John Arbuthnot

Dr. John Arbuthnot, often known simply as Dr. Arbuthnot, (baptised April 29, 1667 – February 27, 1735), was a Scottish physician, satirist and polymath in London. He is best remembered today for his contributions to mathematics, his membership in the Scriblerus Club (where he inspired both Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels book III and Alexander Pope's Peri Bathos, Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus, and possibly The Dunciad), and for inventing the figure of John Bull.

Literary significance

Arbuthnot is one of the founding members of the Scriblerus Club, and he was regarded by the other wits of the club as the funniest, but Arbuthnot left fewer literary remains than the other members of the club. His satires are written with an ease, a humanity, and an apparent sympathy. Swift and Arbuthnot had similar styles in language (both preferred direct sentences and clear vocabulary) with a feigned frenzy of lists and taxonomies, and sometimes their works are attributed to each other. The treatise on political lying, for example, has been attributed to Swift in the past, although it was definitely Arbuthnot's. Generally, Arbuthnot's writings are not as vicious or nihilistic as Swift's, but they attack the same targets and both refuse to hold up a set of positive norms for their readers.

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Because of Arbuthnot's own insistence on not being recognized, it is difficult to speak definitively of his literary significance. We know that he was at the heart of many of the greatest satires of his age, that he was a conduit and source for a great many of the finest literary accomplishments of a half century of writing, but Arbuthnot was zealous that he not receive credit.

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