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- Thomas Henry FRS (c. 1734-1816)
Thomas Henry was one of the founding members [1] of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and later its president. He had trained as a surgeon-apothecary at Wrexham and was assistant to Mr. Malbon, a visiting apothecary in Oxford. He then settled in Knutsford for five years. There is a record of the marriage of Thomas Henry to Mary Kinsey at Knutsford Parish Church on 16 June 1760. Phoebe described as "the daughter of Thomas Henry, apothecary of Nether Knutsford" was baptised at the same church on 3 June 1763. Henry moved to King Street, Manchester where he was in business as a surgeon-apothecary.
At that time few medical men had university training. Surgeons and apothecaries qualified by apprenticeship. They provided most of the medical care in the kingdom. They were in effect the forerunner of the modern general practitioners. Physicians were educated at university but there were few of them and they were mainly in London.
Henry discovered a new way of making magnesium carbonate which he used as an antacid. It became known as Henry's Magnesia, a popular medicine of the time. He presented a paper on its preparation to the Royal College of Physicians in London in 1771. This earned him the name of Magnesia Henry. He was pressed by friends to make the medicine and it was manufactured in East Street, Bale Street until at least 1881.
The business, which also made soda water, proved to be profitable. Thomas Henry published [2] a paper on the preservation of sea water from putrefaction which showed the importance of magnesium salts in the process of putrefaction. This paper also had an account of a newly invented machine for impregnating water with fixed air (carbon dioxide) communicated to Mr Henry by I Haygarth MB FRS and read on 21 November 1781. The latter describes how fixed air could be made by the action of acid on lime and the gas bubbled into water. This was clearly a forerunner of his own manufacture of soda water and probably led to his son's quantitative studies on the absorption of gases by fluids culminating in Henry's Law.
Thomas Henry was an apothecary to Manchester Infirmary and became [3] a trustee of Cross Street Unitarian Chapel. This is interesting in view of the record found at Knutsford of the baptism of his daughter in an Anglican church. Thomas Henry died in 1816 aged 82. His son William Henry wrote [4] an appreciation of his father in 'Manchester Memoirs'.
https://www.thornber.net/cheshire/ideasmen/henry.html
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Barker - Humphrys Family Tree
1734 - 1816 (81 years)