In considering the import of Linacre’s endeavours to promote the study of medicine at Oxford and Cambridge, it must be remembered that the idea of establishing lectureships or professorships for public instruction was quite a novel one in England, and that Fox, Bishop of Winchester, appears to have been the first, in 1517, to endow lectures in Greek and Latin. And Linacre unquestionably has the merit of first applying such an idea to the improvement of instruction in medicine. His foundations did not take full effect till 1524. Again, we have a letter from the University of Oxford “to the renowned Dr. Linacre,” couched in the most exaggerated style of panegyric, thanking him for his proposition to endow “splendid lectures” in medicine, lauding his “sober gravity and erudite judgment,” “his greatness,” “the transcendency of his gifts.” The letters patent founding the lectures were dated on the 12th of October, 1524, only eight days before his death. Two of the lectureships were to be founded at Oxford and one at Cambridge, and to be named Linacre’s Lectures. Thirty pounds a year, a considerable sum then, was to be devoted to this purpose by his trustees, out of the proceeds of two manors at Newington, near Sittingbourne. But although the trustees, Sir Thomas More, Tonstal, Stokesley, Tonstal’s successor, and John Shelley, were men who might have been expected to pay attention to Linacre’s desires, yet, probably owing to the busy occupations in which they were engaged, they failed to carry them into full effect; and it was not till the third year of Edward VI. that Tonstal, the surviving trustee, assigned two of the lecturers to Merton College, Oxford, and one to St. John’s College, Cambridge. Their office was to expound publicly certain parts of Hippocrates or Galen. That his lectures failed to become what Linacre would have wished, was due to the common defect of that age in not foreseeing the revolutions in learning that were to come, and not providing any elasticity in their foundations. Thus these lectureships, which might have powerfully aided the development of medicine, remained of little use till modern times, when they have been placed on an improved footing. “It has been questioned,” writes his biographer, “whether he was a better Latinist or Grecian, a better grammarian or physician, a better scholar or man. That Linacre was of a great natural sagacity, and of a discerning judgment in his own profession, we have the concurrent testimony of the most knowing of his contemporaries. In many cases which were considered desperate, his practice was successful. In the case of his friend Lilye, he foretold his certain death if he submitted to the opinion of some rash persons who advised him and prevailed with him to have a malignant strumous tumour in his hip cut off, and his prognostic was justified by the event.