In 1751, finding his health unequal to a country practice, he came to London, and made an attempt to support a wife and three children by teaching physiology.
His lessons were intended for medical pupils who had not been at the universities, and were unable to read the standard books in learned or foreign languages.
369) contains a statement of the fact that motor and sensory nerves are anatomically distinct, although they might coexist in the same bundle; the experimental proof came many years after.
His first work, dated from Hull in June 1738 and published at York in 1740, was 'Neuropathia,’ a Latin poem in three books on hypochondriasis and hysteria, with a prose summary and additions prefixed, dedicated to Peter Shaw ('Doctissime Shavi!’); it was republished at Rome, with an Italian translation by Moretti, in 1755.
His next venture was 'A Proposal for the Improvement of Medicine, &c.,’ being a collection of therapeutic essays on the use of bark in smallpox, on limes and other fruits and vegetables in scurvy, &c.; it was dedicated to Mead, who had been pleased with the 'Neuropathia.'
In the same year he published anonymously 'A new Critical Examination of an Important Passage in Mr. Locke's Essay on Human Understanding [on the possibility of thought being superadded to matter], in a familiar letter to a friend.'
In 1753 he issued a physiological comment on Solano's prognostics from the pulse (dicrotism, intermittence, &c.), an account of which had been brought to England by Dr. Nihell, physician to the English factory at Madrid.
Another paper, on corpulence, was read at the Royal Society in 1757, but not issued until the author printed it in 1760; it was translated into German by Joseph Jakob Plenk at Vienna in 1769, and reprinted in London as late as 1810.