Roger Drake (physician)

Roger Drake (1608–1669) was an English physician, and a minister of strong Presbyterian convictions.

He was the eldest son of Roger Drake, a wealthy mercer of Cheapside, who died in December 1651. He received his education at Pembroke College, Cambridge, as a member of which he graduated B.A. in 1628, and M.A. in 1631. At thirty years of age he entered himself as a medical student at Leyden in 1638 and attended the lectures of Adolph Vorstius, Otto Heurnius, and Johannes Walaeus. He proceeded doctor of medicine there in 1639. In his inaugural dissertation he defended William Harvey's theory of the circulation of the blood, and was subjected to an attack by Dr. James Primrose the following year; Drake replied.

Drake appears to have been incorporated a doctor of medicine at Cambridge, and was admitted a candidate of the College of Physicians on 22 December 1643. He resigned his candidateship 27 November 1646, having resolved to enter the ministry.

A rigid presbyterian, he was implicated in Christopher Love's plot, and was arrested by order of the council of state, 7 May 1651. With some ten or twelve others, he was pardoned for life and estate without undergoing a trial, after an outside intervention. Drake became minister of St. Peter's Cheap in 1653, was one of the intended commissioners at the Savoy conference (though did not attend after an administrative mistake), and occasionally conducted the morning exercise at St. Giles-in-the-Fields and that at Cripplegate. Towards the close of his life he lived at Stepney, where he died in the summer of 1669. Samuel Annesley preached his funeral sermon and praised his chronological writings, returning to Drake in 1673 in the preface to his sermon on William Whitaker.

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