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Woodville's Medical Botany
 William
Woodville, physician and botanist, was born in 1752 at Cockermouth,
in Cumberland. He received a classical education, spent some time as
an apothecary’s apprentice, and then studied medicine at the
University of Edinburgh. He gained an M.D. degree in 1775 after
which he traveled on the Continent before entering private practice
in Scotland. In 1782, Woodville moved to London where he held the
post of physician in the Middlesex Dispensary until 1791 when he was
appointed physician in the Smallpox and Innoculation Hospital in St.
Pancras. In the same year, he was made a Fellow of the Linnaean
Society, an honor directly related to his botanical work which
included the establishment of a garden at King’s Cross, near the
hospital.
The Fellowship to the Society was conferred just a year after the
publication of the first volume of Woodville’s great work on medical
botany. The full title of this classic describes its scope and
purpose-"Medical Botany, containing Systematic and General
Descriptions, with plates, of all the Medicinal Plants, indigenous
and exotic, comprehended in the Catalogues of the Materia Medica, as
published by the Royal Colleges of Physicians of London and
Edinburgh: accompanied with a circumstantial Detail of their
medicinal Effects, and of the diseases in which they have been most
successfully employed."
The second volume was published in 1792 and the third in 1793. A
supplement, which included the plants not listed in the Materia
Medica, appeared in 1794. Thirty-eight years later, when the third
edition, revised and with comments by the botanist, William Jackson
Hooker (1785-1865), appeared, it had grown to five volumes. The
illustrations in the book were nearly all drawn from living plants
or herbarium specimens, and were the work of the artist, James
Sowerby (1757-1822). Medical Botany has been described as "the best
work in English on medical herbs of its time" and as having been
written "in a thoroughly scientific spirit".
Woodville’s other major work was never completed, but the first
volume of The History of the Inoculation of the Small Pox, in Great
Britain... was published in 1796. The second volume was abandoned
due to the discovery of the vaccination method by Edward Jenner
(1749-1823) in 1796. Woodville was initially skeptical of Jenner’s
claims for vaccination, but after some controversy and difficulties
in clinical trials, he became a convert and supported the new
technique for smallpox prevention.
Woodville was a lifelong member of the Society of Friends, and after
his death at the hospital on March 26, 1805, he was buried in the
Friends’ burial ground at Bunhill-fields. He was one of a number of
very eminent Quaker physicians who lived and worked in Great Britain
in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Currently, this
collection includes 12 prints, in two sizes, 13 inches by 19 inches,
and 8 inches by 10 inches. Sample images from the series are
provided below. Clicking on the smaller thumbnail image will take
you to a larger sample image for closer inspection. Clicking on the
name of the print will take you to the web page for that print,
where you can find more information and place an order online.
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