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 an abstract of the first volume." As with other works that Arbuthnot encouraged, this systemizes a rhetoric of bad thinking and writing. He proposes to teach people to lie well. Similar lists and systems are in Alexander Pope's "Peri Bathos" and John Gay and Pope's "Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus." Also in 1713, Arbuthnot was made a physician of Chelsea Hospital, which provided him with a house. It was this house that hosted the meetings of the Scriblerus Club, which had as its members Harley (now Earl of Oxford), St. John (now Viscount Bolingbroke), Pope, Gay, Swift, and Thomas Parnell. According