Richard Mead was born at Worcester House, Middlesex in 1673 to Matthew Meade and Elizabeth Walton. He studied classics at the University of Utrecht before studying medicine at Leiden, leaving in 1695 without completing his degree. He received his MD later that year in Padua. He began a medical practice in London the following year, without a licence from the Royal College of Physicians of London. Mead began work as a physician to St Thomas’s Hospital in 1703 and was also appointed as a reader in anatomy by the London Company of Barber–Surgeons. He joined the council of the Royal Society in 1705. He was additionally a major collector of books and antiquities, which were auctioned off after his death over a period of 56 days. Mead died in 1754.
