Hey trolls, keep it up because if you’re super persistent, there’s a place for you in the history books.
Today’s Moment of Science… Bane of The Royal Society, “Sir” John Hill.
For someone who’s remembered as being super goddamn obnoxious in his determination to make sure the world knew how smart he was, it’s hard to tell how smart he was. If ever there was a prototype of the sonofabitch who built up their reputation for being a smartass antiestablishment bro based largely on the smell of his own farts, it was John Hill.
Uh, Sir John Hill.
Depending on your source, he went to medical school in Cambridge. Or University of St. Andrews. Or he bought his degree, or maybe he wasn’t formally educated at all. But having been born in 1716, it was pretty easy for this failed actor in his early twenties to fake it in the dark arts of Georgian era bullshit medicine. Or as we call it in LA, getting a job at a medispa to support your dreams.
To be fair, in the mid-1700s, we were still working with leeches and humours. Any herbs he jacked up the prices on were probably no better or worse than contemporary medicine of the day.
He had a grandiose view of himself, wanting nothing more than to be a celebrity. Writing gave that to him in some regard. An influencer before influencers, through the course of his meandering career he was a novelist, a playwright, and a gossip columnist. He published a positively enormous amount of his musings on medicine, theology, military history, politics, acting, and all fields of sciences. He also wrote an opera. As you do.
That said, reportedly a lot of his academic writing outside of botany was, at best, hacky.
Then Hill got way into botany. He’s one of the first (if not the first) botanist to bring the Linnaeus classification system to England in the 1750s. From 1759 until his death in 1775, he worked on The Vegetable System, a massive twenty-six volume expenditure with 1,600 illustrations. He was even awarded knighthood for it in 1774 in Sweden, where Linnaeus hailed from.
Through his career he was credited on over seventy scientific publications, on everything from hypochondriacs to insects, though undoubtedly his best work was his botanical research.
So when he wanted to get into the Royal Society super wicked badly, it seemed like a given. If you were a scientist, it was the feather in your cap, the gold star that said “you did good, mate.” There were members who weren’t even scientists, so why would he be turned down?
Simple: they could just turn him down if they felt like it.
They felt like it.
As are so many things in his life, the exact details on his rejection are lost to history. Reportedly as he was wrapping up a manuscript for publication, his publisher thought it’d be a better sell if ‘F.R.S.’, for ‘Fellow of the Royal Society’, was printed after his name. All he would need were three fellows to sign his application, and he had friends at the Royal Society, right?
Three hundred fellows, and fewer than three would claim him as their man.
As a prolific writer, he’d already published writing calling their members “butterfly hunters,” “cockle shell merchants” and “metal scrapers.” In his mind, the great honor wouldn’t be his, it would be theirs for being in a society with him. Somehow he was surprised when they didn’t want him in their little science club after he’d been an insulting prick.
Like the 1700s version of a guy who slides into your DMs with a dick pic and then calls you a fat whore when you won’t fuck him, the Royal Society became John Hill’s fat whore.
He published ‘A Review of the Works of the Royal Society’, a book length satirical critique of the organization. Then came ‘A Dissertation Upon Royal Societies,’ bitching about Royal Society meetings.
He couldn’t help himself and wrote ‘Lucina Sine Concubitu,’ meaning ‘pregnancy without intercourse.’ Submitted under a pseudonym, it claimed to have found a way for women to get pregnant without sex and proposed a royal edict to ban people from sex for a year. It was described as being “written and published by Hill as a hoax upon the Royal Society in revenge for his rejection as a candidate for membership.” Fucking Christ man, find a book club.
His botany experience did him well working in possibly his most prestigious role as the gardener at Kensington Palace.
This has been your daily Moment of Science, just throwing it out there that, were Sir Hill alive today, he would have been in the IDW bitching about his freedoms to be an asshole.
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