Clifton Wintringham

Clifton Wintringham senior (baptized 1689 – 1748) was an English medical practitioner, appointed Physician at York County Hospital in March 1746.

Life

Wintringham was educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, and was admitted on 3 July 1711 as an Extra Licentiate of the College of Physicians, enabling him to practice medicine. He practiced in York for over 35 years, and the town house The Judges Lodgings, York was built around 1715 as his private residence. He authored several books and attended the Earl of Carlisle at nearby Castle Howard. In the period 1715 to 1730 he kept meteorological records, and notes on his patients. He later published data, one of a number of physicians of the time concerned to understand the relationship of climate and disease. In his essay "An Essay on Contagious Diseases" He presented an early theory of immunity, stating that the dilation of blood vessels during infection by smallpox prevented the disease being able to be caught again.

Publications

Clifton wrote extensively on a range of medical topics, with a particular interest in the early branch of epidemiology (analysis of the distribution, patterns and determinants of health and disease control.)

Wintringham, Clifton. (1718). A treatise of endemic diseases, wherein the different nature of airs, situations, soils, waters, diet … are mechanically explain’d and accounted for. London: printed by Grace White for Francis Hildyward. (Available at University of York Library Rare Books Collection as part of the York Medical Society Library.)