John Clarke (physician, 1761–1815)

[1] After becoming a member of the Corporation of Surgeons, as the body then separated from the Barbers, but not yet raised to the degree of a college, was called, he began practice in Chancery Lane, and at the same time lectured on midwifery in the private medical school founded by William Hunter.

His lectures were popular, and William Munk was told by his brother, Sir Charles Mansfield Clarke, that this was in part due to a custom of illustrating the points of midwifery by familiar analogies.

[1] Besides a paper on a tumour of the placenta, read before the Royal Society, he published three books: The last, of which his death prevented the publication of more than one part, is the work on which his fame rests, and it entitles him to rank as a medical discoverer; for it contains the first exact description of laryngismus stridulus or tetany.

This disease, which consists in a sudden onset of difficult breathing, obviously originating in the windpipe, was confused by Boerhaave with asthma, and by later writers with true croup.

Its anatomical cause was still unknown in 1887; but Clarke's exact clinical description (Commentaries, chap.