Author: Perfect, William
Biography:
PERFECT, William (1737-1809: ancestry.com)
No record has been found of his birth or baptism and various sources offer various dates but the record of burial unequivocally gives a date of 1737 and an age at death of 72. The ODNB date of 1731/2 is unlikely given that his parents Sarah Weller and William Perfect married in Oxford in 1732. His father was a clergyman, vicar of East Malling, Kent, from 1745 until his death in 1757. In 1749 Perfect was apprenticed to a London surgeon and embarked on a fruitful medical career. On 3 Oct. 1753 he married Elizabeth Shrimpton at St. Mary’s, Newington, Surrey; they had a son born and baptised earlier that year and went on to have five more children before she died in 1763. They settled in West Malling, Kent, where he had his practice. With a colleague he undertook the inoculation of whole parishes in Kent against smallpox. He also had literary interests, exchanged poems with friends, and contributed to magazines. His first two collections, published by subscription, were A Bavin of Bays . . . by a minor poet (1763) and The Laurel Wreath (1766). After the death of his first wife he joined the freemasons and rose to the rank of Grand Master of the county of Kent in 1795, an office he retained until his death. In 1768 he married Henrietta Johnstone and with her had four more children. After her death in 1804 he married Elizabeth Longhurst on 8 Mar. 1806 at St. Pancras Old Church, London. The crucial turn in his career was his concentration on mental illness and his creation of a humane private asylum in his own home. He wrote about some of his cases first in Methods of Cure, in some Particular Cases of Insanity (1778) and in the enlarged Annals of Insanity (1800, many times reprinted). He also published some of his earlier work as Cases in Midwifery (1781-3), and in 1783 graduated MD from St. Andrews, Scotland. Perfect died at his home in the High Street, West Malling, on 5 June 1809 and was buried with masonic rites in a vault in the churchyard of East Malling that he had built to commemorate his father and grandfather, both buried in the church there. (ancestry.com 15 Sept. 2023; findmypast.com 15 Sept. 2023; ODNB 15 Sept. 2023)