Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 40.djvu/171

 not enter till 2 Oct. In 1654 he graduated B.A., and on 25 July 1655 he was admitted a fellow of Queens' College. He seems to have resided in Cambridge until 1659, when he left the university to practise for a short time in Shropshire. In 1660 he was living in Oxford and attending the lectures of Willis, Millington, and his old schoolfellow Lower, who was his senior by a year. There he made Anthony à Wood's acquaintance, and associated with the men who shortly afterwards founded the Royal Society. Needham subsequently returned to Cambridge, and took the degree of doctor of physic from Queens' College on 5 July 1664. He was in December 1664 admitted an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians—a grade of fellows instituted in September 1664 at the suggestion of Sir Edward Alston, the president. On 4 Aug. 1667 his ‘Disquisitio anatomica de formato Fœtu’ was licensed to be printed; in this work he states that he was living a long way from London. He was admitted a fellow of the Royal Society on 6 April 1671, and on 7 Nov. 1672 he was appointed physician to Sutton's Charity (the Charterhouse) in succession to Dr. Castle. In 1673 he read a paper before the Royal Society giving the results of some experiments he had made in conjunction with Mr. Sergeant-surgeon Wiseman on the value of Denis's newly discovered liquor for stopping arterial bleeding. In 1681 he was living in Great Queen Street, Broad Sanctuary; on 30 Jan. of that year Wood incorrectly recorded that Richard Allestree [q. v.] died there in his house. He was created a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians under the charter of James II, and was admitted on 12 April 1687. He died, Wood tells us, on 5 April 1691, and was buried obscurely in the church of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, near London (, Life and Times, Oxf. Hist. Soc. iii. 358). Executions were out against him to seize both body and goods.

Needham was held in high esteem by his contemporaries, and, according to Wood, had much practice.

His chief published work, apart from papers in the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ was ‘Disquisitio anatomica de formato Fœtu,’ London, 1667, 8vo, dedicated to Robert Boyle, and published by Radulph Needham at the Bell in Little Britain. It was reprinted at Amsterdam in 1668, and was included by Clericus and Mangetus in their ‘Bibliotheca Anatomica,’ issued at Geneva in 1699, i. 687–723. The book treats of the structure and functions of the placenta or afterbirth in man and animals. It is written in excellent idiomatic Latin. Sydenham speaks of him in the dedicatory epistle of his ‘Observationes Medicæ’ to Dr. Mapletoft, an old Westminster boy, as ‘tam Medicæ Artis, quam rei literariæ decus et laus.’

[Wood's Life and Fasti; Munk's Coll. of Phys. i. 472; additional facts kindly given to the writer by the president of Queens' College, Cambridge; by the librarian of Trinity College, Cambridge; and by Mr. A. Chune Fletcher, the present medical officer to the Charterhouse.] 

NEEDLER, BENJAMIN (1620–1682), ejected minister, son of Thomas Needler, of Laleham, Middlesex, was born on 29 Nov. 1620. He was admitted to Merchant Taylors' School on 11 Sept. 1634, was head scholar in 1640, and was elected to St. John's College, Oxford, on 11 June 1642, matriculating on 1 July. He was elected fellow of his college in 1645, but appears to have been non-resident, as his submission is not registered. Joining the presbyterian party, he was summoned to assist the parliamentary visitors of the university in 1648, and was by them created B.C.L. on 14 April of the same year. On 8 Aug. he was appointed to the rectory of St. Margaret Moses, Friday Street, London. It is not known whether he took episcopal orders or not. He was one of the ministers in London who in January 1648–9 signed the ‘Serious and Faithful Representation’ to General Fairfax, petitioning for the life of the king and the maintenance of parliament. On his marriage in 1651 with Marie, sister of Nathanael Culverwell [q. v.], Needler resigned his fellowship at St. John's College.

In August 1662 he was ejected from his rectory by the Act of Uniformity, and afterwards retired to North Warnborough in Hampshire, where he preached privately till the time of his death. He was buried at Odiham, near Winchfield, on 20 Oct. 1682. Needler had several children. The baptisms of six are recorded in the registers of St. Margaret Moses between January 1651–2 and May 1662, and the burials of two of them in 1658 and 1659 respectively.

He was an able preacher, and, according to Baxter, a very humble, grave, and peaceable divine (, Reliq. Baxt. iii. 94). He published ‘Expository Notes with Practical Observations towards the opening of the five first Chapters of Genesis,’ London, 1655, and three sermons which are reprinted in various editions of ‘Morning Exercises’ (cf. these of 1660, 1661, 1675, 1676, 1677, and 1844). Dunn speaks highly of all these sermons. Needler also wrote some verses on the death of Jeremiah Whitaker, which were published in Simon Ashe's funeral sermon on Whitaker,