Matthew Gwinne

Matthew Gwinne (16 May 1558 – 1627) was an English physician.

Life

Gwinne was born in London on 16 May 1558. He was of Welsh descent, a son of Edward Gwinne, grocer. On 28 April 1570 he entered Merchant Taylors' School. He was elected to a scholarship at St John's College, Oxford, in 1574, and afterwards became a fellow there. He proceeded B.A. 14 May 1578, and M.A. 4 May 1582. In 1582, as a regent master, he read lectures in music, but on 19 February 1583 he was allowed to discontinue the lecture. In 1588 he was junior proctor.

Queen Elizabeth visited Oxford in September 1592, and he took part as replier in moral philosophy in an academic disputation held for her amusement, defending the Moderns against the Ancients and being cut short by the proctors; and at the same time was appointed to provide for plays in Christ Church. He took the degree of M.B. 17 July 1593, and was the same day created M.D., on the recommendation of Lord Buckhurst, chancellor of the university; one of his quaestiones on this occasion was "whether the frequent use of tobacco was beneficial".

Works The Gresham inaugural oration, with another, was published in 1605: Orationes duae, Londini habitae in sedibus Greshamiis in laudem Dei, Civitatis, Fundatoris, Electorum. Like all his Latin prose compositions these orations are crowded with quotations. Vertumnus sive annus recurrens was printed in London in 1607, with a preface praising the king, and with prefatory verses to Gwinne by Sir William Paddy and John Craig, the royal physicians. Gwinne proves that Anthony's aurum potabile contained no gold, and that if it had, the virtues of gold as a medicine in no way corresponded to its value as a metal, and were few, if any. It is written in the form of a Latin dialogue between Anthony and his opponent; prefixed to were laudatory verses from the physicians Paddy, Craig, Forster, Fryer, and Hammond. Allen Debus considers that this work shows knowledge of the Paracelsian as well as the Galenist literature, and that the polemic, from the conservative angle, also shows some discrimination amongst different kinds of chemists in the medical field.

He was friendly with literary men, especially with John Florio, to whose works he contributed several commendatory sonnets under the pseudonym of "Il Candido". In the second dialogue of Giordano Bruno's La Cena de le Ceneri (1584) Gwinne and Florio are represented by Bruno as introducing him to Greville, at whose house the three dined before holding a philosophical disputation.

Gwinne wrote also: There was a dedicatory Latin poem by John Sandsbury. Nero was never acted, because of "the multitude of roles, the unequal length of the Act, and the implausibility of producing such an intractable piece." Vertumnus, 1607 Oratio in laudem Musices, first published in The Lives of the Professors of Gresham College (1740) by John Ward. Memorial inscriptions in St John's College Chapel to John Case, Richard Latewar (attributed on internal evidence), and John Wicksteed.