Withering, of Birmingham, published "An Account of the Fox-glove, and some of its Medical Uses," in 1785. Withering was a scientific pioneer of European fame, an intimate associate of Priestley, Watt, and Boulton, a painstaking botanist in whose honour a genus of the Solanaceæ was named Witheringia, and a mineralogist whose name is similarly commemorated by the name Witherite, given to barium carbonate.
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William Withering, M.D.
(From a print in the British Museum.)
In Dr. Withering's "Account of the Fox-glove," he narrated that ten years previously his opinion had been asked about a family recipe for the cure of dropsy which had long been the secret of an old woman in Shropshire, and which he was told had cured cases after regular treatment had failed. The medicine was composed of some twenty different herbs, but it was not difficult, he says, for one conversant with such matters to perceive that fox-glove was the active ingredient.
