What we now understand about daily life centuries ago is mostly based on the events that people wrote down in journals, letters, diaries, and the like. The journals of Samuel Pepys address the late 1600s. And decades earlier — but also in England — another diarist provided similar details about his own time. That was Simon Forman, who was born December 31, 1552.
Forman was born into a fairly average family for the time, but his father died when he was 11, which forced him into a 10-year apprenticeship with a merchant. He helped the merchant trade in cloth, salt, and — most significantly for Forman — herbal remedies. After arguing with the merchant’s wife, his apprenticeship was terminated, which in modern parlance means he was fired. He managed to get into Magdalen College in Oxford despite having only a couple of years of formal schooling. He probably studied medicine and astrology there, since when he was in his 30s he opened a London practice as a combination doctor and astrologer. In those days the two things were not as dissimilar as you might think.
He also began documenting all his cases in notebooks, including details about medical patients as well as the questions people brought him as an astrologer. His casebooks contain information about everything from illness to stolen goods and career opportunities. His astrological predictions were accurate (or lucky) enough to give him a growing reputation, but his medical practice received the opposite sort of attention; the College of Physicians tried to ban him from it. He countered that by convincing the University of Cambridge to give him a license to practice medicine.
According to his own notes, Forman was quite a ladies’ man, and his journals make note of all his lovers. He was also a man about town in early 1600s London, and evidently attended Shakespeare’s plays, performed by Shakespeare’s own troupe of actors in his original Globe theatre. He seems to have been personally acquainted with Shakespeare, as well as various others in the writer’s inner circle. Some of them were even Forman’s patients.
Forman’s papers were published after his death; they amounted to sixty-four volumes, and are still available. The originals are in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, and the University of Cambridge digitized the whole set. Forman is still remembered by a series of mystery novels, The Casebook of Dr. Simon Forman, written by Judith Cook. The 1998 film Shakespeare in Love includes the character Dr. Moth, which is based on Forman. And in 2019, the video game Astrologaster was released by Nyamyam — it’s centered around Forman and his life and times.
As for Forman himself, he accurately predicted his own death, after which his reputation was for a while tarnished by the possibility that he had been involved in the sensational murder of Thomas Overbury — two of his patients were found guilty, and the prosecutor in the case suggested that Forman had provided the poison. He was long gone and nobody had any evidence, but for years afterward (at least in London), Forman was regarded as a possible accomplice.
