[Gough's Hist. of the Quakers; Sewel's Hist. of the Rise, &c., of the Quakers; Fox's Journal, ed. 1765; Friends' Library (Philadelphia), vol. xiii. ed. 1837; Besse's Sufferings, &c.; Smith's Catalogue of Friends' Books.]
CROOKE, HELKIAH, M.D. (1576–1635), physician, was a native of Suffolk, and obtained a scholarship on Sir Henry Billingsley's foundation at St. John's College, Cambridge, 11 Nov. 1591. He graduated B.A. in 1596, and then went to study physic at Leyden 6 Nov. 1596, where he took the degree of M.D. on 16 April 1597, after a residence of only five months. His thesis is entitled ‘De Corpore Humano ejusque partibus principibus.’ It consists of thirteen propositions, and shows that he had already paid particular attention to anatomy. The original autograph manuscript is bound in vellum, in one volume, with twenty-seven other theses and the treatise of John Heurnius of Utrecht on the plague. Heurnius was a professor of medicine at Leyden of Crooke's time, and the theses are those of Crooke's contemporaries on the physic line, and many of them have notes in his handwriting. He went back to Cambridge and took the degrees of M.B. in 1599, and M.D. in 1604. He settled in London, was appointed physician to James I, and dedicated his first book to the king. ‘Mikrokosmographia, a Description of the Body of Man,’ was published in 1616, and is a general treatise on human anatomy and physiology based upon the two anatomical works of greatest repute at that time, those of Bauhin and Laurentius. The lectures in which Harvey demonstrated the circulation of the blood were delivered in the early part of the same year; but no trace of his views is to be found in the ‘Mikrokosmographia,’ nor when Crooke published a second edition in 1631 did he alter his chapters on the heart, veins, and arteries so as to accord with Harvey's discovery. The book is a compilation, and its subjects are set forth clearly, but without original observations. A finely bound copy presented by the author was one of the few books of the library of the College of Physicians which escaped the great fire, and is still preserved at the college. At the end is printed Crooke's only other work, ‘An Explanation of the Fashion and Use of Three and Fifty Instruments of Chirurgery,’ 1631. In 1620 Crooke was elected a fellow of the College of Physicians, and held the anatomy readership in 1629. In 1632 he was elected governor of Bethlehem Hospital. It is said that he was the first medical man known to have been in that position. On 25 May 1635 he resigned his fellowship, and soon after died. His portrait is prefixed to the second edition of ‘Mikrokosmographia.’
[Munk's Coll. of Phys. 1878, i. 177; Volume of Theses in Library of Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London.]
CROOKE, SAMUEL (1575–1649), divine, son of Thomas Crooke [q. v.], was born at Great Waldingfield, Suffolk, on 17 Jan. 1574–5. Having received his early education at Merchant Taylors' School, he entered Cambridge as a scholar of Pembroke Hall, and was afterwards chosen fellow, but the master refused to allow the election. Soon after this he was admitted one of the first fellows of Emmanuel College, being at that time B.D. He was a good classical scholar and well skilled in Hebrew and Arabic. He also spoke French, Italian, and Spanish, and had read many books in these languages. He was appointed rhetoric and philosophy reader in the public schools. In compliance with the statutes of his college he took orders on 24 Sept. 1601, and immediately began to preach in the villages round Cambridge. In 1602 he was presented to the rectory of Wrington, Somerset, by Sir John Capel, and soon afterwards married Judith, daughter of the Rev. M. Walsh, a minister of Suffolk. At Wrington, ‘where the people had never before … a preaching minister, he was the first that by preaching … brought religion into notice and credit’ (Life and Death, p. 11). When in April 1642 the commons voted to call an assembly of divines for the reformation of the church, Crooke was one of the two chosen to represent the clergy of Somerset. The assembly, however, did not meet until the next year, and then Crooke's place was filled by another. On the outbreak of the civil war he was active in persuading men to join the side of the parliament (Mercurius Aulicus, p. 39). When the king's power was re-established in Somerset in the summer of 1643, it appears that soldiers were quartered in his house, probably to bring him to obedience, and when the royal commissioners visited Wrington in September he made a complete submission, and signed eight articles, promising among other things that he would preach a sermon in Wells Cathedral and another at Wrington testifying his dislike to separation from the established religion and his abhorrence of the contemning of the common prayer. His submission occasioned great rejoicing among the royalists in London and elsewhere. ‘I would your late cousin, Judge Crooke, were alive either to counsel or condemn you,’ wrote one of his own party (Mercurius Britannicus, p. 7; E. Green, p. 6). The taunt seems to imply that Crooke's father was a brother of Sir John Croke [q. v.], and of his brother Sir George [q. v.], who died in 1642. It was probably
