William Heberden

William Heberden (1710 to 1801) was an English physician who spent his career at Cambridge and then in London during the eighteenth century. Born in London and educated at St John's College, Cambridge, he took his medical degree in 1739 and lectured on materia medica for roughly ten years, producing a 1745 essay on the ancient antidotes mithridatium and theriaca that argued the old compounds had shifted in composition over the centuries. He settled in London in 1748, became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1749 and held several offices at the College of Physicians, including Gulstonian lecturer, Harveian orator and Croonian lecturer. He urged the College to publish its Medical Transactions and contributed papers to it. His observations on the history and cure of diseases appeared after his death as the Commentarii in 1802, and the German anatomist Soemmering reprinted them with a preface calling their author a truly Hippocratic physician. He died at his house in Pall Mall in his ninety-first year.