Abstract
THE June issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine contains an interesting notice by Drs. Ruth Musser and John C. Krantz, jun., on the friendship of William Withering and Erasmus Darwin. In 1775, nine years after graduating as M.D. at Edinburgh, Withering, who was in practice at Birmingham, became intimately associated with Erasmus Darwin, an Edinburgh doctor of medicine ten years his senior, and was admitted by him to the Lunar Society which Darwin and others had founded. The outstanding members of this Society were James Watt, Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood, and the visitors included among others Herschel and Benjamin Franklin. The friendship of Darwin and Withering continued for many years. Each enjoyed a wide reputation and an extensive practice. The greatest contribution which Withering made to posterity was his use of the purple foxglove in the treatment of dropsy, the description of which is to be found in his classical work published in 1785 entitled “The Foxglove, an Account of its Medical Properties”, while of Darwin it has been said that there was scarcely an invention in the world to-day that his mind did not foresee. Withering died in 1799 at the relatively early age of fifty-three, but Darwin survived until 1802, or seven years before the birth of his grandson, the author of “The Origin of Species”.
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William Withering and Erasmus Darwin. Nature 146, 398 (1940). https://doi.org/10.1038/146398a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/146398a0