Nathaniel Highmore (1613 - 1685)

Born 1613 in Burgate, Fordingbridg, Hampshire

Ancestors

Died 20 Mar 1685 at about age 72 in Dorset, England

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Biography

From 'Moorcocks Sable' by Christopher Russell Highmore, published in 2013:^[1]

Nathaniel Highmore was born in 1613, the son of Nathaniel Highmore and his wife Margaret Husee. Nathaniel was born in Burgate, Fordingbridge, Hampshire and baptised there on 6th February 1613. Nathaniel was educated at Sherborne School where he kept a notebook written mainly in Latin in microscopic handwriting, each page covered with notes, neatly laid out and indented. In the front of the notebook, which is still available in the British Library in London (in 2013) he drew his family crest. Interestingly he drew it with three moorcocks and an inverted crossbow bearing the legend 'Mihi Vita Christus' rather than his later adoption of four moorcocks and an upright crossbow. The two crests represent the Harbybrow and Armathwaite branches of the Highmore family.

Nathaniel matriculated from Sherborne in 1631 to Queen's College, Oxford.

In 1632 he became a pensioner at £5 per year at Trinity College, Oxford gaining his B.A in Arts and Physic (Medicine) in 1634 and his M.A in 1638. On 10th July 1641 he was admitted as a Batchelor of Physic. Nathaniel treated the young Prince Charles (later King Charles II) for measles in November 1642 for which he was given a gold topped cane by the King.

He gained his doctor of Physic on 10th January 1642 and was granted his M.D in 1643 under the 'Caroline Creations' system instituted by King Charles I.

This came about after the battle of Edgehill during the Civil War, when King Charles retired to Oxford and as a means of rewarding those who had helped him, ordered the University to give them degrees. By this means Nathaniel received his M.D at least two years earlier than he would have done under university regulations.

It is possible that Nathaniel's contribution to the King's cause was to treat the young prince.

At about this time Nathaniel became a member of the Oxford Philosophical club in a group at Trinity which included William Harvey, George Bathurst and Hannibal Potter. He went on to work with Harvey in Harvey's study of the circulation of the blood.

In 1638 he relinquished his scholarship at Trinity in favour of his younger brother, Richard Highmore (1619-1695).

In 1640 Nathaniel married Elizabeth Haydock, in Salisbury, Wiltshire. They had no children.

In 1651 he published his work, 'Corporis Humani Diquisto Anatomica' a detailed anatomical textbook which was used by medical students for many generations. A copy was in the Royal College of Surgeons Library in London in 2013.

He dedicated this work to Robert Boyale and William Harvey.

'Corporis Humani Diquisto Anatomica' was the first anatomical textbook to accept the circulation of the blood. In it he described the antrum of the Highmore, (the maxillary sinus) which still bears his name. He says that his attention was brought to it by a lady who had an abscess in that situation.

Nathaniel Highmore published a treatise on generation 'History of Generation' in 1651. This work was the result of Nathaniel's collaboration with William Harvey in Oxford. It contains references to a microscope, which he (in contrast to Harvey) may have used in embryology. His treatise contains detailed drawings of the chick in the egg. This work also has important observations of plants. Nathaniel started at Oxford in the same year that Physick Garden was set up. It must have provided him with great opportunities to continue his studies in that direction.

Gardening was among Nathaniel's hobbies. Robert Boyle wrote in a letter that states: 'I was visited in Dorsetshire by the ingenious Dr. Highmore... he is a great florist, and finds by experimentation that there is scarce any mold comparable for flowers to the earth which is digged from under old stacks of wood, or other places where rotten wood has long lain.'

Both of his major works in 1651 contain a great amount of physiology of circulation. In 1651 he wrote a 'Discourse of the cure of wounds by Sympathy' (printed with History of Generation).

His work, 'De passione hysterica et de affectionae hypochondriaca,' published in 1660, was a work which engaged Nathaniel in a controversy with the scientist, Thomas Willis.

He also wrote a 'Short Treatise of Dysenteria' 1658; and several papers in the Philosophical Transactions, including one on the medicinal springs in East Somerset.

Nathaniel Highmore's medical practice, the major source of his income, was in Sherborne, Dorset, possibly beginning in 1643 but certainly by 1651, extending until his death in 1685.

He gave up the lease of his house in Fordingbridge in 1644 which may be the date when he and his wife moved to Sherborne to begin his medical practice.

In 1654 he became a Governor of Sherborne School.

In 1668 he became a Justice of the Peace of the County of Dorset.

In 1675 he he was entrusted to buildings and furnishings a new library at Sherborne School and in 1676 drew up the indictment against John Goodenough, the unsatisfactory Head of the School.

By 1677, the Sherborne Manor Survey shows him as a leaseholder of several properties or pieces of land in Overcombe, Nethercombe, Houndstreet, Westbury, Bishops Caundle, Barton Farm, and Primsley Manor, Sherborne, Dorset, England.

Nathaniel was treasurer for the subscriptions to the Sherborne Town Hall built in 1681 just south of the Abbey.

He was burried in the Chancel of St. Peter's church, Purse Caundle, Dorset, having died on 20 March 1685.

In his will dated 4th March 1685, three weeks before his death Nathaniel Highmore left an annuity of £5 to be raised out of the rents of his houses in the borough of Sherborne, to a poor boy sent from the free grammar school there, by choice of the governors, to the university for the term of 6 years, and from time to time during the term of 76 years. To the master of the Sherborne Almshouse he left the sum of £50 to be employed in erecting a workhouse, if they should go about such work. His 21 copper plates of anatomical figures he left to the Royal Society; and his long table of muscles he left to the physic school at Oxford. Precise to the last, he wrapped individual pieces of gold for each of his inheritors. He also crossed out the usual ending to a will in those days, substituting, ‘sane in mind but weak in body,’ for, ‘in perfect health of body and mind.’

Although she is supposedly buried with Nathaniel, Elizabeth Highmore nee Haydock’s gravestone remains unmarked. She died in 1707, twenty two years after Nathaniel.

Nathaniel Highmore Wikipedia ^[2]

Sources

1. ↑ 'Moorcocks Sable' by Christopher Russell Highmore, published in 2013, ISBN 978-1-78222-087-9
2. ↑ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Highmore_(surgeon)