| | 1 | Name: | Andrew Duncan | | | Year Elected: | 1774 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 10/17/1744 | | | Death Date: | 7/5/1828 | | | | | | |
Andrew Duncan (17 October 1744–5 July 1828) was a physician and member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1774. Born in Pinkerton, Scotland to merchant and shipmaster Andrew Duncan and his wife Catherine, Duncan pursued an education at St. Andrews University, earning a MA degree in 1762. Later that year he went on to study medicine at Edinburgh University. He served as president of the Royal Medical Society in 1767 before traveling to China as a surgeon on the East India Trading Company ship, Asia. He turned down a lucrative offer to make a second journey to instead begin lecturing at St. Andrews. He earned his MD to that end in 1769, and became a licentiate of the Edinburgh College of Physicians the following year. That year he also published his first work, Elements of Therapeutics. In 1776, he began teaching a course on chronic diseases, leading him to found a public dispensary that provided free medicine and medical advice to the poor (later the Royal Public Dispensary). Meanwhile, he also founded the Aesculapian Club and later the Harveian Club in 1782, both of which provided him with the necessary connections to begin publishing his journal of medicine, Medical and Philosophical Commentaries. In 1790 he served as president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and two years later proposed the construction of a public mental asylum which was then built in 1807. The following year, he was decorated with the Freedom of Edinburgh for his work on the asylum as well as his dispensary. In 1821, he was made First Physician to the King in Scotland and was elected president of the Edinburgh Medical Chirurgical Society. He died a few years later and was buried in Buccleuch churchyard in Edinburgh. (DNB) | |
| 2 | Name: | Bryan Edwards | | | Year Elected: | 1774 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 5/21/1743 | | | Death Date: | 7/16/1800 | | | | | | |
Bryan Edwards (21 May 1743–16 July 1800) was a historian, politician, plantation owner, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via his election in 1774. His early life was marked by hardship and disruption—his father, who worked diligently but unsuccessfully to increase his family’s wealth, died when Bryan was thirteen years old, leaving the family with little financial security—but his fortunes quickly changed. His widowed mother, Elizabeth Bayly, turned to her two wealthy brothers, Zachary and Nathaniel, for support. In 1759, Bryan moved to Jamaica to live with Zachary Bayly, who, upon his death in 1769, left his nephew five estates. Soon afterward, Bryan also inherited two plantations from a friend, Benjamin Hume. At least 1500 enslaved people worked on these properties, producing sugar and rum. Edwards’s wealth thus became dependent on the institution of slavery: unsurprisingly, he became a lifelong and public opponent of the abolitionist movement. Edwards’s political career in Jamaica began in 1765 when he joined the House of Assembly in the parish of St. George. He later ran three times for British Parliament; in 1795, he was elected to a seat for the county of Grampound. During his tenure as an elected official, he participated in heated debates in defense of slavery against the abolitionist leader William Wilberforce but was considered a moderate voice on the issue. Today, he is most well-remembered as a writer and historian of the West Indies. Between 1784 and 1797, Edwards published multiple works including pamphlets, poems, speeches, and multi-volume histories of the cultures and economies of the region. He spent the last eight years of his life in Southampton, where he worked as a merchant and established a bank. He became a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 1797. Upon his death in 1880, he left his son, Zachary Hume Edwards, a great fortune. (DNB) | |
| 3 | Name: | John Ellis | | | Year Elected: | 1774 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1710 | | | Death Date: | 10/5/1776 | | | | | | |
John Ellis (c.1710–c.5 October 1776) was a zoologist, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1774. Likely born in Ireland to a middle-class English family, Ellis apprenticed under a London clothworker, before later launching a successful linen business of his own. His income now steady, Ellis was free to pursue his true passion: natural history. Known as one of the earliest marine biologists, he studied invertebrates and had a penchant for zoophytes, publishing descriptions and engravings of these creatures alongside his Swedish collaborator, Daniel Solander. Most notably, the two discovered that sponges are animals. For this work he became a fellow of the Royal Society of London in 1754 and was its Copely medallist in 1767. Many of his biological papers appear in the Transactions of the Royal Society from 1754 to 1776. He was one of the first to speculate that microorganisms cause putrefaction as well as disease, despite being credited for neither discovery. Going bankrupt in 1759, Ellis shifted careers and became an administrator in the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Commerce and Science, moving his focus towards tropical plants. He wrote extensively on this topic, notably his 1770 Directions for Bringing Over Seeds and Plants, Coffee (1774), and Mangosteen and Breadfruit (1775). Towards the end of his life he made several trips to the South-East coast of England to continue to study invertebrates before dying in Hampstead and being buried at St. Leonard’s in Bromley. (DNB) | |
