (1756–1841) was an English churchman, Archdeacon of Middlesex from 1808.
Susannah Taylor or Susannah Cook - also known by the sobriquet Madame Roland or Dame Roland - was a British socialite and correspondent.
Sir William Duncan, 1st Baronet was a Scottish physician. He was a fashionable society doctor in London, and physician in ordinary to George III of Great Britain.
Marianne Francis (1790–1832) was an English evangelical, now known principally as a correspondent of Hester Piozzi and Sarah Wesley. She has been called an "evangelical bluestocking", and is recognised as a significant participant in debate about religious enthusiasm.
Thomas Keate (1745–1821) was an English surgeon. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1794.
Jeremiah Whitaker Newman was an English surgeon and medical writer.
