[3] By the time Yonge was born, his parents had moved to Plymouth, where he was baptised in the Parish Church of St Andrew on 11 March 1647.
[1] In 1658 Yonge's father had him articled as an apprentice at the age of ten to Silvester Richmond of Liverpool, a surgeon on the Navy vessel Constant Warwick.
He was next appointed surgeon's mate to HMS Montague, part of Lord Sandwich's fleet in the Downs, with which he sailed in 1660, aged 13, for an ineffectual bombardment of Algiers in the following year.
He was released from his apprenticeship in May 1662, by his master's retirement, then worked as an assistant at Wapping to an apothecary named Clarke, where he presumably gained practical knowledge of making up medicines.
This action by his father rankled him all his life: "My elder brother was maintained like a prince, I clad with old turned cloaths, and not one penny in my pocket, he was hard as a master.
Yonge corresponded with Sir Hans Sloane and associated in London with Francis Atterbury, Charles Bernard, Edward Browne and Walter Charleton as well as Tyson.
Yonge pointed out that it put together text from the Muskotomia of William Molins with illustrations from the Tabula anatomicae of Giulio Casserius.
[7] By the 1670s Yonge had become of importance, called to fill successive civic and professional offices in Plymouth, whose charter had been restored by Charles II.
3 Regiments quartered in town, to be Embarked for the W. India by this Lord, gave me great trouble in Quartering them.... June My Ld Marquis of Carmarthen, son & heir to the duke of Leeds, being Rere Admiral of the blew came into port, spent an evning merryly at my house, & treated me wth r Governor, &c next day on board the Lenox very nobly, wth Gunnes....
The new Key fid up to the outside of the Slipp before Mr Allens house, and all new paved over.Yonge's brother Nathaniel was also involved in the politics of the town.
"In his Plymouth Memoirs[8] Yonge gives short biographies of mayors in his time, containing "ye memorable occurrences in their respective yeares".
A tool, & a fool, dyed soon after, and was succeed[ed] by B. Berry, who served the rest of the yeare: and having no house in town, Lodged and Kept the Mayoralty at an house that was common for quarting strangers, & selling punch, Ale, to the great scandal of the office... but they stuck at nothing, -seemd [sic] to regard neither the credit, or welfare of the town, filled up ye benches with men that were of mean, Scandalous, --- as if they had been sworn to choos the worst --- and did many things contrary to the constitution, & custom of the Burrough, chose a Mayor that did not Inhabit, filled the Benches with Lawyers.
He had attempted it twice before, but then the Lords of Admiralty made enquiry into the matter and found me innocent but notwithstanding that and a promise they made not to hearken any more to him, they did on this third wrong information put me out without notice or hearing and this injustice he got by quitting Weymouth to Col Churchill's brother.In his Journal[1] Yonge refers to 12 shillings as the fee for a twenty-mile visit, another £1, and, for an outside visit of two days' duration, £1 10s.
He earned twice a hundred guineas for a single operation, boasting that he obtained £120 in one year for treating sailors for the pox (syphilis) in the naval hospital at Plymouth.
One of the last commissions he refers to in his Journal is embalming a body in preparation for the lying in state in London of Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, who drowned off the Scilly Isles in one of the worst peacetime disasters of the Royal Navy.
A document in the Plymouth and West Devon Record Office shows his assets and income in 1718 at £21,000 – remarkable from a medical practice.
This led him to write Currus Triumphalis de Terebintho, describing how he used turpentine to arrest a haemorrhage and the flap operation in amputation, and showing familiarity with tourniquets.
On 3 November 1702 Yonge was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and made contributions to the Philosophical Transactions on subjects as diverse as "on a bullet in the trachea, on two huge gallstones and on intestinal concretion".
[14] In Sidrophel Vapulans,[13] He wrote on the large number of unqualified people practising medicine, saying it was "a great wonder that in this age of regulation and amendment nothing is done to rectify the notorious abuses and secure us from the mischief done by those men who without skill or authority under he pretence of restoring and preserving do destroy men's lives and estates and more especially at such a time when the Nation is in need of both for its defence and preservation.... Why then should impudent ignorant quack and empirics (smiths weavers cobblers draymen women etc.)
Also in Sidrophel Vapulans he wrote: How absurd it is to affirm that a bright and dark moon shall have the same effect, that a body fourteen times less than the Earth and at such a great distance from it shall press the ocean to such an extent and while its in the like situation force it to retire....
He left details of an early trepanning operation performed on a man who "by a prodigious wound in the forehead lost as much brain as the shell of a pullets egg can contain and was cured in Plimmouth by J. Y.
till he was forced to go to sacrament to get the hospital at Plymouth and then he baulked at complying and was dragged to the Lords table and then became one of the greatest enemies they had.