Painless parasites: how leeches cured one of Adam Smith’s students

(Continued from yesterday’s post) Adam Smith’s private pupil at Glasgow, Thomas Petty-Fitzmaurice, became ill yet again in the fall of 1760. In a letter (dated November 11, 1760) to Fitzmaurice’s father, Lord Shelburne, Smith writes: “Mr Fitzmaurice being at present indisposed with sore eyes I write this letter to make his apology to your Lordship and to Lady Shelburne for his not having written so regularly of late as usual. He got cold at Inveraray [a small coastal town in Argyll and Bute, Scotland, located on the western shore of Loch Fyne], the effect of which was to make the scurvy on his face strike in and fall upon his eyes. They were, he tells me, ill there, and have been so ever since his return. These three days he has been confined to a dark room. Had he taken proper care of them immediately upon his return, they probably would have given him less trouble. But his manliness hinders him from being so careful of his person, or as attentive to the first beginning of Disorder…