author
Clifton Wintringham
1689–1748
An early 18th-century York physician, he spent more than three decades in practice and left behind medical writings that helped earn him a reputation as an early medical epidemiologist. His career linked everyday provincial medicine with the emerging hospital world of Georgian England.
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About the author
Educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, Clifton Wintringham was admitted in 1711 as an Extra Licentiate of the College of Physicians, a status that allowed him to practice medicine. He built a long career in York, where he worked for more than 35 years and became one of the city’s best-known medical figures.
Wintringham wrote several medical works and is remembered for careful observations on disease and public health. Modern scholars have even described him as an early medical epidemiologist, which gives a sense of how closely he paid attention to patterns of illness rather than only individual cases.
Late in life he was appointed physician to York County Hospital in 1746. He died in York in 1748, but his writings continued to circulate after his death, helping preserve the record of a thoughtful provincial doctor working at an important moment in the history of British medicine.