WILLIAM

See also:

• WILLIAM HEBERDEN (1710-1801)

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 1732, 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 .