Author: Freeman, Stephen
Biography:
FREEMAN, Stephen (1739-90: Sommers)
The publishing record of the time identifies "S. Freeman, M.D." as a busy physician offering advice between 1776 and 1789 on subjects ranging from venereal disease to hypochondria. His major work was The Ladies' Friend, which appeared in several editions. But new research by Susan Mitchell Sommers tells a completely different, quite lurid story. Freeman appears to have been a foster child, raised by Stephen and Mary Freeman in Hinton St. George, Somerset. His birth name may have been Kingstone. He was apprenticed to a blacksmith but in 1756 went to London after his period of indenture to seek medical training. There, however, he was abducted and taken to Antigua, where he found work in a counting-house and later joined the Navy. About 1765 he married Mary Crawford, with whom he had two daughters, but he left them behind when he returned to London in 1767. There he laboured successfully to reinvent himself and win a respectable social position. He became a freemason, member of at least three London Lodges and Grand Steward of one. He exercised voting rights in Westminster and joined the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. In the 1770s he published as "M.D. and man-midwife" and developed several medicinal cures which he advertised but did not patent. Despite a bankruptcy in 1777 for which he was imprisoned, he was able finally to purchase an honorary MD from King's College, Aberdeen, in 1780. Attacked by James Adair in Medical Cautions(1786), he responded in print immediately with Strictures on Adair's Bath Medical Cautions, which gives his own version of his life story. In 1788 he became a partner with two quack doctors in an enterprise that offered training and treatment in Mesmerism; he was at the same time promoting an esoteric chemical "preservation of life." His own life however ended in obscurity in 1790. He is not the "S. Freeman" of Ryton, near Coventry, who contributed a poem about the death of Princess Charlotte to The Cypress Wreath in 1817. (Susan Mitchell Sommers, The Siblys of London [2018] 80-99 passim; WorldCat) HJ
Other Names:
- S. Freeman