Edward Jorden

Edward Jorden (1569 to 1633) was an English physician and chemist, born at High Halden in Kent. Accounts of his English university education differ: one has him at Oxford, probably Hart Hall, and the other at Peterhouse, Cambridge, but both agree that he received his medical education in Italy, attending the universities of Padua, Bologna, Ferrara and Venice and taking his MD at Padua in 1591. He became a Licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians in November 1595 and a Fellow in December 1597, practised in Bishopsgate, London from 1596 to 1600, and then in Bath, where he died and was buried in the Abbey Church. In 1595 he was examined at a censorial hearing after a dispute with an apothecary and was allowed to practise on condition that he read several works of Galen. He is best known for A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother of 1603, the first English book on hysteria. He was the first English physician to view women accused of witchcraft as people with a medical condition, and he served as expert witness at their trials, as in the case of Elizabeth Jackson, who was convicted despite his defence.