Charles Scarborough

  Sir Charles Scarborough, MP, FRS, FRCP (1615-1694), was an English physician and mathematician.

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Scarborough was born in 1615, and educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (BA, 1637, MA, 1640) and Merton College, Oxford (MD, 1646). While at Oxford he was a student of William Harvey, and the two would become close friends. Scarborough was also tutor to Christopher Wren, who was for a time his assistant.

Following the Restoration in 1660, Scarborough was appointed physician to Charles II, who knighted him in 1669; Scarborough attended the king on his deathbed, and was later physician to James II and William and Mary. During the reign of James II, Scarborough served (from 1685-1687) as Member of Parliament for Camelford in Cornwall.

Scarborough was an original fellow of the Royal Society and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, author of a treatise on anatomy, Syllabus Musculorum, which was used for many years as a textbook, and a translator and commentator of the first six books of Euclid's Elements (published in 1705). He also was the subject of a poem by Abraham Cowley, An Ode to Dr Scarborough.

Scarborough died in London in 1694.

References

Lee, Sidney (1897), Dictionary of National Biography, Vol. 50. London: Smith, Elder & Co.