Jacob de Castro Sarmento
Jacob de Castro Sarmento · Science & Medicine
Marrano physician who fled the Inquisition to London, became a Fellow of the Royal Society and championed smallpox inoculation and Newton's science in Portuguese
6 mai 1690, Bragance, Portugal — 14 septembre 1762, Londres, Angleterre
Bragance, Coimbra, Londres
Jacob de Castro Sarmento is recognized among Jewish contributors to Science & Medicine — Marrano physician who fled the Inquisition to London, became a Fellow of the Royal Society and championed smallpox inoculation and Newton's science in Portuguese
Origins and early life
Jacob de Castro Sarmento was born Henrique de Castro Sarmento in Bragança, in northern Portugal, on 6 May 1690, the son of Francisco de Castro Almeida and Violante de Mesquita, New Christians — descendants of the Jews forcibly baptized in 1497 — who were both arrested by the Inquisition in 1708 as secret Jews; the Encyclopaedia Judaica names them, and this fiche rests on those two parents and on the son's own return to Judaism.
Work and career
He took his degrees in philosophy at Évora and in medicine at Coimbra in 1717, practiced briefly in Portugal, and in 1720, with the Inquisition at his heels, fled to London, where he joined the Sephardic congregation of Bevis Marks under the name Jacob and lived openly as a Jew for nearly forty years — until, in 1758, he broke with the synagogue over its rabbinic orthodoxy and lived out his last years as a deist, which this fiche states as plainly as the rest.
In London he became a physician of note and a man of science: he published in 1721 one of the first defenses of inoculation against smallpox, the practice Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had brought from Constantinople, and in 1730 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, one of the first Jews so honored, after introducing a remedy for fevers based on quinine that he sold, with great success, as 'Água de Inglaterra'. He was also the interpreter of Newton to the Portuguese-speaking world: his Teórica verdadeira das marés of 1737 explained the theory of the tides to readers in Portugal and Brazil, and his correspondence and his gifts of books and instruments helped the Portuguese Enlightenment find its way past the Inquisition. He died in London on 14 September 1762.
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Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/castro-sarmento-jacob-henrique-de
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Marrano physician who fled the Inquisition to London, became a Fellow of the Royal Society and championed smallpox inoculation and Newton's science in Portuguese
Source: https://www.encyclopedia.com/religion/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/castro-sarmento-jacob-henrique-de
