Dr Simon Forman: A Most Notorious Physician

by JudithCook (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2001

  $3.29

  Charismatic and ambitious, Simon Forman rose from a poor upbringing in Wiltshire to become one of the wealthiest doctors in London. This account of his life sees him denounced as a quack and an astrologer who used black magic. It covers his private life through deciphering his intimate coded diary.

• Used

  Paperback
  2002

  $3.66

  Simon Forman was one of the most extraordinary personalities of Elizabethan and Jacobean London. Charismatic, volatile and ambitious, he was doctor to the giants of the theatre and his 'playbook' contains the first eye-witness accounts of Shakespeare's plays. Like most doctors he was also an astrologer, reading the stars for all and sundry. Constantly on the fringes of great events and court intrigues, his name has been linked with Sir Walter Raleigh's mysterious group, 'the School of Night' and with the notorious Overbury poisoning case, in which the beautiful Countess of Essex was accused of murder. Also uncovered is Forman's private world, that of a compulsive womaniser who kept a coded diary, never fully deciphered before, a record of promiscuity as colourful as the journals of Pepys and Boswell.