Biography

Scottish physician and natural philosopher, trained at Edinburgh University, who later settled at Windsor and became physician to the Royal Household. In semi-retirement, he taught science at Eton and tutored the young poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), who later married Mary Wollstonecraft (1797-1851). Percy Shelley immortalized Lind in a poem as the character Zonoras, the wise old teacher of a Prince Athanasein.

Lind had wide interests in science and his experiments on galvanism, using electricity to animate the muscles of dead frogs which so impressed the young Percy Shelley, have been proposed as the inspiration for Mary Shelley's fictional creation, Frankenstein. Lind also suggested the use of electric shock treatment for insanity, following an audience with King George III during his madness.

Lind was a Fellow of the Royal Society and a founding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He was an acquaintance or correspondent of many of the famous scientists of the eighteenth century and engineers of the Industrial Revolution. His better-known cousin, also called James Lind (1716-1794) and often confused with the natural philosopher, was Physician to the Naval Hospital at Haslar in Gosport in 1758. To add to the confusion, both his father and eldest son were called James Lind, the latter becaming a captain in the Royal Navy.

The older cousin's fame came from what has been considered medicine's first controlled experiment with human subjects, carried out in 1747 on seamen afflicted with scurvy and written up in 1753 as a Treatise on Scurvy. Lind advised the use of fresh fruit on English sailing ships as a specific preventative but the Admiralty were wary of statistics used to prove Lind's claims (Vitamin C was not discovered until the 20th century) and delayed changing policy until 1795. Scurvy disappeared from the Fleet almost immediately and the number of sick sailors sent to hospital each year was halved. J.R. Forster (1729-1798) wrote an account of the second voyage (1772-1775) of James Cook (1728-1779) and how he followed Lind's recommendations to reduce deaths from scurvy that had decimated the crews of long sea voyages. It is not known if the older cousin collected any plant specimens though he also travelled extensively as surgeon's mate and ship's surgeon around 1750.

Specimens attributed to James Lind at BM came from naval voyages as a ship's surgeon including those of the Drake (1762-1763) and Hampshire (1765-1767) and were mostly made during stays at the Cape and the Comoros on the way to India and in south-east Asia. Lind visited in China 1766, accompaned Joseph Banks and Daniel Solander on an expedition to Iceland in 1772, and collected in South Africa during 1779.