Anthony Addington

Anthony Addington was an English physician, born at Fringford in Oxfordshire in 1713 and dead in 1790. The youngest son of a gentleman landowner, he was educated at Winchester College and Trinity College, Oxford, taking his MA in 1740 and his MD in 1744, and was later admitted a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and practised in London until bad health moved him to the country. His career gained public attention when he appeared as an expert for the prosecution of Mary Blandy for poisoning her father in 1752. He then retired to Reading in Berkshire, where he earned a large income from his profession, devoted his attention particularly to the treatment of insanity, and was one of the physicians called to see George III when the king first showed symptoms of mental aberration. In 1753 he wrote An Essay on the Sea Scurvy, proposing a method of curing the disease at sea.