John Arbuthnot John Arbuthnot John Arbuthnot FRS ("baptised" 29 April 1667 – 27 February 1735), often known simply as Dr Arbuthnot, was a Scottish physician, satirist and polymath in London. He is best remembered for his contributions to mathematics, his membership in the Scriblerus Club (where he inspired both Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels" book III and Alexander Pope's "Peri Bathous, Or the Art of Sinking in Poetry", "Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus," and possibly "The Dunciad"), and for inventing the figure of John Bull. In his mid-life, Arbuthnot, complaining of the work of Edmund Curll, among others, who commissioned and invented a biography
John Arbuthnot and Arbuthnot became the private tutor of one Edward Jeffreys, son of Jeffrey Jeffreys, an MP. He remained Jeffreys's tutor when the latter attended University College, Oxford in 1694, and he there met the variety of scholars then teaching mathematics and medicine, including Dr John Radcliffe, Isaac Newton, and Samuel Pepys. However, Arbuthnot lacked the money to be a full-time student and was already well educated, although informally. He went to the University of St Andrews and enrolled as a doctoral student in medicine on 11 September 1696. The "very same day" he defended seven theses on medicine and was