Background
John Freind was born in 1675 in Croughton, Northamptonshire, United Kingdom.
John Freind was born in 1675 in Croughton, Northamptonshire, United Kingdom.
John was under Richard Busby at Westminster School, and studied at Christ Church, Oxford under Henry Aldrich.
In 1704 Freind gave, by invitation, nine lectures on chemistry at the Ashmolean Museum, later published as Praelectiones chymicae. These are notable for Freind’s adoption of the principles of Newtonian attraction, in an attempt to make chemistry truly mechanical. He tried to estimate quantitatively the relative forces operating between particles in order to explain association, dissociation, calcination, distillation, fermentation, and all other chemical processes. The publication of a second edition at Amsterdam in 1710 provoked an unfavorable review in the Acta eruditorum, to which Freind replied in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1712. The Leipzig attack was part of the Leibniz-Newton polemic, and the criticism was based not upon Freind’s chemistry but upon his Newtonianism, and was so regarded by Newton’s friends.
Freind had already left Oxford and begun his medical career, first as physician to the English forces in the 1705 campaign under the earl of Peterborough, whose defense he was soon to write, then in Italy and later in Flanders as physician to the duke of Ormonde. In 1709 he returned to London, where he practiced very successfully. He began to write on medical topics. Emmenologia displays a leaning toward mechanistic physiology, but most of his other medical works are concerned with therapeutics.
In 1722, having weathered the storm of controversy arising from his association with Peterborough, Freind became a member of parliament for Launceston and, having strong Jacobite leanings, became involved in Atterbury’s plot and was for some months confined to the Tower on a charge of high treason. From the Tower, he wrote to his friend Richard Mead - who was subsequently to secure his release - a letter on smallpox and also sent him his History of Physick. This was long regarded as an authoritative work, especially on English medieval and Renaissance medicine, although the first volume is concerned entirely with post-Galenic Greek writers, and much of the second with Islamic physicians. Soon after his release Freind was appointed a physician to the royal children and in 1727 to Queen Caroline.
Freind was a fellow of the Royal Society of London and of the Royal College of Physicians.
Freind married Anne Morice in 1709.
