Thomas Willis
English physician (1621-1675)
Thomas Willis FRS (27 January 1621 – 11 November 1675) was an English physician who played an important part in the history of anatomy, neurology, and psychiatry, and was a founding member of the Royal Society.
Life
Willis was born on his parents' farm in Great Bedwyn, Wiltshire, where his father held the stewardship of the manor. He was a kinsman of the Willys baronets of Fen Ditton, Cambridgeshire. He graduated M.A. from Christ Church, Oxford in 1642. In the Civil War years he was a Royalist, dispossessed of the family farm at North Hinksey by Parliamentary forces. In the 1640s, Willis was one of the royal physicians to Charles I. Once qualified B. Med. in 1646, he began as an active physician by regularly attending the market at Abingdon, Oxfordshire.
He maintained an Anglican position; an Anglican congregation met at his lodgings in the 1650s, including John Fell, John Dolben, and Richard Allestree. Fell's father Samuel Fell had been expelled as Dean of Christ Church in 1647; Willis married Samuel Fell's daughter Mary, and his brother-in-law John Fell would later be his biographer. He employed Robert Hooke as an assistant, in the period 1656–8; this probably was another Fell family connection, since Samuel Fell knew Hooke's father in Freshwater, Isle of Wight.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q452335. VIAF identifies the subject as 27073010. The Library of Congress control number is n79062692. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1621, 1675, 1642 and 1646.
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This entry incorporates text from “Thomas Willis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.