Abstract

In 1712, the poet Elkanah Settle (1648-1724) published a funeral poem, Threnodia Apollinaris, dedicated to the memory of Dr Martin Lister. Settle had a good deal of material to draw upon, as Lister had been vice-president of the Royal Society, a physician to Queen Anne, and the first arachnologist and conchologist. Marriage and funeral poems were one of Settle's specialties, a lucrative business, as the family of the happy couple or the deceased member would purchase a large number of copies in presentation bindings for distribution among friends. Never averse to cutting corners, Settle later wrote several other poems recycling the same title, one to the memory of physician and naturalist Dr Edward Tyson (1708), another to essayist Joseph Addison (1719), and another to poet William Cowper (1723). At least Lister was in rather distinguished company. Despite the rather dubious literary value of Settle's verse, (after his death, he was described in The Briton as "a man who lived in the city and had a numerous poetical issue, but shared the misfortune of several gentlemen, to survive them all" ), Settle identified the importance of Lister's twin contributions to medicine and natural history.

On this 300th anniversary year of Lister's death, we also celebrated his contributions to natural philosophy and medicine (thankfully) not with heroic rhyme, but with an international conference on 27 April 2012 at the Royal Society entitled "History Comes to Life: Seventeenth-Century Natural History, Medicine and the "New Science". This edition of Notes and Records of the Royal Society includes a selection of the papers presented.