Stephen W. Williams was born on March 27, 1790, in Deerfield, Massachusetts, the son of William Stoddard Williams and Mary Hoyt, and a descendant of Robert Williams, who was admitted freeman in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in 1638. Both his father and grandfather were physicians.
After preliminary education at Deerfield Academy, Williams was apprenticed to his father, a man of scholarly taste who maintained an extensive library. Under such excellent conditions he learned the art of medicine, supplementing his studies at home by a winter in New York, attending the medical lectures at Columbia College.
Returning to Deerfield, he carried on investigations in botany, chemistry, and local history while waiting for his practice to develop. With Edward Hitchcock, the geologist, he explored the hills of western Massachusetts, collecting an herbarium of the indigenous medical plants. He published his researches in 1819, Floral Calendar Kept at Deerfield, Massachusetts, accompanied by colored plates.
Williams was soon sought out as a teacher, first by Josiah Goodhue, as lecturer on medical jurisprudence in the Berkshire Medical Institution (1823 - 1831), and later by his friend, Westel Willoughby, Jr. , in the newly founded Willoughby University in Ohio (1838 - 1853). He also lectured at the Dartmouth Medical School in New Hampshire (1838 - 1841). For teaching he added notes to James Bedingfield's A Compendium of Medical Practice (1823) and published his own lectures on jurisprudence, A Catechism of Medical Jurisprudence, in 1835.
During this period he wrote many papers for the New York Historical Society, the Massachusetts Medical Society, and similar associations. A number of his writings were medical biographies; these, with others, were put together in one volume, American Medical Biography (1845). Not always accurate, the book nevertheless was a worthy successor to, and served to supplement, a previous publication (1828) with the same title, by James Thacher. These two books form the basis for all American medical biography up to Williams' time. At the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Medical Society in 1842, Williams gave a paper, "A Medical History of the County of Franklin, Massachussets", an excellent local history on diseases, climate, and physicians. In addition, he re-issued John Williams' The Redeemed Captive (1853), with an accompanying biography of the author, and wrote an authoritative Genealogy and History of the Family of Williams (1847).
Towards the close of his life Williams left Deerfield, the center of all his activities for years, and went to live with his son in Laona, Illinois, where he died on July 6, 1855, at the age of sixty-five.
Quotations: "A physician without the standard medical works of the day, and without some of the important medical periodicals of the time, by which alone he can keep pace with the improvements of the age, is like a mechanic without tools. "
On October 20, 1818, Stephen W. Williams married Harriet T. Goodhue, daughter of Dr. Joseph Goodhue, an army surgeon. They had four children.
Edward Hitchcock was an American geologist and the third President of Amherst College.
Edward Janner Williams was an American physician.
Westel Willoughby, Jr. was a U.S. Representative from New York.
