Armstrong, JOHN, physician and poet, was born about 1709 at Castleton, a pastoral parish in Liddesdale, Roxburghshire, of which his father was minister. He took the Edinburgh degree of M.D. in 1732, and soon after commenced practice in London. In 1736 he published a nauseous poem, The Economy of Love; in 1744 his principal work, The Art of Preserving Health, a didactic poem in four books. In 1746 he was appointed physician to the London Hospital for Sick and Lame Soldiers, in 1760 physician to the forces in Germany, whence he returned on half-pay in 1763, to resume practice. With Fuseli, the painter, he made a continental tour (1771); and he died from a fall in London, 7th September 1779. The friend of Thomson, Mallet, Wilkes, and other wits and writers of the day, Armstrong seems to have been a reserved, indolent, and splenetic man, 'who quite detested talk;' kind-hearted withal, and of frugal habits, having left £3000, saved out of a small and precarious income. His fame rests entirely on The Art of Preserving Health; his other works—
Benevolence (1751), Taste (1753), Sketches or Essays (1758), Day (1761), Miscellanies (1770), A Short Ramble through France and Italy (1771), &c.—being now only known by name.