From the Medical Heritage Library, new information about Knighton's early medical career – definitely before 1813, when he received his baronetcy, and probably between 1798 to 1803, successful but difficult years when he was in private practice in Plymouth.  

In 1815 the Berks and Bucks Vaccine Institution published a paper to promote vaccination with cowpox as a safer alternative to inoculation with smallpox. A footnote said that some years earlier the then Dr Knighton took matter from the arm of a girl who had developed cowpox following vaccination, and inserted it into one of his patients where it 'produced the disease in a satisfactory manner'.  

This account is entirely plausible. The girl was the younger daughter of a Plymouth physician, Thomas Stewart, who vaccinated her in early 1801 when Knighton was still practising in Plymouth. The young Dr Knighton did not have happy memories of these years; his comment on a bruising incident with unnamed local colleagues was, 'Everything that is wrong punishes itself'. 

In 1803 Knighton left Plymouth for London, and a year later Stewart wrote up the results of vaccination on his own children. If he had ever collaborated with the young doctor who had since left the area, he didn’t bother to mention him.

If you're a person of consequence time travelling to early-nineteenth-century Portsmouth, UK, get yourself a letter of introduction to the proprietor of the local newspaper, man-about-town James Charles Mottley. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Portsmouth awaiting a ship to Malta, was recommended to Mottley as a 'very, very particular friend' by Daniel Stuart of the London Morning Post, and in consequence moved from the Crown Inn to lodge comfortably and cheaply at Mottley's home. Coleridge described Mottley as 'a dashing bookseller' and 'a booted, buck-skin-breeched Jockey' who spared no pains to entertain his guest.

Mottley's attentions didn't end when Coleridge embarked for Malta. Coleridge's wife was to send letters for her husband to Mr Mottley at Portsmouth, and Mottley would forward them to Malta 'under Government covers'. What's more, they'd arrive sooner than if she sent them direct.  

I failed to discover why Mottley had access to the Government mail service, but I do know that his business interests included lotteries, insurance, patent medicine, and possibly prize agency. These enabled him to keep a second home – a modest but genteel cottage about ten miles from Portsmouth in the tiny parish of Blendworth. If he looked across the field behind his house he could see the equally modest home of a Royal Navy purser. Mottley and the purser had at various times unsuccessfully advertised their homes for sale, but in May 1820 the purser sold his house to Knighton, who was known to be George IV's favourite.

The following month Mottley readvertised his Blendworth home, capitalising on his prestigious new neighbour. He cited Knighton's choice of Blendworth as proof of the area's desirability, and tweaked the property description to portray his own country home as a mirror image of Knighton's.  But still no takers.

The 1860 (Old Portsmouth) Project: More than half a century after Coleridge's visit, but close enough for our purposes, and a joy to visit and use. The Crown Inn was 33-36 High Street. Mottley's town house was in St Thomas's Street, west of St Thomas's Church and parallel with the High Street. His newspaper premises were opposite Grand Parade. That makes them 75-77 or, more likely, No 81 from 78-81. No, I'm not going to check the rate books to find out. 

Scroll down each page for meticulously researched digital models, and go walkabout in 1860s Portsmouth.

Picture credit: Evelyn Simak [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

When Knighton visited Nice on the King's business in December 1824 he wrote home to chilly Hampshire about the green peas and artichokes he had just eaten, and the roses, violets, jonquils and jasmine blooming in the hotel garden. By November 1827 he owned property there.  Nice was popular with English people in uncertain health, and I suspect that Knighton's youngest daughter was not strong, but I have no details of the purchase or the property.

The British consul at Nice was Pierre Lacroix. Over the years Knighton mentioned him with respect, met his little girl, and grieved when she died.

Not all the British in Nice shared Knighton's affection for their consul. In June 1826 Thomas Major Pilton, who had lived in Nice for six years, petitioned the Foreign Secretary in London for Lacroix's removal. According to Pilton, so little happened at Nice that the consul's only duty was to sign passports, yet when British subjects needed Lacroix he was  never to be found. Instead he ran numerous lucrative sidelines, all of which involved charging commission. If His Majesty's Government insisted on employing a consul at a port with no trade they would do better to appoint 'some Poor but Brave retired Officer who had Fought and Bled in his Country's defence, and whose health having suffered in the service required a Salubrious Climate to renovate it.'

Lacroix survived Pilton's criticisms. 

