Sir Samuel Garth

Sir Samuel Garth (1661–1719) was an English physician and poet, a leading member of the Whig Kit-Cat Club and a friend of Addison, Pope and Dryden, whose funeral oration he delivered in 1700. He was knighted in 1714 on the accession of George I.

His mock-heroic poem The Dispensary (1699) satirised the 1690s quarrel between the College of Physicians, who backed a free dispensary for the poor, and the apothecaries who opposed it, and became one of the most admired English burlesque epics of its day.