John Rutty

John Rutty (1697–1775) was a Dublin Quaker physician and naturalist born in Melksham. He was the author of many texts including A methodical synopsis of the Mineral Waters of Ireland (1757) and An Essay towards the Natural History of the County of Dublin (1772). After his death his spiritual diary was published and the botanist William Henry Harvey named the genus Acanthaceae Ruttya after him.

He was born of Quaker parents, on 25 December 1698, and after medical education at the University of Leyden, where he graduated M.D. in 1723 and read a thesis ‘De Diarrhœa,’ settled in Dublin as a physician in 1724. There he practised throughout his life.

He lived simply and often gave his services to the poor. On 6 April 1775 John Wesley records that he ‘visited that venerable man Dr. Rutty.’ Rutty then lived in rented rooms at the eastern corner of Boot Lane and Mary's Lane in Dublin. He died on 27 April 1775, and was buried in a Quaker burial-ground on St Stephen's Green.

In 1753 he began to keep a spiritual diary and continued it till December 1774, leaving directions in his will for its publication. The chief ill-doings of which he accuses himself are too great a love for the studies of the materia medica and meteorology, irritability, and excessive enjoyment of food. He deplored these excesses in language which caused Samuel Johnson to laugh.

His first medical book was ‘An Account of Experiments on Joanna Stephen's Medicine for the Stone,’ published in London in 1742. He published in Dublin in 1751 ‘A History of the Rise and Progress of the People called Quakers in Ireland, from 1653 to 1751,’ a continuation of a book originally written by Thomas Wight of Cork in 1700; a fourth edition was issued in 1811. In 1757 he published in London ‘A Methodical Synopsis of Mineral Waters,’ a quarto of 658 pages, which gives an account of the chief mineral springs of the British Isles and of Europe. He had thrown doubt on some statements of Charles Lucas in his account of the spa of Lisdoonvarna, County Clare, and Lucas issued a general attack on the book.

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