Author: Thompson, Gilbert
Biography:
THOMPSON, Gilbert (1727-1803: ODNB)
He was baptised on 21 Feb. 1726 (OS), at Warrington, Cheshire, the son of William Thompson, ironmonger, and his wife Ann (maiden name not known). Nothing is known of his early education but it may have been at the school run by his uncle, also Gilbert Thompson, at Penketh, near Warrington. He then ran a school himself at Lancaster for several years before attending Edinburgh where he graduated MD on 8 June 1753 (Dissertation: De Exercitatione). He went to London but practised with little success and reverted to teaching. He was a writing-master at a boarding school in Tottenham, now north London. He then became a dispensing assistant to a druggist. On the death of his uncle in 1768 he was left £4000 which enabled him to set up in practice again, this time more successfully. He was admitted to the Royal College of Physicians on 25 June 1770 and became Secretary to the Medical Society of London. He married Mary Edmondson (1735-1805), a fellow Quaker, on 7 May 1771, at Devonshire House, London. There does not appear to have been any issue and no children are mentioned in his will. He died on 2 Jan. 1803 at Salters’ Hall Court, Cannon Street, and was buried at Bunhill Fields, the dissenting burial ground, on 11 Jan. His translations of Homer and Horace were quite highly regarded at the time; his poetry, consisting mostly of fables and odes to nightngales, owls, and other birds, went largely unnoticed. He also published a few medical essays and Memoirs of the Life and A View of the Character of the Late Dr. John Fothergill (1782), a relative and fellow physician. (ODNB; ancestry.co.uk 19 Nov. 2023; Munk, 2:244-5; List of the Graduates in Medicine in the University of Edinburgh from MDCCV to MDCCCLXVI [1867], 5; Friends’ Books, 2: 735; Morning Post 10 Jan. 1803; GM Jan. 1803, 89) AA