Philadelphia physician.

Studied medicine in London and Edinburgh (1770-73). Assumed Cadwalader Evans’s medical practice in Philadelphia (1773). Physician of the Philadelphia almshouse (1773) and the Pennsylvania Hospital (1777-1827). Director of the Library Company of Philadelphia (1778-1835). Founder (1787) and president (1818-35) of the College of Physicians. Member (1774) and curator (1795) of the American Philosophical Society.

Son of Thomas and Jane Parke of Chester County, Pennsylvania. Educated at the College of Philadelphia (M.D., 1770). Married Rachel Pemberton (1775); five children. Quaker.

First letter in correspondence: May 3, 1784; Elaine Forman Crane, ed., The Diary of Elizabeth Drinker (3 vols., Boston, 1991), iii, 2194; Early Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society . . . from 1744 to 1838 (Philadelphia, 1884), p. 87.