Connor was born in
County Kerry in , and was instructed by private tutors. With the intention of adopting the medical profession he went to France about 1686, and studied at the universities of Montpelier and Paris, but took the degree of M.D. at
Reims on 18 September 1691. He was a distinguished physician, anatomist and chemist. When the two sons of
Jan Wielopolski of Poland were on the point of returning to their own country, it was arranged that they should be accompanied by Connor. He took them to
Venice,
Padua, and through the
Tyrol,
Bavaria, and Austria, to Vienna. After some stay at the court of
Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor he passed through
Moravia and
Silesia to
Kraków and
Warsaw. He was appointed physician at the court of
John III Sobieski; his reputation was increased by his correct diagnosis that
Katarzyna Radziwiłłowa, the king's sister, was suffering not from
ague as other physicians maintained, but from an abscess in the liver. In 1694 Connor was appointed to attend the king of Poland's only daughter, the Princess
Theresa Kunegunda Sobieska, who was to travel from Warsaw to Brussels to marry
Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria. They set out on 11 November 1694, and arrived at Brussels on 12 January 1695. Connor went on in February to London and took up residence in Bow Street, Covent Garden. He visited Oxford, where he lectured on the discoveries of
Marcello Malpighi,
Lorenzo Bellini,
Francesco Redi, and others he had known. He returned in the summer of 1695 to London, where in the ensuing winter he gave another course of lectures. On 27 Nov. 1695 he was elected a
fellow of the Royal Society; on 6 April 1696 he was admitted a licentiate of the
College of Physicians of London, and that year lectured at Cambridge. Connor succumbed to a fever, of which he died in October 1698. He was buried at
St. Giles's-in-the-Fields on the 30th, when his
funeral sermon was preached by
William Hayley, D.D. Hayley, who regarded Connor as a member of the
Church of England, attended him in his last illness and gave him the sacrament; but a Catholic priest also visited the dying man, and gave him absolution. ==Works==