When I use a word . . . Medical anniversaries in 2026: William Withering’s Botany

My list of medically related anniversaries for 2026 includes William Withering’s Botany, The Botanical Arrangement of All the Vegetables Naturally Growing in Great Britain, which was published 250 years ago, in 1776. Although Withering professed himself to be uninterested in botany while a student at the Edinburgh Medical School from 1762 to 1766, after graduation he developed an interest, perhaps through his friend Richard Pulteney, perhaps because of his friendship with Helena Cookes, initially a patient, later to be his wife, and perhaps because much of his clinical therapeutic practice would have involved the use of herbal medicines. Whatever the reason, his interest extended to studying the plants growing in the UK and writing the first British Flora in English, introducing the Linnaean classification of plants to amateur botanists. Withering deserves to be remembered today as much for his 1776 Botanical Arrangement as for his better known 1785 book, An Account of the Foxglove and Some of its Medical Uses.