Dr. Timothie Bright, 1550-1615: A Survey of His Life With a Biography of His Writings.

Abstract

Timothie Bright was "The Father of Modern Shorthand" and the author of an important precursor to "The Anatomy of Melancholy," entitled, "Treatise of Melancholie," 1586. He was not, as far as I know, an ancestor of the much more famous Richard Bright, but he did have some claim to fame in being the great-grandfather of the celebrated Restoration dramatist, William Congreve. Sir Geoffrey Keynes, whose distinguished contributions to bibliography, medical history, and culture make him a splendid ornament of our time, chose Dr. Timothie Bright as the subject for his Gideon de Laune Lecture, delivered at Apothecaries Hall, April 28, 1961. He took the somewhat meager historic facts we have, and sought out all the copies he could find of Bright's various books and their several editions. From this he built a learned bibliography, complete with many photographs of title pages and other parts of the several books. From this