This medical guide to Nice is from 1841. 
http://archive.org/stream/39002086471399.med.yale.edu#page/n3/mode/2up

L'Ancien port de Nice by Isidore Dagnan (1794-1873). Municipal museum of Orange, Vaucluse.
Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ancien_port_de_Nice_(FR-06000)_de_Isidore_Dagnan.jpg
Photographed by fr:Utilisateur:Semnoz

Between September 1796 and January 1797, when Knighton was nineteen going on twenty, he undertook the rite of passage between apprenticeship and medical practice, and left Devon to 'walk the wards' under a prestigious medical man at a London hospital. He paid a fee to become a pupil of surgeon Henry Cline at St Thomas's Hospital, paid more fees for lectures by other medics, and spent his Saturday evenings at the Guy's Physical Society which was open to staff and students of St Thomas's and Guy's hospitals.

Each week a Society member reported a case that he had observed, so speakers were usually experienced medical men. On 17 December 1796, however, the floor was given to one of Knighton's fellow students, Hall Overend, who dispassionately reported symptoms he had experienced after cutting his finger in the dissecting room ten weeks earlier.  

The wound was so slight that Overend had ignored it, but within two days it was ulcerated, his whole arm was stiff and he had a swollen gland in his armpit. He healed the wound but the pain and swelling increased. A week later he consulted Astley Cooper, who was another of Knighton's lecturers and a former pupil of Cline. During the next two weeks Overend suffered throbbing pain, delerium and debility. The swelling hardened and filled his armpit, at one stage extending to his nipple. Cooper prescribed leeches to reduce the swelling, a succession of purgatives to flush out the infection, opium for the pain, and incisions in the swelling to remove pus. To discourage further swelling he placed Overend on an antiphlogistic regimen of simple diet and no alcohol.  

At the time of speaking Overend had not yet fully recovered, but he survived to return to Sheffield where he had been apprenticed. There he established a successful practice as a surgeon apothecary, founded his own school of anatomy and medicine, and supported the creation of a second school which is now part of Sheffield University.

Here is a bust of Hall Overend. http://www.picturesheffield.com/frontend.php?keywords=Ref_No_increment;EQUALS;s07723&pos=2&action=zoom 

Astley Cooper in 1825, nearly twenty years after he treated Hall Overend.
Wikimedia Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Astley_Paston_Cooper_2.jpg

John Cary's map, c1812, showing St Thomas's and Guy's hospitals south of the Thames on the approach to London Bridge http://www.foldingmaps.co.uk/cary.jpg

In 1803, a year after the death of his first child, Knighton gave up a successful medical practice in Plymouth, Devon, and moved to London to make a fresh start.  To practise in London Knighton had to become a licenciate of the Royal College of Physicians, which he believed was a straightforward matter of passing the College’s examination.  Once in London, however, he discovered that the College no longer accepted the qualification he held.  

To put his competence beyond doubt Knighton decided to confront the College with a qualification that it could not refuse – a degree in medicine from Edinburgh University –  even though this meant selling a London house which he had already bought and furnished, earning no fees for at least two years, and moving to Edinburgh with his wife. In October 1804 Knighton sold the house, 28 Argyll Street in St James, to Caleb Whitefoord, a successful wine merchant, lifelong supporter of the arts, and sometime diplomat – as a friend of Benjamin Franklin in London Whitefoord was chosen as an intermediary at the end of the American War of Independence.  

Two months earlier The Times had advertised a substantial, well-appointed house in the same position and on the same side of Argyll Street as No 28. Selling points included two drawing rooms, spacious entrance hall and stone stair case, dining parlour, breakfast room, three servant’s bedrooms and a servants’ hall, kitchen, scullery, garden, and cellars for beer, wine and coals.  

I can’t prove that the ad was for No 28, but I do know that No 28 occupied a plot of more than 93ft x 26ft in a fashionable area – not bad for a provincial physician. Whitefoord was able to display a large art collection there, and was the sort of man Knighton admired – educated, cultured, and convivial.  He had a sense of fun, and invented a ‘New Method of Reading Newspapers’ by scanning across the columns rather than down. I’d like to believe that Whitefoord and Knighton remained in touch.

In later life Knighton remembered his time in Edinburgh with affection. He left without taking his degree but, as he’d studied there for two years, the Royal College of Physicians examined him and admitted him as a licentiate.

