Addenbrooke’s Hospital
Some of you may know that I have been a regular visitor at Addenbrooke’s over the last couple of years. Denice thinks we should have a loyalty card! Somewhere near the main concourse is a plaque commemora ng the charitable gi! in the will of Dr John Addenbrooke (1680-1719), which led to the founda on of the hospital. I was intrigued to find that there was very li.le about Dr Addenbrooke in the usual online sources, so I delved a li.le deeper. Addenbrooke was a fellow of St Catharine’s College in Cambridge. I was lucky enough to contact Dr Colin Higgins at the College who has been researching the life of John Addenbrooke and has wri.en an ar cle for the College Magazine. He kindly allowed me to use extracts from his ar cle here. John Addenbrooke should be seen not just as a medical man but a scholar with a wide range of interests, par cularly in the organisa on and systems of the natural world, which places him firmly in the tradi on of what we now know as the Age of Enlightenment. He was a contemporary of be.er-known figures such as Locke, Newton, and Voltaire. He le! a substan al library and a medical cabinet (which at first glance resembles a desk) to St Catharine’s College. The 184 volumes in the library cover a huge range of subjects. In addi on to many medical disciplines (anatomy, surgery, pharmacology, toxicology and more) Addenbrooke’s other interests appear: for example, he owned a mid-sixteenth-century Vene an copy of the works of Sophocles in an Oxford binding, a two-volume edi on of Holinshed’s Chronicles (the source for many of Shakespeare’s history plays) and a copy of Newton’s Op cks . There are volumes of Ancient Greek poetry and La n rhetoric, and a copy of the first book on probability theory.
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