James Drake (physician)

James Drake (1667–1707) was an English physician and political writer, a Jacobite and Fellow of the Royal Society.

A New Test of Church of England's Loyalty (1702) by Daniel Defoe was answered by Drake as "A True Englishman" in Some Necessary Considerations, Relating to All Future Elections of Members to Serve in Parliament (1702).

The House of Lords had been investigating the report that William had plotted to secure the succession to the crown for the Elector of Hanover.

The book was also presented as a libel by the grand jury of London on 31 August 1705, and burnt by the common hangman.

After voting that the church was not in danger, both houses of parliament (14 December) requested the queen to punish persons responsible for scandalous insinuations to the contrary.

The printer made a statement implicating three members of the House of Commons, Poley, John Ward III, and Sir Humphry Mackworth, but stated that the pamphlet was brought to him by two women, one of them masked, and the printed copies delivered by him to porters, some of whom were arrested.

[2] Drake escaped for the time, but was prosecuted the following spring for some passages in the Mercurius Politicus, a paper of which he was the author.

[12] A medical treatise called Anthropologia Nova, or a New System of Anatomy, was published just before Drake's death in 1707.

[13] Contractually the book was a legacy of a project involving instead Clopton Havers, author of Osteologia nova (1691), who had died in 1702; and as a consequence used plates copied from Stephan Blancard.

[14] Drake's wife Judith edited the work and secured a dedication to Henry Somerset, 2nd Duke of Beaufort.

He is also said to have written The Antient and Modern Stages Reviewed (1700), one of the replies to Jeremy Collier, and prefixed a life to the works of Tom Brown (1707).