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 Essays". In 1751, after the death of Pope, it was published at the beginning of "Imitations of Horace" and retitled "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, being the Prologue to the Satire", even though it lacks both Horatian and prologic characteristics. The poem includes character sketches of "Atticus" (Joseph Addison) and "Sporus" (John Hervey). Addison is presented as having great talent that is diminished by fear and jealousy; Hervey is sexually perverse, malicious, and both absurd and dangerous. Pope marks the virulence of the "Sporus" attack by having Arbuthnot exclaim "Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?" in reference to the form