Place Name
John Radcliffe (1650 – November 1, 1714) was the preeminent physician of his day whose expertise was sought by three kings and queens of England (King William III, Queen Mary II, and Queen Anne), among many others. However his arrogance was to ultimately lead to him being shunned by high society. Radcliffe had property in Yorkshire, Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire, and owned a house at Hammersmith. But it was at Carshalton that he made home (the former Carleton House) and where he died. Radcliffe was born the son of George Radcliffe and Anne Loader, in Wakefield, Yorkshire. After attending grammar school he went to the University of Oxford, first to University College, where his father was described as a “pleb”. He obtained his degree in 1668 and his Bachelor of Medicine in 1675, and was a Fellow of Lincoln College until 1677, but had to resign his Fellowship because he did not wish to take Holy Orders (as was required under the University statutes). In 1684, two years after he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Medicine, he moved to practice in London, and was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1687. In 1691 he agreed to care for the two-year-old William, Duke of Gloucester provided that his mother Princess Anne and her sister Queen Mary relied on him exclusively for medical advice. It was from here that his fame and personal fortune grew. (As a sideline he was MP for Bramber from 1690 to 1695 and Buckingham from 1713 to 1714.) Eric Parker in the Highways and Byways in Surrey writes of him: “[Radcliffe was] so much run after as a physician that he felt able to be intolerably rude to his patients, even if they happened to be kings and queens. William the Third never forgave him for telling him that he would not own his Majesty’s dropsical legs for the three kingdoms. Queen Anne refused to make him her court physician, but sent for him when she was dying. He would not leave Carshalton pleading the gout; and he lived and died in angry remorse. The Queen never recovered, and the doctor did not dare to show his face in London.” A E Jones in From Medieval Manor to London Suburb: An Obituary of Carshalton takes up the story: “Her death on the 1st August brought against him the animosity of the Tory party which stood to lose by the Hanoverian succession. Feeling against Dr Radcliffe ran very high, and he was considerably alarmed. Two days after the Queen’s death, in a letter suggesting a date for a friend’s visit, he wrote from Carshalton, ‘Nor shall I be at any other time from Home because I have received several Letters that threaten me with being pulled in pieces if ever I come to London.” As it was he himself died three months later, like the queen, from apoplexy. However the doctor certainly knew how to be remembered. In his will dated September 13, 1714 he left annuities to his two sisters and the bulk of his estate to the University of Oxford (to pay for the erection of the Radcliffe Camera, the Radcliffe Observatory, and the Radcliffe Infirmary) and to University College (for the building of a new quadrangle and the endowment of two Fellowships in medicine). Later came the Radcliffe Lunatic Asylum (renamed the Warneford), and when the science books were moved to a new library in 1901, that was named the Radcliffe Science Library.
