They could not help remembering how the famous doctor had excelled in literature as in medicine; how he had been not only Physician in Ordinary to Queen Anne and Prince George of Denmark, but a satirist and pamphleteer, a wit and the friend of wits--of such wits as Pope and Swift, Harley and Bolingbroke.

Hence they took, as it were instinctively, to physic and the _belles lettres_, and were never without a doctor or an author in the family.
My father, however, like the great Martinus Scriblerus, was both doctor and author.

And he was a John Arbuthnot.

And to carry the resemblance still further, he was gifted with a vein of rough epigrammatic humor, in which it pleased his independence to indulge without much respect of persons, times, or places.

His tongue, indeed, cost him some friends and gained him some enemies; but I am not sure that it diminished his popularity as a physician.