Sir Samuel, a well-known physician and poet of the Queen Anne and early Georgian period, was a native of Yorkshire. He studied at Peterhouse, Cambridge, joined the college of physicians in London, and became a fellow in 1692. He was the leading Whig physician, as Radcliffe was that of the Tories; and in 1714 he was knighted with Marlborough's sword by George I. His social and liberal spirit made him friends among all parties, and he also enjoyed considerable reputation as author of the Dispensary, a popular poem on a popular subject. This appeared in 1699, and went through seven editions in the author's lifetime, each edition being corrected and enlarged. On a copy at present (1855) in the possession of Mr Rogers, Pope made some corrections, which were adopted by Garth. The object of this poem was to ridicule the company of apothecaries and certain medical men who set themselves to thwart and oppose a benevolent edict issued by the college of physicians, that the poor should have advice gratis. The subject is treated in a ludicrous allegorical style, in the heroic couplet, which Pope afterwards carried to such perfection in his Rape of the Lock and other works. Garth also edited a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, supplying himself the fourteenth and part of the fifteenth book. This was published in 1717, and he died in 1719. In the brilliant society of that period, as a member of the Kit Kat Club, and the associate of Halifax, Addison, Congreve, Swift, and Pope, Garth appears to have been a favourite. He was unfixed in his religious opinions, but Pope says he was a good Christian without knowing it, and that he died a Papist. A more characteristic anecdote is related by Swift's friend Alderman Barber, who writes to the Dean, "You may remember Mr Garth said he was glad when he was dying, for he was weary of having his shoes pulled off and on!" The force of pococurante indifference could no further go. But there was little serious feeling among the wits of that age, save with Addison and Arbuthnot, and most of them affected a sort of Roman superiority to those terrors of death which have shaken so many stronger minds.