‘Propagating what the Ancients taught and the moderns improved’:1 The Sources of George Motherby’s A New Medical Dictionary; or, a General Repository of Physic, 1775

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter ODNB) notice, he was trained as a physician, receiving a medical degree from the University of Aberdeen in 1767. He appears as a surgeon in Liverpool in 1766 (Liverpool Directory: 22) and later as a physician in Highgate (Middlesex) (Medical Register 1780: 121). Motherby died in 1793. ODNB also reports that he was conspicuous for his work in Königsberg, where he introduced the technique of vaccination for smallpox about 1770.4 Gause, the Königsberg historian, mentions his having been in Königsberg, and the Königsberg Konsistorialrath and colleague of Kant, Friedrich Samuel Bock, notes Motherby’s skill in variolation in a pamphlet published in 1770, as well as noting that he is leaving the city and expressing the hope that he will return (Sembrzycki 238). It is not known that he ever did. Gause also points out that the first variolation in Königsberg was actually performed by Johann Wilhelm Werner in 1757 (Gause 232). Robert Motherby (1736-1801), George’s brother, migrated from Scotland and founded a trading company, Green, Motherby & Co., and is reported to have been ‘a close friend of Immanuel Kant’.5 Gause claims that Green brought Robert to Königsberg as an eighteen-year