William Douglass (physician)

William Douglass (c. 1691–1752) was a physician in 18th-century Boston, Massachusetts, who wrote pamphlets on medicine, economics and politics that were often polemical.

Douglass was born in Gifford, Scotland in about 1691. Douglass studied at Edinburgh (MA, 1705), Leyden, Paris, and Utrecht, where he received his MD in 1712. He first arrived in Boston in 1716, with letters of introduction to Increase Mather, Cotton Mather and Benjamin Colman. After travelling in the West Indies, Douglass returned to Boston in 1718, where he lived for the rest of his life. Douglass prospered in Boston, and put his money into property, both in the city and in remote parts of the Massachusetts Bay colony. Although he owned houses in Boston, he lived at the Green Dragon Tavern, which he also owned. In 1746 Douglass offered the town of New Sherburn, where he had purchased a large quantity of land, $500 and thirty acres, with a house and barn, to be used to establish free schools in the town, in exchange for the town changing its name to Douglas.

In common with other educated men of the time, William Douglass pursued a wide range of interests. He corresponded with Cadwallader Colden for twenty-five years about subjects such as botany and geography, as well as medicine. He knew five languages, accumulated a collection of 1,100 American plants, observed the weather, and studied magnetic deviation and astronomy. His almanac Mercurius Novanglicanus, published in 1743, has been called "useful" and "good". His map of New England, which was published posthumously, was, at least in part, the basis for every map of New England published over the following fifty years.

Douglass did not always fit in well with Boston society. He was a self-proclaimed "rationalist", and quickly joined in the growing dissent against official Puritanism in Boston. He was probably a member of the group of freethinkers (the "hell fire club") that contributed to The New-England Courant published by James Franklin. He engaged in economic, political and medical controversies. Douglass never married, but had an illegitimate son (born in 1745) whom he adopted, causing a scandal in society.

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