Author: Good, John Mason
Biography:
GOOD, John Mason (1764-1827: ODNB)
The second of three sons born to Peter Good, a Congregational minister, and his wife Sarah Peyto, he was born at Epping, Essex, on 25 May 1764. His mother died days after the birth of his younger brother in Feb. 1766 and his father married Rebecca Baker on 6 Nov. 1766. The family moved to Romsey, Hampshire, where Peter Good established a small school and educated his sons. On 7 June 1779 John Mason Good was apprenticed to a surgeon, William Johnson, in Gosport, Hampshire; after Johnson’s death he transferred to another surgeon in Havant. In 1783 he studied medicine in London and in 1784 he moved to Sudbury, Suffolk, where he worked as a surgeon. He married Mary Godfrey in the church of St. Peter Ad Vinicula, Coggeshall, Essex, on 31 May 1785 but she died in Nov. of the same year. On 12 June 1788 Good married Susanna Fenn (d 1834) in All Saints, Sudbury. ODNB and Gregory state that they had six children but records have been found for just three. In 1792 Good suffered financially, possibly as a result of an unsecured loan to friends; he borrowed money from Susanna’s father but he also began writing and publishing in hope of repaying the debt. The family moved to London in 1793 and Good was admitted to the Company of Surgeons in Nov. He won twenty guineas for an essay, Diseases Frequent in Workhouses, in 1795 and he contributed to periodicals, particularly CR which for a time he edited. His only son, also John Mason, died in 1803. Good was elected FRS in 1808 and lectured at the Surrey Institution. He collaborated with Newton Bosworth and Olinthus Gregory on a 12-volume “cabinet cyclopedia,” Pantologia (1813). Briefly a Unitarian, Good later converted to the established church. He was granted a medical degree by Marischal College, Aberdeen, in 1820, became a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians, and published Study of Medicine (1825). He suffered from increasingly poor health and died at the Surrey home of his widowed daughter, Susanna Neale, on 2 Jan. 1827, survived by his wife and two daughters. He was buried in the churchyard at St. Pancras New Church. (ODNB 7 Oct. 2024; ancestry.co.uk 7 Oct. 2024; findmypast.co.uk 7 Oct. 2024; O. Gregory, Memoir of the Life, Writings, and Character…of the late John Mason Good, MD [1828]) SR
Other Names:
- J. M. Good