Samuel Musgrave

Samuel Musgrave (born September 29, 1732 in Washfield / Devon (England) , † July 4, 1780 in Bloomsbury (Camden) , today a borough of London ) was an English classical philologist and doctor.

Samuel Musgrave was the son of a doctor. At the University of Oxford he studied Latin and Greek, among other things, from 1749 to 1754 and graduated with a BA . This was followed by the Radcliffe traveling fellowship , with whom he stayed from 1754 to 1765 mainly in France, especially in Paris , and the Netherlands. In 1756 the master's degree followed, also in Oxford. In 1760 Musgrave was inducted into the Royal Society . In 1762/63, in the tradition of his father, he continued to study medicine, which he completed as a doctorate at the University of Leiden . In 1763 he was accepted into the Académie Royal des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres . From 1766 Musgrave worked first in Exeter , then in Plymouth as a doctor. Between 1765 and 1770 he tried in vain to prove that members of the English government had corruption in connection with the Peace of Paris of 1763 , which was supposed to end the Seven Years War . Central to this was a pamphlet from 1765, addressed to the people of the county of Devon , claiming that the spy and diplomat Charles d'Eon de Beaumont , who lived in exile in London, had evidence of this accusation. This denied the allegations and the House of Commons ruled in 1770 in Musgrave's disadvantage. This had a profound effect on his practical work as a doctor, which is why he settled in Bloomsbury, London, in 1775 and had to work primarily as a writer on philological and medical topics in order to support his income. In 1775 he also received his doctorate in medicine at Oxford. In 1777 Musgrave was inducted into the Royal College of Physicians .

Although Musgrave had published early works in the field of medicine early in his career, in 1757, especially his studies in psychosomatics were of importance, his more important scientific achievements lie in philology. Here his performances were less time-typical antiquarian , than in the althumanistischen tradition standing. Together with Thomas Thyrwitt , he advanced the English research on the textual constitution of Euripides and Sophocles . He improved the research of Josuah Barnes , Thomas Johnson and Jeremiah Markland and influenced contemporary and later generations of British classical scholars, including Richard Porson and Peter Elmsley . A large part of Musgrave's emendations and conjectures can still be found in the modern Euripides editions.

literature

• Musgrave, Samuel . In: Encyclopædia Britannica . 11th edition. tape 19 : Mun - Oddfellows . London 1911, p. 69 (English, full text [ Wikisource ]).
• Manfred Landfester : Musgrave, Samuel. In: Peter Kuhlmann , Helmuth Schneider (Hrsg.): History of the ancient sciences. Biographical Lexicon (= The New Pauly . Supplements. Volume 6). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02033-8 , Sp. 862 f.

Web links

• Literature by and about Samuel Musgrave in the catalog of the German National Library