Dr Simon Forman, a most notorious physician by Judith Cook. Vintage, £7.99, pp 228. ISBN 0 09 928962 8. Rating:

Born on the last day of 1552, Simon Forman worked his way up, without the benefit of much formal education, to become a successful and well known London physician. His physic was a blend of astrology, botched anatomy, and physiology, and a polypharmacy, which from a modern perspective seems a hopeful cross between herbalism and witchcraft.

Hardworking, earnest about his profession, and astute in his practice, he was also blessed with a manner that made him attractive (rather in spite of his physical appearance). As a result he won for himself both patients and sexual conquests alike—often the same people. He took the trouble to record details about the former in extensive casenotes, and lists of the latter in a series of private diaries (in which he coined the curious word “halek” for sexual intercourse). He stayed in London during two outbreaks of the plague, further angering the already disapproving Royal College of Physicians by doing so. The college, whose members mostly fled for the country during the outbreaks, never forgave Forman for being self taught (although he belatedly acquired a licence to practise medicine from Cambridge University). As a result the college repeatedly forced him into examinations that had little to do with his fitness to practise. His persistent and expensive failure in those will be familiar to some practitioners of medicine today.

Outside medicine, Forman was a great enthusiast of the theatre of his day, and it is on this basis that history has chiefly been interested in him. He gives first hand accounts of original Shakespearean performances, and was well known enough to be referred to in plays by Ben Jonson. In her brief volume, however, Judith Cook writes about Forman for his own sake, rather than for his peripheral involvement with the world of the great playwrights. She tells an interesting tale, set in a world not only of violence, intrigue, and the threat of early mortality, but also one of surprising litigiousness. Forman seems to have been vain, ambitious, sexually and materially rapacious, and frequently terrified: the possibility of female infidelity was one of his particular fears.

Although enjoyable, this book seems like more of a documentary than a biography. The pages may be full of facts and sketches, but they lack a warm blooded pulse. Cook's account is lively, but not fully lifelike.