| 4 | Name: | Samuel More | | | Year Elected: | 1774 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 11/30/1726 | | | Death Date: | 10/11/1799 | | | | | | |
Samuel More (30 November 1726–11 October 1799) was an apothecary, administrator, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1774. Born in Westminster, England to a schoolmaster and his wife, More was educated by his father in his early years. More went on to apprentice under an apothecary in Whitechapel and afterwards opened his own business with his family inheritance. Notably, he cured the incapacitated hands of a dyer’s apprentice thereby earning himself an election to the Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce in May of 1761. He served as chairman of the committee of chemistry, and in all other main committees, becoming very popular within the society. His popularity earned him the office of Secretary in 1769, which involved running in yearly elections against candidates who would often run smear campaigns in the newspaper. Nevertheless, through his tireless work ethic and popularity, More held down his office as secretary for the rest of his life. The office enabled him to develop relationships with many of his contemporaries in scientific and industrial fields and oftentimes his peers sought his advice on technical matters. His renowned expertise led him to be summoned as witness in various high-profile trials and committees, such as the Richard Akwright patent trials that persisted throughout the 1780’s. After years of good health, he began to suffer intense flare-ups of gout before dying at his home in London. (DNB) | |
| 5 | Name: | Lord Mahon Charles Stanhope | | | Year Elected: | 1774 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 8/3/1753 | | | Death Date: | 12/15/1816 | | | | | | |
Charles Stanhope (3 August 1753– 15 December 1816) was a elected official, nobleman, inventor, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1774. Charles was the second son of an aristocratic family, and when his older brother Philip died of tuberculosis in 1763, Charles was next in line to inherit the Earldom of Stanhope. When Charles was eleven years old, he moved with his family to Geneva, where he was put in touch with some of the leading intellectuals, scientists, and philosophers of the age. Charles soon developed his own political opinions that made him unpopular in his social circles. He resisted the trappings of wealth that were common among the aristocracy, disdaining theatre and fashion. He served in the House of Commons beginning in 1780, and, after his father’s death in 1786, the House of Lords. He was considered a radical in political spheres: he was a devoted supporter of the early phases of the French Revolution, of abolition, and of universal toleration for people of all religious faiths. His positions were so extreme and his way of expressing himself so aggressive that he had little success as a member of Parliament; hardly any of the motions he put forth received support from his fellow members. All throughout his political career, Charles remained devoted to scientific pursuits. His notable inventions included a pyrometer, a type of printing press, and a design for steam ships. It was on the strength of his scientific contributions that he became a fellow of the Royal Society in 1773. Charles had a difficult family life: his first wife died shortly after the birth of his third child, he separated from his second wife, and he mentioned none of his living children in his will. He died of dropsy at his estate at Chevening. (DNB) | |
| 6 | Name: | Lord Mahon Philips Stanhope | | | Year Elected: | 1774 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
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| 7 | Name: | William Wright | | | Year Elected: | 1774 | | | Residency: | International | | | Living? : |
Deceased
| | | Birth Date: | 1735 | | | Death Date: | 9/19/1819 | | | | | | |
William Wright (March 1735–19 September 1819) was a naturalist, a physician, a slaveholder, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, elected in 1774. He was born in Perthshire, Scotland, and he began his medical training as a young man, first as a surgeon’s apprentice and then by observing lectures at the University of Edinburgh. He joined the navy in 1758 and was posted as a surgeon’s mate in the West Indies during the Seven Years War. After the war ended, he briefly returned to Britain and managed to secure an MD through a personal connection without formally attending medical school. In 1764 he partnered with another doctor, Thomas Steel, in Jamaica and the two of them treated enslaved people and free people of color in the area. Despite these firsthand encounters with the institution of slavery, Wright was politically conservative and opposed to the abolitionist movement. Together, he and Steel owned as many as thirty-three enslaved people. Throughout his time in Jamaica, Wright began to explore an interest in naturalism. He diligently collected specimens of the island’s flora and wrote papers on their potential medicinal properties. He found a patron for this work in APS Member Sir Joseph Banks, a prominent scientific leader. They remained close for several decades, and some of the specimens that Wright sent to Banks may still be found at the Natural History Museum in London. Throughout his life, Wright sought social and academic recognition, and he achieved it through his participation in multiple well-regarded societies and prominence as a public official. He became the Surgeon General of Jamaica in 1774, a fellow of the Royal Society in 1778, a member of the Royal Medical Society and the president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1801. (DNB) | |
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