Henry Plumptre

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

Henry Plumptre (died 26 November 1746) was an English physician from Nottingham. He came from a family with a strong medical and scholarly tradition; his grandfather, Huntingdon Plumptre, was a respected physician who studied at Cambridge and wrote Latin works. Henry studied at Queens’ College, Cambridge, earning his BA in 1702, MA in 1705, and a medical degree in 1706. He became a fellow at Queens’ College but left the post in 1707. In 1707–1708 he joined the College of Physicians and later held many prestigious roles there, including Gulstonian lecturer (1711), Harveian orator (1722), Lumleian lecturer (1732–33), censor, registrar, treasurer, consiliarius, and finally president from 1740 to 1745. He also worked as a physician at St Thomas’s Hospital until 1736.

Plumptre wrote several medical works, including Dissertatio Medico-Physica de Carolinis Thermis (Magdeburg, 1695; 1705) and Oratio Anniversaria Harvæana (1722); he was also involved with the Pharmacopœia Londinensis, published in 1746. He died of an ulcer in his bladder in Nottingham in 1746. His son Russell Plumptre (1709–1793) followed in his footsteps, becoming a physician and later a professor of physic at Cambridge.