Royal physician

It was not until 1509 that Linacre was appointed a royal physician, and five years later he accompanied Princess Mary as personal physician to Paris, where he met the French humanist Guillaume Budé. His royal services were rewarded by, among other things, presentation to a variety of ecclesiastical livings from at least 1509 onwards, including Mersham and Hawkhurst, Kent; Freshwater, Isle of Wight; Holsworthy, Devon; and Wigan, Lancashire, as well as prebends at St Stephen, Westminster, and York Minster, although he was not actually ordained until late in life, subdeacon in 1515, and deacon in 1520. His friendship with Erasmus might indicate some sympathy for the Dutchman's reforming views, but there is nothing to demonstrate any interest in either side of contemporary religious debates.

Translator of Galen

Of Linacre's actual work as a physician little is known; he seems to have favoured his humanist friends Budé and Longolius with cramp-rings; his advice to the hypochondriac Erasmus is as much moral in content as medical, and that to William Lily, high master of St Paul's School, warning against an operation, may have proved all too accurate. His prime importance as a physician lies in his abilities as a translator of Galen from Greek into Latin. Apart from (unpublished) parts of Aristotle's Meteorology, small portions of the seventh-century Byzantine author Paul of Aegina, De victus ratione (Cologne, 1526), and De crisi and De diebus criticis, published along with some reprinted Galenica (Paris, 1528), Galen occupied his attention exclusively. Linacre translated the following works: De sanitate tuenda (Paris, 1517); Methodus medendi (Paris, 1519); De temperamentis and De inaequali intemperie (Cambridge, 1521); De naturalibus facultatibus (London, 1523); De usu pulsuum (London, 1523–4); De symptomatum differentiis, and De symptomatum causis (London, 1524).

Three points need stressing about this selection. With the exception of Methodus medendi none of these writings was available in print before 1525; Linacre thus worked from Greek manuscripts, probably in his own library, and he appears to have used a manuscript of the Methodus medendi as well as the printed text (Venice, 1500). Second, none of these works formed part of the standard university syllabus, and even when medieval Latin versions were available in print they were translations made from Arabic intermediaries, not from Greek. Third, this selection included some of Galen's largest and most important texts for the practical physician. De sanitate tuenda is a text on the preservation of health, the Methodus medendi Galen's major treatise on the principles and practice of therapeutics. De naturalibus facultatibus was a detailed investigation into the ruling principles of the human body. All of them, in Linacre's versions, challenged the orthodox interpretation of Galenic medicine by providing in effect new information on what the great Greek physician had believed. This fitted well with the views of other humanist physicians that medicine could be reformed by a return to a more accurate understanding of what the ancient physicians had written, unencumbered by Arabic or medieval error.

As translations from Greek into Latin they are almost impeccable. Linacre employs a wide vocabulary and understands well the nuances of the Greek. He avoids the literal word for word translation of medieval interpreters and provides instead an elegant humanist Latin. At times he emends his text, with the result that in the standard nineteenth-century edition of Galen, by C. G. Kühn (Leipzig, 1821–32), Linacre's Latin version of the Methodus medendi often represents Galen's words more accurately than the Greek text that is printed above it. These versions attracted the admiration of Linacre's fellow scholars around Europe; they were often reprinted, even into the nineteenth century, and they gave to the physician without Greek access to some of the most important medical texts from the past. No longer could the medical humanists be reproached for trumpeting the merits of the ancient Greeks without making it possible for those who knew only Latin to follow them, except at a very great distance.

Reformer of medical education

In 1518 Linacre, along with five other physicians and Wolsey, successfully petitioned Henry VIII for the creation of a college of physicians in London which would be responsible for the inspection and control of all physicians within the city of London and the surrounding area, up to a 7 mile limit. This fulfilled a long held aspiration of the physicians; an earlier attempt in 1423 had lasted for a few years at most, and although the barbers and surgeons had their own companies, there was no such organization specifically for physicians. By contrast, in Italy medical practice was regularly controlled in all its aspects by local colleges of physicians, bringing together those who had graduated in medicine and often working together with the civil authorities to regulate all matters of health. The humanist physicians, especially those trained in Italy, like Linacre and many of the early members of the college, also believed that the new learning gave them added academic reasons for superiority; many medieval doctrines had been shown to rest on misinterpretations of classical antiquity. A new college could set new standards for physicians who, by virtue of their superiority to other healers, would bring about a general improvement in them too, and, perhaps, not only in London.

That, at least, was the theory. Linacre's college, however, whose statutes show links with both Italy and the new humanist inspired Corpus Christi College, Oxford, faced greater problems than a similar continental college. Its numbers were small; by Linacre's death, its original six members had increased to twelve, and numbered only eighteen in 1537. London was far more populous than most other cities, and there was an abundance of those offering healing services. The college also faced competition from those who wished to assert their own rights or those of others to heal; parliament, which ratified the charter in 1523 and gave it authority to govern medical practice throughout England, was notoriously loath to allow the physicians unfettered control, and barbers, barber–surgeons, and surgeons, to say nothing of the two universities, all had their own reasons for non-co-operation. Only rarely in the sixteenth century, in alliance with the royal authorities, did the College of Physicians succeed in achieving even a small percentage of Linacre's aims.

