Good, JOHN MASON

Good, JOHN MASON, physician and writer, was born May 25, 1764, at Epping in Essex, where his father was an Independent minister. He was apprenticed to a surgeon-apothecary at Gosport, next continued his medical studies in London, and commenced practice as a surgeon in Sudbury in 1784. Money difficulties drove him to London in 1793, where he combined medicine with the most miscellaneous literary activity. In 1820 he took his M.D. degree at Marischal College, Aberdeen, and died January 2, 1827. Good's writings embrace poems, translations of Job, the Song of Songs, and Lucretius, essays on prisons, medical technology, and the history of medicine. He collaborated with Dr. Olinthus Gregory and Newton Bosworth in the Pantologia or Encyclopaedia, comprising a General Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, and General Literature, in twelve volumes, which was completed in 1813. His ambitious poem, The Book of Nature, was published in 1826.