Sir Samuel Garth, an English physician and poet, born in Yorkshire, died in London, Jan. 18, 1711). He studied medicine at Cambridge, settled in London in 1093, and soon secured an extensive practice, and became noted for his classical taste, liberality, and social habits. A quarrel had existed for some years between the physicians who advocated and the apothecaries who opposed the establishment of a free dispensary for the poor. Garth sided with the former, and wrote in their support "The Dispensary," a satirical poem of 2,000 lines in imitation of Boileau's Lutrin (1699); 9th revised ed., 1700). Garth was the leading whig physician of the time, and a member of the Kit-cat club. He wrote several short poems, and partly made a translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses" (1717), to which Dryden, Addison, Gay, and many others contributed. He was knighted by George I. in 1714.