William Shippen Sr. (62)

Election date: 1767 (Elected to the revived American Philosophical Society.)
APS Office(s): Vice-president of the revived APS (1768-1769, 1779-1801)

William Shippen, Sr. (1 October 1712–4 November 1801) was a physician and statesman, and a member of the American Philosophical Society, among the first elected following its 1767 revival. Born in Philadelphia, he was apprenticed to Dr. John Kearsley, Sr., and studied under Dr. Thomas Cadwalader, both APS members. He then opened an apothecary shop and wrote in support of smallpox inoculation. Shippen served for twenty-five years as physician of the Pennsylvania Hospital; he was succeeded in 1778 by his son, APS member William Shippen, Jr., with whom he had begun a private medical practice in 1762. The elder Shippen was also a member of the Philadelphia Common Council and a leading Presbyterian layman, corresponding with the evangelist George Whitefield. He owned the Oxford Furnace in Sussex County, New Jersey, as well as a Delaware River ferry. And he was a member of the Library Company of Philadelphia, a trustee of the College of Philadelphia, and a donor to the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University). Despite the tendency for proprietary party members like himself to become Loyalists, Shippen welcomed colonial independence. During the Revolutionary War, he assisted his son at military hospitals in Bethlehem, Easton, and Allentown, Pennsylvania. And in 1778 and the year following he was elected to the Continental Congress. In addition to his son, his brother Edward Shippen III of Lancaster and his nephews Edward Shippen IV and Joseph Shippen, Jr., were APS members. (PI)

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