Thomas Frewen (physician)

Thomas Frewen (1704 to 1791) was an English physician who practised first as a surgeon and apothecary at Rye in Sussex and afterwards as a physician at Lewes, having obtained the M.D. degree before 1755. He became known as one of the first in England to adopt inoculation against smallpox. In his essay on the practice and theory of inoculation he set out his experience in three hundred and fifty cases, of which only one died of the smallpox so induced, and he recorded that ordinary people were averse to the practice. In 1759 he published a short essay arguing against the opinion of Boerhaave, Cheyne and others that smallpox after exposure to infection could be checked in time by a dose of aethiops mineral, holding that many people ordinarily escape smallpox and that the remedy was irrelevant. His treatise Physiologia, published in London in 1780, applied the doctrines of Boerhaave to some diseases. He died at Northiam in Sussex on 14 June 1791, aged 86.