[2][3] A physician in the parliamentary army during the First English Civil War, Coxe is supposed to have pointed Thomas Sydenham in the direction of medicine while attending his brother.
[3] Coxe, with Edward Alston and John Micklethwaite, ensured the college took a generous line in licensing nonconformist ministers to practice medicine.
[11] As a close friend of William Waller, Coxe acted as executor of his will, which included legacies to Thomas Case and Gabriel Sangar.
[12] While Coxe became a physician to Charles II in 1665, his views were unpopular and his presidency of the college in the 1680s lasted only one year, as he was marked out as an early Whig.
[13] One of his acts as president was to order the printing, unusual at this period, of lectures of Walter Charleton, covering the theories of Giovanni Alfonso Borelli on the heart, but without due acknowledgement.
[3] From 1665 a group in the Royal Society followed up the possibility of blood transfusion, at the suggestion of John Wilkins; Coxe worked first on pigeons.
[15] After a demonstration with Edmund King in November 1666,[16] Coxe, in Philosophical Transactions for 1667, reported on a transfusion experiment carried out on dogs, from a spaniel to a mongrel.