William Withering

William Withering (1741-1799) was an English physician, botanist and mineralogist who took his MD at Edinburgh in 1766 and, after a first practice in Stafford, spent the rest of his career in Birmingham as physician to the General Hospital there. He belonged to the Lunar Society, the circle of manufacturers and natural philosophers that included Erasmus Darwin, James Watt and Joseph Priestley. Besides his work on foxglove he wrote "A Botanical Arrangement of All the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain" (1776), the first English flora arranged on Linnaean principles. The mineral witherite carries his name.