Sambrook Court

Reviewed by: Sambrook Court: The Letters of J. C. Lettsom at the Medical Society of London Philip K. Wilson Christopher Lawrence and Fiona A. Macdonald , eds. Sambrook Court: The Letters of J. C. Lettsom at the Medical Society of London. Occasional Publication no. 3. London: Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, 2003. v + 320 pp. Ill. $24.00, £15.00 (paperbound, 0-85484-083-4). John Coakley Lettsom (1744–1815) was ushered into London society in the 1760s through the support of a fellow Quaker physician, John Fothergill. The center of Lettsom's professional life in London was his residence at Sambrook Court in Basinghall Street, though he also worked from the library, museum, and botanical garden that he established in his Camberwell residence south of the Thames. Until now, our appreciation of this individual who became a linchpin in several important hospital, prison, and societal reform movements of his era was limited to two biographical works: Thomas Joseph Pettigrew's Memoirs of the Life and Writings of the Late John Coakley Lettsom (1817), and James Johnson Abraham's Lettsom: His Life, Times, Friends and Descendants (1933). Christopher Lawrence and Fiona Macdonald have now offered considerable new insight into the realms of medicine, reform, and philanthropy in Lettsom's London, from the late 1780s through the 1810s, through a series of Lettsom-related letters that they have diligently edited. [End Page 814] Lawrence and Macdonald have opened the archives of the Medical Society of London, one of several London institutions that Lettsom helped to found, to a much wider audience. First, in thirteen pages of typed text, we are offered for the first time Lettsom's entire autobiographical "Recollections and Reminiscences." The remaining 272 pages of Sambrook Court are devoted to sections including "Letters to Lettsom," "Letters from Lettsom," "Family Business," "Benevolent Favours," and "Letters to Pettigrew from Lettsom." The letters are quite readable and informative as they convincingly support the editors' claim that the Medical Society's holding forms "a very miscellaneous collection . . . from a variety of correspondents, on a wide range of topics . . . over a long time period" (p. 26). These correspondents include Benjamin Smith Barton, Robert Blair, George Cleghorn, Joshua Dixon, Lady Anne Erskine, William Livingstone, James Neild, John Nichols, Benjamin Rush, Jonathan Stokes, John Collins Warren, and Benjamin Waterhouse. Philanthropy, politics, and publishing are repeatedly addressed in these letters, as is Lettsom's involvement with the Royal Humane Society, which devoted its efforts to popularizing innovative resuscitation methods for apparently drowned individuals. Not surprisingly, given the provenance of these letters, new information is gleaned about the inner workings of the Medical Society of London. The editors provide detailed annotations of the individuals and publications mentioned in the letters, and offer ample historical and geographical guidance via expansive footnotes that guide the reader contextually through Lettsom's life and times. As an easily accessible, well-annotated edition of the complete holding of Lettsom-related letters in the Medical Society of London, nothing is wanting in this volume—except, perhaps, for an illustration of at least one of the letters in Lettsom's handwriting. This addition would have afforded readers a more complete appreciation of the task that the editors and earlier transcribers faced in resuscitating these letters, giving them new life beyond the walls of the Society. Lawrence and Macdonald's edited collection nicely complements and will stand alongside the biographies by Pettigrew and Abraham. It also anticipates and serves as a model for a follow-up work on Lettsom's close associate and biographer, Pettigrew—an individual who, the editors rightly note, "merits a major study" (p. 290) of his own. Philip K. Wilson Penn State College of Medicine Copyright © 2005 The Johns Hopkins University Press

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