Richard Huck (243)
Election date: 1768 (Huck later took on the surname of his wealthy wife, Saunders. Elected to the American Society when it absorbed the membership of the Medical Society.)Richard Huck-Saunders (1720–1785) was a physician, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via the absorption of the Medical Society by the American Society in 1768. Born in Westmorland county in northwest England, Huck’s early education fostered a particular faculty with Latin, which he anticipated to deploy in the study of classics at Oxford. But a fall and the resulting infection turned his imagination to surgery and the medical arts—he turned apprentice, until 1745, when he became a military surgeon in the Earl of Loudoun’s regiment. He took a formal M.D. from Marischal College in 1749; the next year he rejoined the army and sailed to Minorca to become surgeon to the 33rd Regiment of Foot. With the start of the Seven Years’ War, he traveled with Loudon to America in 1756 and was named Physician to the Army in 1757. He returned to England in 1762. After a bit of time on the Continent, Huck settled in London in 1765, where he was licensed by the Royal College of Physicians before appointment to Middlesex Hospital in 1766 and election to the Royal Society in 1768. Shy but affable, Huck won friends easily and gave of himself generously: among his admirers was APS Member Benjamin Rush, at least initially. Rush prized Huck’s support to win election to the Royal Society himself, but Huck’s skepticism about Rush’s accomplishments, however kindly expressed, turned Rush against him. Huck’s 1777 marriage to Jane Saunders, heiress to the estate of the naval hero Admiral Sir Charles Saunders, spurred Richard to take her name. The resulting children went on to marry well themselves, but Huck-Saunders’s world crumbled with the death of Jane in 1780. He never fully recovered. His 1784 election to Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians, speciali gratia—a particularly rare distinction, but especially for one not of Oxford or Cambridge—was a highlight of these last years, but Huck-Saunders died the following year at his home. (PI)