William Withering (1741–1799)
Medical reports of the foxglove first appeared in Wales in the thirteenth century, and its scientific name Digitalis purpurea (purple gloved finger) was given some 300 years later. English physician William Withering transformed this folk remedy into what many authorities believe is the most important herb-derived drug and one of the most important of all drugs.
Shortly after his arrival in Birmingham in 1775, Withering was asked to assess a secret family tea recipe of an “old woman in Shropshire” for the treatment of dropsy—excessive fluid accumulation resulting from congestive heart failure. The tea’s recipe contained more than twenty herbal ingredients, but Withering, an active botanist, readily recognized the active herb to be foxglove.
Over the next decade, Withering administered foxglove to 163 patients with dropsy, meticulously studying the patients most likely to benefit from the drug, as well as noting early signs of its toxicity. In his 1785 medical classic, An Account of the Foxglove and Some of Its Medical Uses, Withering mistakenly attributed foxglove’s lifesaving effects in heart failure to profuse diuresis (fluid loss). Notwithstanding the strong warnings Withering sounded about the appropriate medical uses of digitalis and the narrow margin of safety between effective and toxic doses, the drug was carelessly used during the nineteenth century and, because of deaths associated with its administration, fell into disfavor among the physicians of the day. Fortunately, early in the twentieth century, digitalis was rescued from oblivion, and guidelines were established for its use for heart failure and abnormal heart rhythms. The plant product has since been replaced by its purified active ingredients—digitoxin and digoxin—as well as other chemical drugs.
Withering was not only an active practicing physician and botanist, but also an accomplished mineralogist and chemist. As a member of Birmingham’s prestigious Lunar Society, his fellow “Lunatics” included James Watt, steam engine inventor; Joseph Priestley, discover of oxygen; and Erasmus Darwin, physician, scientist, and grandfather of Charles Darwin.
SEE ALSO Herbs (c. 10,000 BCE), Digitoxin (1875), Propranolol (1964).
Portrait of Dr. Gauchet was painted by Vincent van Gogh in 1890, several months before van Gogh’s suicide. Gauchet is thought to have treated van Gogh for mania and/or epilepsy with digitalis (purple foxglove). Some writers attribute the yellow tone present in many of van Gogh’s paintings to xanthopsia, a side effect of digitalis in which a person perceives a yellow tint in his surroundings.