author

Frederick William Headland

A Victorian physician and medical writer, he is best remembered for exploring how medicines act in the body at a time when modern pharmacology was still taking shape. His books tried to make therapeutic theory practical and understandable for both professionals and general readers.

1 Audiobook

The Action of Medicines in the System Or, on the mode in which therapeutic agents introduced into the stomach produce their peculiar effects on the animal economy

The Action of Medicines in the System Or, on the mode in which therapeutic agents introduced into the stomach produce their peculiar effects on the animal economy

by Frederick William Headland

About the author

Born in 1830 and dying in 1875, Frederick William Headland was a British physician whose surviving reputation rests mainly on his medical writing. Records from the Wellcome Collection identify him as a doctor and connect him with several 19th-century medical works, including The Action of Medicines in the System and A Medical Handbook.

Headland gained notice for An Essay on the Action of Medicines in the System, a work that received the Fothergillian Gold Medal from the Medical Society of London. He later continued developing these ideas in The Action of Medicines in the System, reflecting a period when doctors were trying to explain treatment in a more systematic, scientific way.

He also collaborated on later editions of A Manual of Materia Medica and Therapeutics with John Forbes Royle. Taken together, his books suggest a writer interested not only in theory, but also in helping readers understand how medicines were classified, prescribed, and thought to work in everyday medical practice.