Michael Pearson

Michael Pearson (1730-1806) resided at 34 Spital Square, London.  He opened his first practice in Norton Falgate in 1758, eventually becoming one of London’s most successful physicians, including among his clients two populist politicians, Horne Tooke and John Wilkes. In 1781 he moved to Spital Square into the former house of Lord Bolingbroke.  During this decade he became affiliated with the Unitarians in London, attending the ministry of the General Baptist preacher William Vidler (1758-1816) at Parliament Court, London. Pearson, like so many other dissenters, was active in the reform politics of his day; he was a member of both the Revolution Society and the Society for Constitutional Information as well as an active participant in the effort to repeal the Test and Corporation Acts in 1789. His obituary in the Monthly Repository notes that his ‘political principles were in all cases sound and constitutional’, always  ‘zealous in promoting the cause of freedom’. Pearson was also an active proponent of the abolition of the slave trade. See T. W. Davis, Committees for Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (London: London Record Society, 1978), 40; Tracts Published and Distributed Gratis by the Society for Constitutional Information ... Volume the First (London:  W. Richardson, 1783), 6; Monthly Repository 1 (1806), 492.