He also published a medical work in Latin drawing on his army experience, namely an account of fevers encountered during his military service and on venereal diseases (Historia Febris Intermittentis Anomalæ Batavæ Annorum 1746, 1747, 1748: Accedunt Monita Syphilitica, Edinburgh 1757), as well as some other essays.
The accompanying voluminous notes that crowd out the text were dismissed in a review by Tobias Smollett as "a huge farrago of learned lumber, jumbled together to very little purpose, seemingly calculated to display the translator's reading",[3] and launched an acrimonious war of words between the former friends.
[4] By this he joined a family of plantation owners, having married the sister of William Mathew Burt, the island's governor,[5] but did not gain a substantial dowry.
[7] James Boswell recalled in his Life of Johnson that upon a reading of this poem he "had made all the assembled wits burst into a laugh, when, after much blank-verse pomp, the poet began a new paragraph ... 'Now, Muse, let's sing of rats.
That year also, Grainger published anonymously his pioneering Essay on the more common West-India Diseases and the remedies which that country itself produces, to which are added some hints on the management of negroes.