That Linacre was its leading light in its first years is clear. He was its first president; he was responsible for its first statutes, and its first meetings were held in his house, which he subsequently made over to the college for its meeting place and for its library. He recruited to it men like himself, with humanist ideals, and looked for it to have national authority. It was perhaps his successors who, by subtle modifications of the statutes, made it even more parochial, rigid, and authoritarian.

Linacre's humanist intentions were further manifest in a plan, already known in 1523, to establish lectureships in medicine at Oxford and Cambridge. A man of considerable wealth, obtained partly through a series of ecclesiastical appointments, Linacre spent the last few months of his life (he died on 20 October 1524 and was buried in St Paul's) acquiring and disposing of property, including the manor of Traces (for £216) and other smaller properties in Kent, and houses and land in London, including Frognal (costing £130) and his own house in Knightrider Street (for £46 13s. 4d). Most of this was to serve as the basis for his lectureships, which were to be established at Oxford and Cambridge as soon as his executors, including More and Cuthbert Tunstall, thought appropriate. Oxford was to have two, read by MAs at least, and devoted to the exposition of Galenic medicine, largely based on Linacre's own versions. The lectures were to provide a course of medical theory lasting from two and a half to three years. Responsibility for the lectures was in future to rest with the Mercers' Company, who already had control of that prime humanistic foundation, St Paul's School. Cambridge was to have one lecture, at St John's College, on the model of the senior of the two Oxford lectureships. In their content and plan these lectureships broke with the traditional syllabus of medicine; there was no reference to Arabic authorities and the choice of Galenic texts left out such standard fare as the Ars medica. While the lecturer was to explain the meaning of words, he was specifically forbidden to pursue logical questions, common in academic medical lectures.

In Cambridge the implementation of Linacre's plans followed quickly, and the first lecturer may well have been appointed within a year of his death. At Oxford there were many difficulties and delays. The Mercers refused to act, and negotiations involving Brasenose and All Souls in 1540 broke down. Not until December 1549 was Cuthbert Tunstall, by then the sole executor in England, able to conclude an agreement with Merton for the establishment of two lectureships, and not for another decade were lecturers appointed. The impact of their teaching was not as great as Linacre had hoped, in part because the medical humanism he had espoused was becoming outdated, but the holders of the lectureships at both universities were, for the first century at least, competent. But from the mid-seventeenth century onwards the posts came to be used to augment the revenues of college fellows, and it was no surprise when the Victorian reformers took exception to such a use. By the end of the century the lectureships and their revenue had been transformed, at Oxford into the Linacre professorship of comparative anatomy, and at Cambridge into a single annual lecture, given by a ‘man of mark’.

The first Cambridge Linacre lecture, delivered in 1908 by William Osler on the theme of Thomas Linacre, established what came to be the image of Linacre as a humanist within medicine. Osler rightly drew attention to the affection felt for Linacre by his friends and associates and to the way in which he could be said to bridge the gap between arts and sciences. But such a formulation obscures the fact that, for Linacre, and for his fellow medical humanists, this reversion to classical precedent was at the same time the way forward within medicine, and was as progressive in 1515 as anatomy was to be in the 1540s.

Assessment

The influence of Linacre on English medicine is hard to assess. Despite some vigorous efforts in the 1550s his London college did not secure for three centuries the pre-eminence within medicine that he had hoped for it, and it was more often viewed as a home of reaction rather than progress. While his lectureships may have helped to keep medicine as an active subject within the English universities, they too, after initial success, became seen as outmoded in what they were intended to do. None the less, Linacre did encourage the leading physicians of London for almost a century to follow his example of buying, editing, collating, and translating Greek books and manuscripts as a means of improving understanding of the traditional principles of medical practice. The first edition (Venice, 1525) of the collected works of Galen in Greek was owed in large part to his English followers, John Clement, Edward Wotton, and Thomas Lupset, and one can trace a Linacre tradition through scholars like John Caius and Theodore Goulston at least down to William Harvey, a doughty defender of the Galenism of the London College of Physicians.

Linacre may have had, like so many humanists, botanical interests, for Hakluyt in 1582 made the plausible, though far from proven, claim that he had introduced the damask rose into England. Of Linacre's own library, with its fine collection of Greek books and manuscripts, hardly more than twenty volumes remain, remarkably few of them in England. Some, like Eustratius' Commentary on Aristotle's ‘Ethics’ (Oxford, New College, 240–41, later owned by Cardinal Pole), may have been passed on to friends. John Clement, one of his executors, certainly had in his own library several volumes of medicine that were once Linacre's, and some details of them were taken down by John Caius around 1555. When Clement and the rest of Thomas More's household went into exile in Flanders under Elizabeth, some of Linacre's books and manuscripts went with them, only to be dispersed again after the sacking of Mechelen in 1572 and again in 1580. What remains shows the wide range of Linacre's interests in Greek philosophy, history, and medicine, as well as in patristic theology. It bears out the opinion of his contemporaries that Linacre was a scholar of the highest quality, to be ranked alongside Erasmus and Budé as one of the leaders of the Northern Renaissance.

Linacre House, Oxford, was established by the university in 1962. Its name was changed to Linacre College in 1965. It admits only graduate students, and has expanded notably since its foundation.