Walter Needham

Walter Needham (1631?–5 April 1691) was an English physician, known as an anatomist.

Life Needham was from Shropshire. Educated as a queen's scholar at Westminster School, he was elected to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1650, admitted as a pensioner on 17 June 1650. In 1654 he graduated B.A., and on 25 July 1655 he was admitted a Fellow of Queens' College. At Trinity in the 1650s there was a scientific group, in which Needham participated, involving also Alexander Akehurst, Isaac Barrow, John Nidd, John Ray, and Francis Willughby. He left the university to practise medicine for a short time in Shropshire, in 1659.

In 1660 Needham was living in Oxford and attending the lectures of Thomas Willis, Thomas Millington and his schoolfellow Richard Lower. There he met Anthony Wood, and associated with some of the founders of the Royal Society. He subsequently returned to Cambridge, and took the degree of doctor of physic from Queens' College on 5 July 1664. He was in December 1664 admitted an honorary fellow of the College of Physicians of London, a grade of fellow just brought in by Sir Edward Alston, the President. Needham, according to Wood, had much practice.

Admitted a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1667,

In 1673 Needham read a paper before the Royal Society giving the results of some experiments he had made with Richard Wiseman. They concerned the value of Denis's newly discovered liquor for stopping arterial bleeding.