William Withering

In 1775 a young doctor was handed a puzzle. A family in Shropshire had a secret cure for dropsy, the swelling of the legs and body that often meant a heart was failing. Would he give his opinion?

William Withering could have laughed it off. Instead he spent ten years on it. The result was one of the great books in the history of medicine, and a drug that is still saving lives.

A doctor comes to town

Withering was born in Wellington, Shropshire, in 1741, the son of a medical man. He took his M.D. at Edinburgh in 1766 and set up in practice at Stafford the next year.

Stafford gave him two things. One was botany. He gathered wild plants for a patient, Helena Cookes, to paint. The other was Helena herself: they married in September 1772.

Then a letter arrived from Lichfield. Dr Erasmus Darwin wrote to tell him that a physician’s place had fallen vacant in Birmingham. In 1775 Withering moved to the town. He ran a daily clinic for the poor, and when the new General Hospital opened in 1779 he joined its medical staff.

In 1776 he published A Botanical Arrangement of all the Vegetables naturally growing in Great Britain, the first full account of British plants using Linnaeus’s new system. He was not yet 36.

The secret of the old woman in Shropshire

Here is the story in Withering’s own words, published in 1785: “In the year 1775, my opinion was asked concerning a family receipt for the cure of the dropsy. I was told that it had long been kept a secret by an old woman in Shropshire.”

The recipe contained twenty or more herbs. Most of them, Withering reasoned, were padding. The botanist in him picked out the one that mattered. It “could be no other than the Foxglove”.

Then came the hard part. Foxglove is poisonous, so the dose had to be right. Withering did something unusual for his day: he counted. He tried leaves and roots, fresh and dried, picked at different seasons. He varied the dose. He noted who got better, who did not, and who suffered side effects.

A success reported by his Birmingham colleague Dr John Ash encouraged him to go on. By 1785 he had enough. An Account of the Foxglove and some of its Medical Uses sets out 163 of his own cases treated between 1775 and 1785, the failures as well as the cures, plus reports from other doctors. It tells the reader how to prepare the leaf, how much to give, and the warning signs of an overdose.

That honesty is what makes the book special. It was not a miracle cure. It was evidence.

Myth-busting: there was no “Mother Hutton”

Many books and websites name the Shropshire woman as “Old Mother Hutton”, a wise woman of herbs. She never existed. The name and character were invented in 1928 for a Parke-Davis pharmaceutical advertisement. Withering himself names nobody: just “an old woman in Shropshire”.

Edgbaston Hall and the Lunar men

Success brought status. Withering was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 24 November 1785. In 1786 he took a fourteen-year lease of Edgbaston Hall, empty since the Gough-Calthorpe family had left.

There he lived like a scientific country squire. He bred Newfoundland dogs and French cattle. He paid professional plant collectors for a new edition of his Botanical Arrangement. He analysed minerals too: “terra ponderosa”, a barium mineral he analysed, was later named witherite in his honour. His friend Joseph Priestley sent his analyses of local rocks to Sir Joseph Banks at the Royal Society.

Withering was one of the Lunar Society, the circle of Boulton, Watt, Keir, Priestley, Galton and Darwin that dined together each month near the full moon. The friendship with Darwin did not last. The two men later fell out over the foxglove, and who deserved the credit for it.

The chemistry ran both ways. Withering translated the Swedish chemist Torbern Bergman’s work on minerals as Outlines of Mineralogy (1783), and the Victorian Dictionary of National Biography says he handed his own research on phlogiston “over to his friend Priestley”. This was how the Lunar Society worked: friends trading problems across the dinner table.

The mob at the gate

In July 1791 Birmingham exploded. Rioters burned Priestley’s home at Fair Hill and went on to attack the houses of Dissenters and their friends.

Withering was an Anglican, not a Dissenter, and he had not been at the dinner that started the trouble. But he was Priestley’s friend, and that was enough. As the crowd approached Edgbaston Hall he loaded “his books and specimens in wagons”, hid them under hay and prepared to flee. In the end, says the Victorian Dictionary of National Biography, “the arrival of the military ultimately saved his house”.

The last move

By then Withering was ill himself, with a chest disease thought to be tuberculosis. He spent the winter of 1792–93 in Portugal, where the royal court asked him to analyse the waters of the spa at Caldas da Rainha.

In 1799, unable to face another winter at Edgbaston Hall, he bought The Larches in Sparkbrook. It had been rebuilt on the ruins of Priestley’s Fair Hill. He moved in on 28 September 1799. He died there eight days later, on 6 October, aged 58.

He was buried at Edgbaston Old Church, St Bartholomew’s, on 10 October. One modern biographer writes of thousands of mourners following the procession.