Thomas Linacre (1460–1524) was born at Canterbury of parents who have eluded research, and his connexion with the old family that took its name (Linacre = flax farmer) from a hamlet near Chesterfield in Derbyshire was regarded by J. F. Payne as merely an assumption. Believing that those devoted to learning should be free from the obligations of the married state Linacre remained single, so that he had no direct descendants; his will[2] contains references to his brother, who had the same Christian name--Thomas--as himself, two sisters Alice and Joan, two nieces Agnes and Margaret, and two cousins Robert Wright of Chester and Richard Wright; but according to Payne[3] the family history cannot be traced any further. I recently had a faint hope that I had got on the track of collateral descendants, but on enquiry it was courteously made clear that though the family in question was descended from a Mrs. Linnecar, her connexion with T. Linacre rested on tradition only and that no documentary evidence or genealogical tree existed to justify any claim. It may be remembered that Linacre was one of the earliest English students (_circa_ 1488), more than a century before William Harvey, to study medicine and take the doctorate at the ancient University of Padua, which celebrated its seven-hundredth anniversary in May 1922. It is, next, natural to look back to the first holder of this Lectureship, and to wonder what manner of man he was and what he taught. To the Master of St. John’s College I am indebted for the few details that are known of Christopher Jackson (B.A. 1524–25, M.A. 1527), who was buried in the old Chapel on July 2, 1528, his death according to a brass erected to his memory in the new antechapel being “e sudore britanico.”[4] Some of the Lecturers were without a medical qualification, and of these Matthew Prior (1664–1721), the poet and diplomatist, who was a “Medical Fellow” for life and Linacre Lecturer from July 5, 1706, to July 7, 1710, was the most famous. That he ever lectured is more than doubtful, but he appears to have thought out reasons for not doing so: at any rate his _Alma or the Progress of the Mind_ (written about 1715) contains in its third canto the lines: how could I explain The various labyrinths of the brain! Surprise my readers whilst I tell them Of cerebrum and cerebellum! How could I play the commentator On dura and on pia mater! Three of the Linacre Lecturers under the old dispensation stand out for special remembrance on account of their influence on Medicine: William Heberden the Elder (1710–1801), the author of the _Commentarii de Morborum Historia et Curatione_, published posthumously (1802), held office from 1734–38, and was described by Sir William Osler as the “English Celsus.”[5] [Illustration: FIG. 2.--Sir Thomas Watson, Bt., M.D., F.R.S. President of the Royal College of Physicians of London, 1862–67. Linacre Lecturer, 1822–26.