Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 47.djvu/274

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in battle which has only recently been adopted by the formation of an Army Medical Service. He extols the use of Peruvian bark in the suppuration following upon gunshot wounds, and makes the acute observation that its virtue is increased if the elixir of vitriol be given with it. He thus anticipates by many years the use of quinine. He also gives a detailed account of a wound in the leg sustained by the Duke of Cumberland, who attended his father, George II, in the campaign. Finally, he relates cases of death from tetanus occurring after gunshot wounds. 2. ‘A Narrative of the last illness of the Earl of Orford, from May 1744 to the day of his decease, 18 March following,’ London, 1745; 2nd edit. 1745. This pamphlet, relating to the last illness of Sir Robert Walpole, gave great offence to the physicians, for in it Ranby utterly condemned the use of the lithontryptic lixivium in the treatment of stone. 3. ‘The True Account of all the Transactions before the Right Honourable the Lords and others Commissioners for the affairs of Chelsea Hospital as far as relates to the Admission and Dismission of Sam. Lee, Surgeon,’ London, 1754. This work incidentally exposes the methods adopted by a hernia-curing quack to whom the government of the day had paid large sums of money. 4. ‘Three Curious Dissections by John Ranby, esq., Surgeon to His Majesty's Household and F.R.S. 1728,’ printed in William Beckett's ‘Collection of Chirurgical Tracts,’ London, 1740. 5. Paper in the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ 1731, vol. xxxvii.

A natural son of the sergeant-surgeon, John Ranby (1743–1820), born in 1743, assumed the name of Ranby by royal license, in exchange for that of Osborne, in 1756. He states that he knew Richard Watson [q. v.], afterwards bishop of Llandaff, at Trinity College, Cambridge, where, however, he did not graduate. He ‘huzzaed after Mr. Wilkes’ in 1763, but developed into a partisan pamphleteer on the other side. In 1791 he published ‘Doubts on the Abolition of the Slave Trade,’ which Boswell (who calls Ranby his ‘learned and ingenious friend’) highly commended. In 1794, in his ‘Short Hints on a French Invasion,’ he deprecated the general tendency to panic. Three years later he supported Bishop Watson in his controversy with Gilbert Wakefield [q. v.], and in 1811 he attempted to explode the theory of the increasing influence of the crown. In later life he resided first at Woodford in Essex, where he befriended Thomas Maurice [q. v.] the orientalist, and then at Bury St. Edmunds, where he died on 31 March 1820. He was buried at Brent Eleigh in Suffolk, where there is a monument to him and his wife Mary, daughter of Edward Grote and Mary (Barnardiston). She died on 3 Jan. 1814 (notes furnished by G. Le G. Norgate, esq.; Davy's manuscript Athenæ Suffolcenses, iii. 104; Maurice, Memoirs of the Author of Indian Antiquities, pt. iii. p. 6).

[South's Memorials of the Craft of Surgery, edited by D'Arcy Power, London, 1886; article by Dr. Irving on Military Medical Literature in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 1845, lxiii. 93; information kindly supplied by Mr. Sidney Young, F.S.A., master of the Barbers' Company, and Rev. Sydney Clark, M.A., Chaplain to the Chelsea Hospital; Burke's Peerage, 1893, sub nomine ‘Hampden;’ Hervey's Memoirs of the Reign of George II, 1848, ii. 507, 526.]

D’A. P.

RAND, ISAAC (d. 1743), botanist, was probably son of James Rand, who in 1674 agreed, with thirteen other members of the Society of Apothecaries, to build a wall round the Chelsea Botanical Garden (Field and Semple, Memoirs of the Botanic Garden at Chelsea, p. 12). Isaac Rand was already an apothecary practising in the Haymarket, London, in 1700. In Plukenet's ‘Mantissa,’ published in that year, he is mentioned as the discoverer, in Tothill Fields, Westminster, of the plant now known as Rumex palustris, and was described (p. 112) as ‘stirpium indagator diligentissimus … pharmacopœus Londinensis, et magnæ spei botanicus.’ He seems to have paid particular attention to inconspicuous plants, especially in the neighbourhood of London. Thus Samuel Doody [q. v.] records in a manuscript note: ‘Mr. Rand first showed me this beautiful dock [Rumex maritimus], growing plentifully in a moist place near Burlington House’ (Trimen and Dyer, Flora of Middlesex, p. 238), and Adam Buddle [q. v.], in his manuscript flora (Sloane MSS. 2970–80), which was completed before 1708, attributes to him the finding of Mentha pubescens ‘about some ponds near Marybone,’ and of the plant styled by Petiver ‘Rand's Oak Blite’ (Chenopodium glaucum). In 1707 Rand, and nineteen other members, including Petiver and Joseph Miller, took a lease of the Chelsea garden, to assist the Society of Apothecaries, and were constituted trustees; and for some time prior to the death of Petiver in 1718 Rand seems either to have assisted him or to have succeeded him in the office of demonstrator of plants to the society. In 1724 he was appointed to the newly created office of præfectus horti, or director of the garden. Among other duties he had to give at least two de