Williams Smibert (246)

Election date: 1768 (Elected to the American Society when it absorbed the membership of the Medical Society.)

Williams Smibert (29 June 1732–18 January 1774) was a physiologist and anatomy professor, and a member of the American Philosophical Society via the absorption of the Medical Society by the American Society in 1768. Born in Boston to the portraitist John Smibert and wife Mary Williams, who named the lad after his grandfather, Dr. Nathaniel Williams, a Latin School headmaster and sometimes medic. At ten Williams entered the same school, but then apprenticed as a merchant. At his father’s and mother’s passing, he gave up trade and began to study medicine, eventually heading to Edinburgh in 1759, where he heard APS Member Dr. William Cullen profess chemistry and befriended APS Members William Hewson and John Morgan. After returning to Boston he became largely a man of leisure, with a small practice and few lasting effects on the community outside his small circle of friends. He was a corresponding member of the Virginia Society for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge and an honorary member of the Medical Society of Edinburgh. He never married, and left his property to his cousin, the painter John Moffat. (PI)

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