John Arbuthnot

John Arbuthnot
Portrait of John Arbuthnot by Godfrey Kneller
Born	1667 (baptised on 29 April) Kincardineshire, Scotland
Died	27 February 1735 (aged 67)
Nationality	Scottish
Occupation	physician, satirist, polymath

John Arbuthnot (baptised 29 April 1667 – 27 February 1735), often known simply as Dr Arbuthnot, was a Scottishphysician, satirist and polymath in London. He is best remembered for his contributions to mathematics, his membership in the Scriblerus Club (where he inspired both Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels book III and Alexander Pope's Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry, Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, and possibly The Dunciad), and for inventing the figure of John Bull.

In his mid-life, Arbuthnot, complaining of the work of Edmund Curll, among others, who commissioned and invented a biography as soon as an author died, said, "Biography is one of the new terrors of death," and so a biography of Arbuthnot is made difficult by his own reluctance to leave records. Alexander Pope noted to Joseph Spence that Arbuthnot allowed his infant children to play with, and even burn, his writings. Throughout his professional life, Arbuthnot exhibited a strong humility and conviviality, and his friends complained that he did not take credit for his own work.

Arbuthnot was born in Kincardineshire, on the north-eastern coast of Scotland, son of Rev Alexander Arbuthnot, an Episcopalian priest and Margaret, née Lammie. He may have graduated with an arts degree from Marischal College in 1685. Where John's brothers took part in Jacobite causes in 1689, he remained with his father. These brothers included Robert, who fled after fighting for King James VII in 1689 and became a banker in Rouen and half-brother George, who fled to France and became a wine merchant. However, when William and Mary came to the throne and the new Act of Settlement required all ministers to swear allegiance to them as heads of the Church of England, Arbuthnot's father did not comply. As a non-conformist, he was removed from his church, and John was there to take care of affairs when, in 1691 his father died.