author
William Stephens
d. 1760
An Irish physician and botanist from the early eighteenth century, he is remembered for helping develop botany at Trinity College Dublin and for writing careful plant catalogs that reflected the growing scientific spirit of his time.
1 Audiobook
Dolæus upon the cure of the gout by milk-diet To which is prefixed, an essay upon diet
by Johann Doläus, William Stephens
About the author
William Stephens was an Irish physician and botanist associated with Trinity College Dublin in the first half of the eighteenth century. Sources available here identify him as the college’s second lecturer in botany, and note that he was also elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
He studied in Dublin and at the University of Glasgow, then went on to build a career that joined medicine with natural history. His work is especially linked with Trinity’s Physic Garden, where he helped document plant life in a more systematic way.
Although not a widely known figure today, he stands out as one of the early Irish scholars who helped turn botany into a more organized academic subject. The records consulted during this conversation also suggest some variation in the reported year of his death, so it is safest to say that he died around 1760 or 1761.