But foxglove was always a medicine with a popular rather than a professional reputation until Dr. William Withering, of Birmingham, published “An Account of the Foxglove, and some of its Medical Uses,” in 1785. Withering was a scientific pioneer of European fame, an intimate associate of Priestley, Watt, and Boulton, a painstaking botanist in whose honour a genus of the Solanaceæ was named Witheringia, and a mineralogist whose name is similarly commemorated by the name Witherite, given to barium carbonate. [Illustration: WILLIAM WITHERING, M.D. (From a print in the British Museum.)] In Dr. Withering’s “Account of the Fox-glove,” he narrated that ten years previously his opinion had been asked about a family recipe for the cure of dropsy which had long been the secret of an old woman in Shropshire, and which he was told had cured cases after regular treatment had failed. The medicine was composed of some twenty different herbs, but it was not difficult, he says, for one conversant with such matters to perceive that foxglove was the active ingredient. Dr. Withering details his experience as well as that of others with the drug in some hundreds of cases. He noted its action on the heart and as a diuretic. He had also ascertained that it was prescribed in family recipes in Yorkshire. An article in Parkinson’s “Herbal,” written he believed by Mr. Saunders, “an apothecary of great reputation at Worcester,” declared it to be of great value in consumptive cases. It had been admitted into the Edinburgh Pharmacopœia 1783, but many practitioners were giving it in such dangerous doses that he feared its reputation would not last long. Dr. Withering died in 1799 at the age of fifty-eight. A foxglove is carved on his monument in Edgbaston Old Church. GUAIACUM