Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Wednesday, September 18th,

2024. Today's the birthday of the great English man of letters, Samuel Johnson.

Immortalized in the work of his friend James Boswell, the life of Samuel Johnson. Johnson was a recognized moralist,

literary critic, and lexographer. He compiled on his own the first standardized English dictionary,

complete with history of word usage in great literature, which would become

the model and inspiration behind the Oxford English Dictionary, which is still arguably the

greatest dictionary on the planet. Contemporary of and friend to other notable Englishmen

of the century, such as Edmund Burke,

Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Johnson was a giant of his age, but always praised and beloved as a

man of the people and a lover of mankind. And in today's poem on the death of Dr. Robert Levitt, I think we see that virtue clearly on display.

Levitt was a friend of Johnson's, a Yorkshireman that moved to Paris and worked several years as a waiter,

where he would eavesdrop on the conversations of professional physicians,

picking up what he could of their craft and their know-how,

eventually befriending a group of Parisian doctors that took up a collection to pay for his training,

which was primarily in the science of apothecary, but also included some medical lectures. Levitt then returned to England, where he

became a physician to the lower classes, particularly to those who couldn't afford

the services of a doctor who had been through the complete and rigorous courses of English

medical school.

And though some called him a hack, Johnson always had the highest opinion of Leavitt saying

at one point that he would rather have Leavitt at his side in the midst of a physical crisis

than all of the best minds of the Royal Academy.

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