Caleb Whitefoord is the figure in the middle, holding a lorgnette.
Connoisseurs examining a collection of George Moreland's by James Gillray, 1807.
By kind permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London, under creative commons licence http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw62986/Connoisseurs-examining-a-collection-of-George-Morelands?LinkID=mp04807&search=sas&sText=caleb+whitefoord&OConly=true&role=sit&rNo=3

***

I knew that Knighton’s first London home was in Argyll Street, but I didn’t know 
his house number.  I found him in a street directory, misread the faint ‘8’ on the microfilm for a ‘3’, then wondered why there was no corroborating evidence to connect him with No 23.

***

No 28 was on the west side of Argyll Street, almost opposite Argyll House.  The overlay shows Regent Street, built between 1814 and 1825.
http://www.british-history.ac.uk/image.aspx?compid=41478&filename=fig55.gif&pubid=290

***

Sources

•  D. G. C. Allan, ‘Whitefoord, Caleb (1734–1810)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/29282, accessed 27 June 2013]
  
•  W A S Hewins, ed, The Whitefoord Papers, being the correspondence and other manuscripts of Colonel Charles Whitefoord and Caleb Whitefoord from 1739 to 1810, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1898) [Internet Archive http://archive.org/stream/whitefoordpapers00whituoft#page/n7/mode/2up accessed 16 June 2013]
  
• The Times (London, England), Thurs, 30 August 1804, Issue 6113, page 4, col A
  
• London Metropolitan Archives: Middlesex Deeds Registry MDR 1804/2/351 MDR 1804/8/84
  
•  Westminster City Archives, London: Church Rate Collector’s Books MF737–740

George IV’s death in June 1830 released Knighton from royal duties that had sapped his health and spirits. By July he was planning his retirement, and in September he sold his London home, 9 Hanover Square. The purchaser was Charles Locock, an obstetrician in his early thirties to whom Knighton had once referred patients.

More than twenty years earlier, as a provincial doctor making a second attempt to 
establish himself in London, Knighton had bought the property from Robert Hallifax, one of the physicians-in-ordinary to George, then Prince of Wales. In contrast Locock, who enjoyed the patronage of royal surgeon Benjamin Brodie and respected obstetrician Robert Gooch, both of whom Knighton knew well, brought a thriving practice to 9 Hanover Square.  Nevertheless Knighton and Locock had much in common. Both had attracted mentors who guided their early careers. As their practices grew, both noted a rapid, exponential increase in lucrative connections. And both were befriended by slightly older women who became their confidantes (more about that in a later post).

Robert Hallifax died in 1810, and two years later Knighton was appointed physician-in-ordinary in his place.  In 1831 Locock became physician accoucheur to William IV’s consort, Queen Adelaide, whom Knighton attended in 1820 when she was Duchess of Clarence. In 1840 Locock became physician accoucheur to Queen Victoria.

***

I shepherded the bio through publication, shuffling commas and tweaking headings, ignorant of letters at Westminster City Archives in which Locock discusses Knighton’s practice. How important is stuff like that in a biography of a physician? How many eons did I waste looking for it in the wrong places? What of the trillion hours I wiled away in Westminster City Archives dotting and crossing insignificant 'i's and 't's?  Why did it not occur to me to check out the Locock papers at the Wellcome Library? Now I find there's even a biography of the wretched man.

***

Hanover Square is south of Oxford Street. You can just about make out No 9, second down from the north-east corner.  http://www.motco.com/Map/81005/Sale/imagetwo-a.asp?Picno=81005860&title=+return+to+your+previous+screen+close+this+window+%2D+click+on+the+X+in+the+top+right+corner%2E 

Sources:

• G T Bettanny, revised by Anne Digby, ‘Locock, Sir Charles, first baronet (1799-1875), obstetric physician’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16915 [accessed 9 June 2013, free to members of UK libraries] 
  
• Russell C Maulitz, ‘Metropolitan medicine and the man-midwife: the early life and letters of Charles Locock’, Medical History, Vol 26, Issue 1, Jan 1982, pp25-46 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1139111/?page=1 [accessed 9 June 2013]
  
• Morning Chronicle, London, 11 December 1820 and many subsequent dates
• London Metropolitan Archives: Middlesex Deeds Registry MDR 1834/8/247 and MDR 1834/8/248
  
• Westminster City Archives, London: Poor, Watch and Paving Rates Collector’s Book, MF451