King James I might have been a sexually confused misogynist ...

... but he did have some sense.

At  a mini-exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery on 17th-century science, I met Theodore de Mayerne (1573-1655), the Hugenot physician who emigrated to England after initially visiting to treat Anne of Denmark in 1606.

He wrote in his diary that the King "asserts the art of medicine to be supported by mere conjecture, and useless because uncertain".