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
Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot as "the best Memorial that I can leave, both of my Friendship to you, & of my own Character being such as you need not be ashamd of that Friendship." "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot" has a "tangled" publishing history. The poem was first published as a folio of 24 pages on 2 January 1735 under the title "An Epistle from Mr. Pope to Dr. Arbuthnot", with a date of 1734. It appeared in Pope's "Works" the same year in folio, quarto and octavo, with a Dublin edition and an Edinburgh piracy. During Pope's lifetime, it was included among the "Moral