After being admitted as a doctor of medicine at Cambridge, he practised with great distinction at Shrewsbury and Norwich, but was soon summoned by Henry the Eighth to deliver anatomical lectures to the surgeons in London. He was much honoured at the court of Edward the Sixth, and the appointment of body physician, which this monarch bestowed on him, he retained also under Queen Mary and Elizabeth. In 1547, he became a Fellow of the College of Physicians, over which, at a later period, he presided for seven years. He constantly supported the honour of this body with great zeal, compiled its Annals from the period of its foundation by Linacre to the end of his own presidentship, and originated an establishment, the first of the kind in England[790], for annually performing two public dissections of human bodies.
That he was thus established in London before the year 1551 is certain, yet he was present in Shrewsbury, during the Sweating Sickness. His pamphlet[791] upon this disease, the first and last published in England, did not, however, appear before 1552, after all was over. It is written in strong language and a popular style, and with a laudable frankness; for Kaye blames in it, without any reserve, the gross mode of living of his countrymen, and does not fatigue his reader with too much book learning, which neither he nor his contemporaries could refrain from displaying on other occasions. He reserved this for the Latin version of his pamphlet, which was published four years later[792], and although, judged according to a modern standard, it is far from being satisfactory, yet it contains an abundance of valuable matter, and proves its author to be a good observer; and in this we can nowhere mistake that he is an Englishman of the sixteenth century, however numerous the terms he may borrow from Celsus. His doctrines are of the old Greek school throughout, of which the physicians of those times were staunch supporters; hence the term _ephemera[793] pestilens_, his comparison of the disease with the similar fevers of the ancients[794], and his accurate appreciation of the important doctrine of æthereal spirits, to which he refers its chief causes, and, according to which, the corrupted atmosphere (spiritus corrupti) becomes mixed in the lungs with the spirits of blood, (spiritus sanguinis,) whence it at once appears explicable to him, why many persons may be attacked with the Sweating Sickness at the same time, and even in different places, and why the parts of the body in which, according to the ancient Greek notion, the æthereal spirits developed themselves, were most violently affected with this disease[795]. From the relationship of the infected air to the æthereal spirits in the body, polluted by intemperance, it also appears explicable to him, why foreigners in England, in whom this pollution took place in a less degree, were, only in cases of individual exception, attacked by the Sweating Sickness[796], not to mention other theoretical notions.