Background
James was born in 1703, at Kinvaston in Staffordshire, to Edward James, a major in the English army, and his wife Frances, a sister of Sir Robert Clarke.
James was born in 1703, at Kinvaston in Staffordshire, to Edward James, a major in the English army, and his wife Frances, a sister of Sir Robert Clarke.
He then attended Street John"s College, Oxford, from which he received the degree of Bachelor of Arts on 5 July 1726.
His early education was at Lichfield Grammar School, where he became acquainted with his fellow student Samuel Johnson. He was admitted as an extra-licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians on 12 January 1727/8, and in May of the same year was created doctor of medicine at Cambridge by royal mandate. He practiced at Sheffield, Lichfield, and Birmingham before moving to London, where he was admitted as a licentiate of the Royal College on 25 June 1765.
He died on 23 March 1776, aged seventy-three.
This work was immediately translated into French (as Dictionnaire universel de médecine, 1746–1748) by the team of Denis Diderot, François-Vincent Toussaint, and Marc-Antoine Eidous. And it retained its popularity for so long that Mark Twain felt justified in writing a scathing critique of it nearly 150 years later, in 1890.
His fever powder, which he patented in 1747, was one of the most successful of 18th-century patent medicines, though he is said to have "tarnished his image by patenting his powders, and falsifying their specification". (lieutenant was considered unbecomingly mercenary to patent a medicine, and his falsification of the ingredients in the patent documentation would have been designed to prevent others from replicating his formulation) The use of this preparation, a compound of antimony and phosphate of lime, has been cited as a contributing factor in the death of Oliver Goldsmith.
Original works.