Skip to main content

Author: Rees, T. Needham

Biography:

REES, Thomas Needham (1759-94: ancestry.co.uk)

He was baptised on 7 Aug. 1759 at St. Maurice, Winchester, Hampshire, the son of Rev. Thomas Rees, a minor canon at Winchester Cathedral from 1753 until his death in 1769, and his wife Jenny Needham, who had married at St. Clement Danes, Westminster, on 16 Sept. 1756. He probably attended the University of Glasgow as a medical student but there is no record of him as MD and it seems unlikely he pursued the full course. He practised as a surgeon and apothecary for many years, firstly at Watlington in Oxfordshire and later in Wiltshire. He advertised as a Man-Midwife in 1782 and offered to treat poor women free for the first year. He married Anne Waite on 26 Sept. 1781 at St. John’s, Devizes, Wiltshire, and they went on to have several children. (His sister, Jane, had also moved to Wiltshire and married in the same church in 1784.) In 1785 he underwent bankruptcy proceedings which dragged on until 1791. He died on 31 Mar. 1794, after a four-day illness and was buried on 11 Apr. at St. James’s, Southbroom, near Devizes. Roundway Hill (1787), a topographical poem on the ancient barrow site near Devizes, is his only known publication. (ancestry.co.uk 27 Oct. 2021; findmypast.co.uk 27 Oct. 2021; Medical Register [1783], 220; Oxford Journal 13 Jul., 24 Aug. 1782; Bath Chronicle 20 Jan. 1785, 3 Apr. 1794) AA

 

Books written (1):

Devizes: [no publisher: "for the Author"], 1787