LAUSR

Highlights of this season’s releases. Parkinson lived in the same house in Hoxton, east London, for most of his life. He practised medicine there with his father, and then his son, in a business that would span at least four generations. In a sevenyear apprenticeship, he learned to make medicines, diagnose ailments and purge, bleed and blister his patients, mostly lowermiddle-class but with a smattering of the rich. He then spent six months as a surgical dresser at what is now the Royal London Hospital. During Parkinson’s lifetime, Lewis shows, Hoxton’s open fields disappeared beneath tenements and factories as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace. London’s water and air became grossly contaminated, and overcrowding provided ideal conditions for diseases such as tuberculosis. Open fires, combustible clothing and dangerous manual work meant that fractures, lacerations, burns and hernias were common. The conditions Parkinson saw as he travelled on his rounds, often stricken with gout, might well have stirred his social and political awakening. He lived in turbulent times, marked by the Seven Years War, the War of American Independence and the Napoleonic Wars. High taxes to pay for these military adventures coincided with civilian unrest, influenced by the French Revolution of 1789. Parkinson became increasingly radical, advocating votes for all (at a time when approximately 2% of Britons were enfranchised), parliamentary reform, education of the poor and unfettered discussion of politics and religion. In 1792, he joined the London Corresponding Society, which campaigned for parliamentary reform and promoted representation of all men. Parkinson became adroit at the social media of his age — producing periodical articles, broadsheets and pamphlets, often under the pseudonym Old Hubert. In 1794, the radicalized Parkinson was caught up in the Popgun Plot. The conspiracy seems to have been ‘fake news’, concocted by the authorities to justify restrictive legislation. Summoned to Whitehall to be examined, with Prime Minister William Pitt (the Younger) leading the questioning, Parkinson admitted to writing inflammatory — even seditious — pamphlets, but was never arrested. How he escaped is not clear. Next, Parkinson turned his talents to books on geology and general medical advice. As a young apothecary, he had attended anatomical lectures by the celebrated surgeon John Hunter, who, like many medics, collected fossils and encouraged their study. Parkinson started his own collection. In 1807, he was invited to join like-minded individuals such as chemist Humphrey Davy and physician William Babington in founding the Geological Society. Struggling to reconcile biblical authority with the fossil record, which suggested the existence of animal life hundreds of thousands of years before humanity, he embraced the theory of Swiss naturalist The Enlightened Mr. Parkinson: The Pioneering Life of a Forgotten English Surgeon