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William Heberden

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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WILLIAM HEBERDEN (1710-1801), English physician, was born in London in 1710. In the end of 1724 he was sent to St John's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship about 1730, became master of arts in 5732, and took the degree of M.D. in 1739. He remained at Cambridge nearly ten years longer practising medicine, and gave an annual course of lectures on materia medica. In 1746 he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London; and two years later he settled in London, where he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1749, and enjoyed an extensive medical practice for more than thirty years. At the age of seventy-two he partially retired, spending his summers at a house which he had taken at Windsor, but he continued to practise in London during the winter for some years longer. In 1778 he was made an honorary member of the Paris Royal Society of Medicine. He died in London on the 17th of May 1801. Heberden, who was a good classical scholar, published several papers in the Phil. Trans. of the Royal Society, and among his noteworthy contributions to the Medical Transactions (issued, largely at his suggestion, by the College of Physicians) were papers on chicken-pox (1767) and angina pectoris (1768). His Commentarii de morborum historia et curatione, the result of careful notes made in his pocket-book at the bedside of his patients, were published in 1802; in the following year an English translation appeared, believed to be from the pen of his son, William Heberden (1767-1845), also a distinguished scholar and physician, who attended King George III. in his last illness.