Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Doody, Samuel
DOODY, SAMUEL (1656–1706), botanist, the eldest of the second family of his father, John Doody, an apothecary in Staffordshire, who afterwards removed to London, where he had a shop in the Strand, was born in Staffordshire 28 May 1656. He was brought up to his father's business, to which he succeeded about 1696. He had given some attention to botany before 1687, the date of a commonplace book (Sloane MS. 3361), but his help is first acknowledged by Ray in 1688 in the second volume of the ‘Historia Plantarum.’ He was intimate with the botanists of his time, Ray, already mentioned, Plukenett, Petiver, and Sloane, and had specially devoted himself to cryptogams, at that time very little studied, and became an authority upon them. He undertook the care of the Apothecaries' Garden at Chelsea in 1693, at the salary of 100l., which he seems to have continued until his death. Two years later he was elected fellow of the Royal Society. The results of his herborisations round London are recorded in his copy of Ray's ‘Synopsis,’ 2nd edit., now in the British Museum, which were used by Dillenius in preparing the third edition. He suffered much from gout, and appears to have been rather notorious for a failing which, although not specified, seems to have been intemperance. He died, after some weeks' illness, the last week in November 1706, and was buried at Hampstead 3 Dec., his funeral sermon being preached by his old friend, Adam Buddle [q. v.] His sole contribution as an author seems to be a paper in the ‘Phil. Trans.’ (1697), xix. 390, on a case of dropsy in the breast.
[Pulteney's Sketches, ii. 107–9; Trimen and Dyer's Flora of Middlesex, 376–8; Sloane MSS. 2972, 3361, 4043; Sherard MSS. (Roy. Soc.); Nichols's Lit. Illustr. i. 341–2, where the index has a misprint of ‘music’ for musci.]