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 awarded the doctorate. He first wrote satire in 1697, when he answered Dr John Woodward's "An essay towards a natural history of the earth and terrestrial bodies, especially minerals..." with "An Examination of Dr Woodward's Account &c." He poked fun at the arrogance of the work and Woodward's misguided, Aristotelian insistence that what is theoretically attractive must be actually true. In 1701, Arbuthnot wrote another mathematical work, "An essay on the usefulness of mathematical learning, in a letter from a gentleman in the city to his friend in Oxford." The work was moderately successful, and Arbuthnot praises mathematics as a