HEBERDEN, William, a practical physician of great celebrity, was born in London in the year 1710. He was sent at a very early age, near the end of 1724, to St John’s College, Cambridge. He took his first degree in 1728, and obtained a fellowship about 1730; he became master of arts in 1732, and took his degree in physic in 1739. He remained at Cambridge about ten years longer as a practitioner of physic, and gave an annual course of lectures on the Materia Medica. In 1746 he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in London, and two years afterwards he left Cambridge, having presented to St John’s College the specimens which had been subservient to his lectures. He also added to this donation, a few years afterwards, a collection of astronomical instruments of some value. Having determined to establish himself in London, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1769; and he was employed in a very extensive medical practice for more than thirty years. When he became sensible that his age required some indulgence, he resolved to pass his summers at a house which he had taken at Windsor; but he continued his practice in the winter for some years longer. In January 1760 he married Mary, daughter of W. Wollaston, Esq. by whom he had five sons and three daughters; but he survived them all, except Dr W. Heberden, and Mary, married to the Rev. G. Jenyns. In 1778 he was made an honorary member of the Royal Society of Medicine at Paris.

Dr Heberden’s first publication seems to have been a short essay on the incongruous composition of the mithridate and theriac, entitled Antitheriaca, 8vo, 1745. 2. He sent to the Royal Society an Account of a very large Human Calculus, weighing more than 2į pounds avoirdupois (Phil. Trans, xlvi. 1750, p. 596; Abr. xi. p. 1005). 3. Account of the Effect of Lightning at South Weald in Essex (Phil. Trans, liv. 1764, p. 198). Both these essays are erroneously attributed, in Dr Maty’s index, to his brother, Dr Thomas Heberden of Madeira, who sent several other papers to the society. Dr Heberden was one of the principal contributors to the first three volumes of the Medical Transactions, published in a great measure at his suggestion, by the College of Physicians, in which we find about sixteen of his original communications. 4. Remarks on the Pump Water of London, 1768. 5. Observations on Ascarides. 6. On Night Blindness, or Nyctalopia. 7. On the Chicken-Pox. 8. On the Epidemical Cold of 1767. 9. Queries, relating to bark, camphor, cold, the gout, and apoplexy. 10. On Hectic Fever. 11. On the Pulse. 12. On a Disorder of the Breast, the angina pectoris. 13. On Diseases of the Liver. 14. On the Nettle Rash. 15. On Noxious Fungi. 16. Queries; on sizy blood, on hernia, on damp clothes, on venesection in hemorrhages. 17. On an Angina Pectoris. 18. On the Ginseng. 19. On the Measles. 20. Table of the Mean Heat of the different Months in London (Phil. Trans, lxxviii. 1778, p. 86.) 21. Commentarii de Morborum Historia et Curatione, London, 1802, in 8vo; also in English. He had long been in the habit of making notes in a pocket-book, at the bed-sides of his patients; and every month he used to select and copy out, under the proper titles of the diseases, whatever he thought particularly worthy to be recorded. In the year 1782 he employed himself in digesting this register into the form of a volume of Commentaries on the history and cure of diseases, religiously observing never to depend on his memory for any material circumstance that he did not find expressly written down in his notes. These commentaries were intrusted to the care of his son, Dr W. Heberden, to be published after his death. We find in them a greater mass of valuable matter, accurately observed and candidly related, than in almost any other volume which has ever appeared upon a medical subject; yet they are but too likely to chill the ingenuous ardour of many a youthful mind, and even to lead to a total apathy with respect to the diligent study of a profession in which so respectable a veteran was so often disposed to exclaim, that “all is vanity.” There are indeed many instances in which he does not seem to have been perfectly master of all the instruments of his art: thus, he appears to have been but partially acquainted with the virtues and various uses of antimony and ipecacuan, and to have reasoned very inaccurately on the operation for a strangulated hernia. But it has been remarked, that the more experience a physician acquires in his profession, the more he is in general inclined to approach the opinions of Dr Heberden, and to esteem his writings.

Notwithstanding that he has been accused of having occasionally been liable to personal and professional prejudices, it may safely be asserted, that he possessed a singular combination of modesty and dignity of character. He was not only a well-informed and accomplished scholar, but a man of the purest integrity of conduct, of mild and courteous manners, distinguished by genuine piety, and by unaffected benevolence of heart. It is related by one of his biographers, that he bought a sceptical work, left in manuscript by Dr Conyers Middleton, of his widow, for L.50, in order to burn it. He was at the expense of publishing another work of the same author, on the servile condition of physicians amongst the ancients, as well as an edition of some of the plays of Euripides, by Markland. He had an opportunity of rendering an essential service to Dr Letherland, a man of the deepest and most extensive learning and science that adorned the last century, but of retired habits, and very little known even in his own profession, though he contributed by his literary information to the popularity of more than one of his colleagues. Dr Heberden’s extensive practice made it inconvenient for him to accept the appointment of physician to the queen; and the king, who had always shown him the greatest esteem and regard, readily adopted his disinterested recommendation of Dr LetherIand as his substitute in the situation. He died on the 17th of May 1801, at the age of above ninety years, having exhibited at the close of his life the same serenity of mind which· he had enjoyed throughout its course. (Life prefixed to his Commentaries ; Chalmers’ Biographical Dictionary, xvii.)