Thomas Frewen (physician) facts for kids

Thomas Frewen (1704–1791) was an English doctor. He was known for his work in medicine during the 18th century.

Early Life and Medical Career

Thomas Frewen was born in 1704. He first worked as a surgeon and an apothecary in a town called Rye, Sussex. An apothecary was like a pharmacist who also prepared medicines. Later, he became a physician in Lewes. He earned his M.D. degree, which means Doctor of Medicine, before 1755.

Fighting Smallpox: Inoculation

Dr. Frewen became famous for being one of the first doctors in England to use inoculation against smallpox. Smallpox was a very dangerous and often deadly disease. Inoculation was a way to protect people from getting seriously ill.

Inoculation involved giving a person a very mild form of the disease. This was usually done by taking a small amount of material from a smallpox blister and putting it into a scratch on a healthy person's skin. The idea was that the person would get a mild case of smallpox, recover, and then be immune to the more severe form.

Dr. Frewen wrote an essay called The Practice and Theory of Inoculation. In this book, he shared his experiences. He had used inoculation on 350 people. Only one of these people died from the smallpox they got through inoculation. This showed that his method was quite successful.

Public Opinion on Inoculation

Not everyone agreed with inoculation at the time. Many ordinary people were against it. They worried about whether it was right to give someone a disease on purpose. This concern was one reason why smallpox inoculation was later made illegal in 1840.

Dr. Frewen also wrote about how some scientists believed diseases like smallpox spread. They thought tiny living things, called animalcula, caused the illness. These tiny creatures were thought to hatch from eggs found on people's bodies.

Other Medical Writings

In 1759, Dr. Frewen published another essay about smallpox. It was called Reasons against an opinion that a person infected with the Small-pox may be cured by Antidote without incurring the Distemper. Some doctors, like Boerhaave and Cheyne, believed that a medicine called æthiops mineral could stop smallpox from developing after someone was exposed to it.

Dr. Frewen disagreed. He argued that many people simply avoided getting smallpox even when they were thought to be at high risk. He believed that the æthiops mineral did not actually help.

His other important work was Physiologia, published in London in 1780. This was a large book that applied the medical ideas of Dr. Boerhaave to different diseases. One of Dr. Frewen's own beliefs was: "Wherever nature has fixed a pleasure, we may take it for granted she there enjoins a duty; and something is to be done either for the individual or for the species." This means that if something feels good or natural, it often comes with a responsibility to do something helpful for yourself or for others.

Later Life and Death

Thomas Frewen passed away in Northiam, Sussex, on June 14, 1791. He was 86 years old.