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James Jurin

1684-1749/50.  Physician and natural philosopher.

James Jurin was the son of John Jurin, citizen and dyer of London, and his wife, Dorcas Cotesworth. In 1692 he was admitted from St Leonard, Shoreditch, to the Royal Mathematical School at Christ's Hospital, London, where he distinguished himself and earned a full scholarship to Trinity. Jurin graduated BA in 1705, and was elected Fellow in 1706. Richard Bentley, Master, became his patron and arranged for him to travel as tutor to Mordecai Cary (later bishop of Killala) in 1708-9. During his travels Jurin enrolled at Leiden University, but did not receive a degree. In 1709 he received an MA from Trinity and was appointed headmaster of the grammar school at Newcastle upon Tyne. While in Newcastle he delivered a series of public lectures on mathematics and Newtonian natural philosophy, and updated Newton's edition of Bernhard Varenius's Geography (1672) by adding supplements on meteorology, tides, and properties of air.

In 1715 Jurin resigned his position as headmaster and returned to Cambridge to study medicine, receiving his MD in 1716. He established a successful medical practice in London and in Tunbridge Wells during the summer months. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1717 and became secretary in November 1721. He served as secretary until 1727 and edited volumes 31-4 of the Philosophical Transactions. He was admitted a candidate of the Royal College of Physicians in 1718, and was made a Fellow in 1719. In 1722 Jurin delivered a series of lectures on anatomy to the Company of Surgeons, and in 1725 was appointed physician to the newly established Guy's Hospital, a position he held until 1732, when he resigned and became governor to the hospital. Jurin served as censor to the Royal College of Physicians five times during the period 1724-50, was made an elect of the college on 17 July 1744, served with Richard Mead as consiliarius in 1749, and became president of the college on 19 January 1750.

Jurin occupied a central place in British medical and scientific circles during the first half of the eighteenth century. He was witty, satirical, ambitious, and professionally and financially successful. His dispassionate, yet forceful advocacy of smallpox inoculation using an innovative statistical approach brought him widespread recognition both in Britain and abroad. Initially a folk practice, inoculation consisted of placing matter taken from the pocks of an individual with smallpox in a small incision made on a limb of a healthy individual. A mild case of smallpox typically ensued, which generally gave the inoculated individual immunity from natural smallpox. Occasionally, however, inoculated individuals died from the severity of the infection. During the first decades of the eighteenth century in England smallpox inoculation was debated fiercely on medical, ethical, and religious grounds. Jurin approached the issue differently by calculating the risks of inoculated and natural smallpox. Using his position as secretary to the Royal Society, he placed an advertisement in the Philosophical Transactions inviting readers to send accounts of their experiences with inoculation. Over sixty individuals responded, the majority either physicians or surgeons who performed the inoculations themselves. From these accounts Jurin calculated the relative odds of dying from smallpox inoculation (roughly 1 in 50) and natural smallpox (roughly 1 in 7 or 8). He published the results of his calculations in a series of annual pamphlets entitled An Account of the Success of Inoculating the Small-Pox, which appeared from 1723 until 1727. Contemporaries were generally persuaded by Jurin's figures and his pamphlets were acknowledged as central to the establishment of smallpox inoculation in England.

Jurin was an ardent Newtonian. (His portrait in the Royal Society portrays him holding a copy of Newton's Principia.) Although not taught by Newton, he studied with two early Newtonians at Trinity, Roger Cotes and William Whiston, and proved an able mathematician. Jurin developed his relationship with Newton at the Royal Society, especially as secretary to the society during the last seven years of Newton's presidency. During the 1730s and 1740s he corresponded with leading French Newtonians, including Voltaire, Buffon, and Mme du Châtelet, and throughout his life he championed Newton and Newtonian ideas in the most important scientific debates of the time, including the Analyst controversy with Bishop Berkeley over the calculus, the vis viva controversy over how to measure force, and the iatromechanical disputes over the force of the heart.

As secretary to the Royal Society, Jurin initiated a project to collect meteorological reports in order to learn more about the weather, or in his words, to create ‘a natural history of the air’. He recruited observers from Britain, the European continent, and the North American colonies; he also persuaded the Royal Society to send meteorological instruments (thermometers and barometers) as gifts to more distant observers, to facilitate standardization among observations. This project was significant in its thoroughness and in the degree to which it encouraged co-operation among an international group of natural philosophers.

Jurin's most important scientific papers, initially published in Philosophical Transactions, concerned capillarity, and were well received by natural philosophers throughout Europe. Much of his early work discussed iatromechanical topics, such as the force of the heart and the specific gravity of blood, and he debated the former with John Keill and Jean-Baptiste Sénac. He wrote several treatises on hydrodynamics, published both in the Philosophical Transactions and separately, which criticized Jean Bernoulli's and Daniel Bernoulli's work on the topic. In 1738 Jurin appended an essay On Distinct and Indistinct Vision to Robert Smith's Opticks, which provoked an extended exchange in print with the mathematician Benjamin Robins.

Jurin participated in a lively controversy among British mathematicians about the calculus triggered by Berkeley's The Analyst (1734), which argued that the calculus was as much a doctrine of faith as was religion, because the new mathematics was not based on rigorous demonstration. Jurin took this as an attack on Newton and proceeded to defend Newton's approach to the calculus. Between 1734 and 1742, the most heated period of debate, Jurin penned over 300 pages, many satirical, on the topic. Two pamphlets, published under the pseudonym Philalethes Cantabrigiensis and entitled Geometry no Friend to Infidelity, or, A Defence of Sir Isaac Newton & the British Mathematicians (1734) and The Minute Mathematician, or, The Freethinker no Just Thinker (1735), responded directly to Berkeley. After this exchange Berkeley withdrew from the debate, and Jurin's later writings on the subject (published in the Republick of Letters, 1728-26, and the History of the Works of the Learned, 1737-43, under the same pseudonym) were directed against the mathematicians Benjamin Robins and Henry Pemberton.

Near the end of his life Jurin became embroiled in yet another controversy, this one involving the death of Robert Walpole, first earl of Orford. Orford suffered from the stone, and Jurin was one of the physicians he consulted. Jurin prescribed lixivium lithontripticum, a medicine he developed while treating his own case of bladder stones. Walpole died, and Jurin was accused of causing his death. He was forced to defend himself in a heated exchange of pamphlets.

Jurin died at his house in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London, at sixty-six years of age, and was buried at St James Garlickhythe; he was survived by his wife. He left £35,000 in stock for his family and rings of remembrance for four friends including Robert Smith.

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