Thomas Cogan

Thomas Cogan (8 February 1736 – 2 February 1818) was an English nonconformist physician, a founder of the Royal Humane Society and philosophical writer.

He was born at Rothwell, Northamptonshire on 8 February 1736, the half-brother of Eliezer Cogan. For two or three years he was placed in the dissenting academy at Kibworth Beauchamp, run by John Aikin, but was removed at the age of fourteen, and spent the next two years with his father. He was then sent to the Mile End academy, where John Conder was the divinity tutor, but was transferred at his own request to a similar institution at Homerton. Doubts as to the truth of the doctrines of Calvinism prevented him from joining the dissenting ministry.

In 1759 he was in the Netherlands, where he found that the Rev. Benjamin Sowden, the English minister of the presbyterian church at Rotterdam, supported by the English and Dutch governments with two pastors, required a substitute; Cogan applied for and obtained the place. He continued to seek for a pastorate over a dissenting congregation in England, and about 1762 he was selected as the minister of a chapel at Southampton, where he soon publicly renounced Calvinism and adopted the doctrines of Unitarianism. A quarrel with his congregation followed, and Cogan became the junior minister of the English church at the Hague. He was introduced to Mr. Graen or Groen, originally a silversmith at Amsterdam, and afterwards a banker, and was wooed and won, as the story goes, by the banker's only daughter, a beauty and an heiress. It was a condition of the marriage that Cogan should enter the profession of medicine, and he accordingly matriculated at Leyden University on 16 October 1765, and took his degree of M.D. in 1767. He practised for a few years at Amsterdam, Leyden, and Rotterdam.

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