COTTON, Nathaniel, an English physician of the eighteenth century, who long practised at St Albans, where he had the principal charge of a lunatic asylum, and where also he died in the year 1788. Like several other medical men of this country, he cultivated poetry as well as physic; and although he published observations on a particular kind of scarlet fever, yet he is better known as the author of poetical pieces, inserted in the collection published by Dodley, and particularly by a work in verse, entitled, Visions for the Improvement of Children, which has been several times reprinted.