author

Frederick William Headland

A 19th-century British physician and medical writer, he is best remembered for exploring how medicines act in the body and for turning complex medical ideas into practical books. His work connected hospital teaching, research, and public health at a time when modern therapeutics was taking shape.

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, Frederick William Headland studied at the University of London and built his career as a physician, lecturer, and author. He became lecturer on botany at Charing Cross Hospital in 1852, later gave the Lettsomian Lectures on materia medica, and was elected physician to Charing Cross Hospital in 1867.

Headland gained early recognition when his Essay on the Action of Medicines in the System won the Fothergillian gold medal from the Medical Society of London in 1852. He went on to publish On the Action of Medicines in the System, a work associated with his name, and also wrote A Medical Handbook while revising John Forbes Royle’s Manual of Materia Medica and Therapeutics.

Alongside his medical writing, he contributed political articles to Conservative newspapers. He died in 1875, leaving behind books that show both a scientific curiosity about treatment and a strong wish to make medical knowledge useful and understandable.