Author: WITHERS, Thomas
Biography:
WITHERS, Thomas (1750-1809: ancestry.com)
The younger son of the Rev. William Withers DD (1738-1771), rector of Tankersley, Yorkshire, and his wife Jane Buck, he was baptized on 19 Apr. 1750 at Higham Ferrers, Northamptonshire. His brother William (d 1802), a barrister, was, from 1793, Recorder of York. Having graduated M.D. at Edinburgh in June 1772, he practised at York. In 1773, he co-established a “lunatic asylum”; in 1788, with a set of Quaker and Anglican evangelical philanthropists, he co-founded the York Dispensary; he became senior physician to the York County Hospital; and throughout his career he supplied the poor “with gratuitous advice, and with medicine at a very reduced price” (Gray, 25:71). There were no children by his marriage of 2 Nov. 1784 to Elizabeth Goddard (d 1802). His death occurred on 12 Feb. 1809 at his house in St Saviourgate, York. There is a monument to his memory in St Saviour’s Church. His several well-received medical publications may have attracted more readers than did his 297-page Redemption a Didactic Poem with its 52 pages of notes. His assertion that the “character of a physician . . . cannot be maintained with dignity but by a man of literature” is often quoted. (ancestry.com 20 Mar. 2025; Yorkshire Poets, 3; R. Davies, A Memoir of the York Press [1868] 282-83; A. V. Gray, ed., Papers and Diaries of a York Family [1927]; K. A. Webb, York Dispensary, 1788-1988 [1988], 5; S. Wright, Friends in York [1995], 72; E. L. Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England [2002]) JC