William Heberden

William Heberden FRS (13 August 171017 May 1801) was an English physician.

Life He was born in London, where he received the early part of his education at St Saviour's Grammar School. At the end of 1724 he was sent to St John's College, Cambridge, where he obtained a fellowship, around 1730, became Master of Arts in 1732, and took the degree of MD in 1739.

His tomb in Windsor Parish Church is by John Bacon.

Works William Heberden, who was also a classical scholar, published several papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society; and among his noteworthy contributions to the Medical Transactions (issued, largely at his suggestion, by the College of Physicians) were papers on chickenpox (1767) and angina pectoris (1768). His Commentarii de morborum historia et curatione, the result of notes made in his pocket-book at the bedside of his patients, were published in 1802 and again in 1807. In the year following the first edition, an English translation appeared, with a 3rd edition in 1806, The English translations are believed to be from the pen of his son, William Heberden (1767–1845), also a distinguished scholar and physician, who attended King George III in his last illness. The eponymous Heberden's nodes of osteoarthritis are named after William Heberden senior, who included a chapter on arthritis in his Commentaries on The History and Cure of Diseases.

Wives and children He married twice. First to Elizabeth Martin in 1752, with whom he had one son Thomas (1754–1843), later Canon of Exeter, but she died in 1754. He remarried to Mary Wollaston, daughter of Francis Wollaston (1694–1774), and had a further eight children, of whom only two survived their father, one being William Heberden the Younger (1767–1845), who followed his father into medicine, and the other Mary (1763–1832) who married the Rev George Leonard Jenyns.