In her poem ‘To Dr. Aikin on his Complaining that She Neglected Him, October 20th 1768’, Anna Barbauld celebrates her brother John’s prospective career as a literary physician. Drawing on the classical identification of Apollo as the deity who gave humanity poetry and medicine, she confidently predicts:

1. So shall thy name be grac’d with fairer praise

2. Than waits the laurel or the greenest bays:

3. Yet shall the bays around thy temples twine,

4. And make thine own Apollo doubly thine.

5. (86–9)

From Aikin’s own writings it appears that he had a strong and sustained investment in the character of the literary physician. Indeed, he seems to have been among the first to think seriously about the literary physician as a historical phenomenon. He identifies the appearance of the literary physician in early modern Europe as a product of the Renaissance ‘revival of literature’. In his view, the appearance of the literary physician signalled an important historic shift in the field of medicine, towards an approach that was at once more holistic and scientifically sounder than in previous eras. This is a view at striking odds with recent scholarship and perceptions of the narrowing focus of medicine during the Enlightenment. As a literary physician, Aikin regularly blurred disciplinary boundaries, particularly those between medicine, morality and politics. Much writing of classical antiquity posits a direct analogy between medicine and morality, vice and disease, routinely extended into politics through the idea of the body politic. Aikin develops his own cure for what he sees as an ailing contemporary British body politic by bringing together ancient assumptions concerning the main causes of disease: moral, physical and political, with Enlightenment philosophy and medicine, and with the reformist politics of eighteenth-century liberal Dissent.

Educated at home and later the Warrington Academy, he was one of a number of graduates who went on to study medicine. Indeed, this liberal Dissenting academy has been seen as substantially contributing to eighteenth-century medicine as a whole. At age 15, Aikin began an apprenticeship to apothecary-surgeon Maxwell Garthshore, at Uppingham in Rutland, during which he sometimes assisted his father’s friend, Leicester apothecary Richard Pulteney. This apprenticeship ended when Garthshore and Pulteney both decided to pursue degrees as physicians at the University of Edinburgh. After taking over Pulteney’s practice for a few months, Aikin studied medicine at Edinburgh from 1764 to 1766, leaving without gaining a degree. He soon went on to another apprenticeship, this time to the surgeon Charles White in Manchester, where he had access to a large infirmary and the opportunity for medical experimentation and research. In 1769 and 1770, he completed his surgical apprenticeship in London under William Hunter (an Edinburgh graduate who was by this time physician to Queen Charlotte, Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Anatomy to the Royal Academy, and who had built a London anatomy theatre and museum, which would become famous for training some of the best surgeons and anatomists of the day). After an initial start in Chester, he moved his surgical practice to Warrington in 1771, and in 1774 he began lecturing part-time at the Warrington Academy on anatomy, physiology and chemistry. Lectures were reportedly designed both to prepare students with a professional interest in these subjects and to appeal to those who were engaged in ‘a course of liberal education’. Aikin apparently took special interest in mentoring future medical students. While at Chester and Warrington, he was part of a group of medical men (including Matthew Dobson and John Bostock from Liverpool, John Haygarth from Chester and Thomas Percival from Manchester) who met four times a year to discuss medical subjects. When the academy ceased operations in 1783, he applied for a doctorate in medicine at the University of Leyden, successfully defending his thesis, ‘De Lactis secretione in puerperis’, in the summer of 1784. Hearing of a vacancy at Great Yarmouth in Norfolk, he decided to relocate there. Dissatisfied with the number of the available clients, he left after a year for London. Four months later, he was successfully petitioned to return to Yarmouth, which had recently been left without any physician. Word of his authorship of two controversial political pamphlets published anonymously in 1790, An Address to the Dissidents of England on their Late Defeat and The Spirit of the Constitution and that of the Church of England Compared, cost him his Yarmouth practice several years later. He settled in London in 1792, developing a decent London medical practice, which he maintained until 1798, when, suffering from ill health, he turned it over to his son Charles. He subsequently recovered, but spent the rest of his life (until his final decline following a stroke in 1817) engaged in writing projects of various kinds.