Michael Robinson on 4 Nov 2006  •  Link

Per Wheatley

Thomas Allen was matriculated a pensioner of Trinity College, Cambridge, in December 1648, but migrated to Caius College, of which he became a Fellow. He proceeded Bachelor of Medicine, 1654; Doctor of Medicine, 1659. He was admitted a Candidate of the College of Physicians, September 30th., 1659, and a Fellow, 1671. Dr Allen was physician to Bethlehem Hospital, and died of dropsey in 1684.
(Monk's "Roll of the Royal College of Physicians")

Michael Robinson on 4 Nov 2006  •  Link

Another Pepys connection ...

"Thomas Allen, a physician at Bethlem Hospital who also ran a private asylum. Allen seems to have been a humanitarian scientist who prevented his colleagues from transfusing sheep's blood into a man, and also ordered the first postmortem recorded at the Bethlem Hospital. One of his patients was James Carkesse, a clerk in Samuel Pepys's office at the Admiralty. "

Mind >>> Notes on the history of mental health care
http://72.14.209.104/search?q=cac…

Michael Robinson on 4 Nov 2006  •  Link

Allen inspired verse

Lucida intervalla: containing divers miscellaneous poems, written at Finsbury and Bethlem by the doctors patient extraordinary.
London : [s.n.], printed anno Dom. 1679.
[2], 68 p.; 4to. Anonymous. By James Carkesse, poems concerning the author's treatment in Bedlam and directed chiefly against Dr. Thomas Allen.
Wing (2nd ed., 1994),C577

He believed apparently he was on a mission to destroy the meeting houses of dissenters. Clarkess poems have been anthologized in the New Oxford Book of Seventeenth-Century Verse (1991)