QI The Book of the Dead

have been intimate but not sexual friendships, usually with him in the role of mentor. Which isn’t to say he didn’t get up to mischief. At one of the endless parties the French threw for him, a young woman patted his portly belly and remarked, ‘Dr Franklin, if this were on a woman, we’d know what to think.’ To which he replied, ‘Half an hour ago, mademoiselle, it was on a woman and now what do you think?’ In this vein, when asked by a young male friend for advice in choosing a mistress, Franklin wrote back extolling the virtues of older women. He listed eight good reasons, including:
    5. Because… The Face first grows lank and wrinkled; then the Neck; then the Breast and Arms; the lower Parts continuing to the last as plump as ever: So that covering all above with a Basket, and regarding only what is below the Girdle, it is impossible of two Women to know an old from a young one. And as in the dark all Cats are grey, the Pleasure of corporal Enjoyment with an old Woman is at least equal, and frequently superior, every Knack being by Practice capable of Improvement .
     
    His final reason was even more to the point: ‘They are so grateful! ’ As always with Franklin, it’s difficult to tell just how serious he was being, but the letter, first discovered in 1881, has done him no harm. In 2003 Time magazine published an article on him entitled ‘Why he was a babe magnet’. Franklin’s more selfdeprecating name for himself was ‘Dr Fatsides’.
    Benjamin Franklin – scientist, diplomat, philosopher, inventor, businessman, civic leader, patriot, humorist, revolutionary and ladies’ man – died in 1790, aged eighty-four. Sixty years earlier he’d written his own immortal epitaph:
    The Body of B. Franklin Printer; Like the Cover of an old Book, Its Contents torn out, And stript of its Lettering and Gilding, Lies here, Food for Worms. But the Work shall not be wholly lost: For it will, as he believ’d, appear once more, In a new & more perfect Edition, Corrected and Amended By the Author .
     
    Half the population of Philadelphia – 20,000 people – attended his funeral, and his pallbearers included representatives of all the main religious denominations. (Ever the pragmatist, Franklin had been careful to contribute to each of their building funds, including one for a new synagogue.) Few men can honestly say they have left the world a better place. Through the warmth and courage of his character and the deep originality of his mind,Citizen Ben Franklin, the first self-taught American genius, was certainly one of them.

     
    The career of the English doctor Edward Jenner (1749–1823) can’t possibly match Franklin’s for excitement. He spent most of his life working quietly in his home village of Berkeley in Gloucestershire, but he too changed the world beyond all recognition. The two men shared the same sunny outlook and the same voracious enthusiasm for learning and experiment. In Jenner’s case, this led to a discovery that has probably saved more human lives than any other.
    The eighth of nine children, he lost both his parents before he was six but his elder siblings looked after him well. His sister Deborah took him in to her family home, and his brother Stephen planned out his education, so that by the age of thirteen he was apprenticed to a surgeon in nearby Chipping Sodbury. Edward was a happy, self-absorbed child, obsessed with fossil-hunting and natural history. By the time he was nine he had a large collection of dormouse nests and would always carry a large pocketbook to record his observations. He could never walk past a butcher’s shop without peering at the various organs on display in case they revealed something anatomically interesting. He maintained his interest in such things throughout his life, long after he became famous. As an old man, he was delighted to be the first to find and identify the fossilised bones of an aquatic dinosaur (the plesiosaur) near his home. To him, fossils were no dusty old bits of rock; they were ‘monuments to departed worlds’.
    Edward Jenner would have liked Epicurus’ belief that happiness comes from living an unobtrusive life. ‘As for fame,what is it?’ he wrote to a friend. ‘A gilded butt for ever pierced with the arrows of malignancy.’ But, try as he might, anonymity was not to be his destiny. Aged twenty-one he went up to London to study anatomy, physiology and midwifery under the eminent surgeon John Hunter (1728–93).