author

Francis Penrose

1718–1798

An English surgeon and medical writer from Bicester, he explored big scientific questions with the curiosity of an independent thinker. His books on electricity and magnetism show how lively and experimental eighteenth-century science could be.

1 Audiobook

A Treatise on Electricity Wherein its various phænomena are accounted for, and the cause of the attraction and gravitation of solids, assigned. To which is added, a short account, how the electrical effluvia act upon the animal frame, and in what disorders the same may probably be applied with success, and in what not.

A Treatise on Electricity Wherein its various phænomena are accounted for, and the cause of the attraction and gravitation of solids, assigned. To which is added, a short account, how the electrical effluvia act upon the animal frame, and in what disorders the same may probably be applied with success, and in what not.

by Francis Penrose

About the author

Practising for many years as a surgeon in Bicester, Oxfordshire, Francis Penrose also built a reputation as a medical writer. He lived in the nearby village of Chesterton as well, and his life bridged practical provincial medicine and the wider culture of scientific inquiry in eighteenth-century Britain.

Penrose is remembered for works that tried to explain natural forces in an age when electricity and magnetism were still being actively debated. Among his books are A Treatise on Electricity and An Essay on Magnetism, which reflect both medical interests and a broad fascination with how the physical world works.

He died on January 17, 1798. Though not a household name today, his writing offers a glimpse of a period when surgeons, experimenters, and authors often overlapped, and when new ideas in science could come from far beyond London’s main institutions.