William Woodville was an English physician and botanist who lived and worked in London for most of his life. For his work in botany, he was made a Fellow of the Linnaean Society just a year after the publication of volume one of his Medical Botany. This classic work containing descriptions and commentaries of the medical plants listed in the Materia Medica of London and Edinburgh was published in 1790 and followed by two more volumes and a supplement-1792-1794. The plates accompanying the text were the work of James Sowerby (1757-1822) and were numbered 1-274. A third edition of five volumes was presented in 1832, twenty-seven years after Woodville’s death. This publication added descriptions of thirty-nine new plants and was edited and revised by the eminent botanist, William Jackson Hooker (1785-1865).