Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson FRS FRCP (31 October 1828 – 21 November 1896) was a British physician, anaesthetist, physiologist, sanitarian, and a prolific writer on medical history.

He was the recipient of the Fothergill gold medal, awarded by the Medical Society of London in 1854 and of the Astley Cooper triennial prize for an essay in physiology.

Ward Richardson remained a committed exponent of Snow's radical views on the microbial cause of infectious disease for the rest of his life.

He continued, and extended, Snow's work on inhalation anaesthesia and brought into clinical use, no less than fourteen anaesthetics, of which methylene bichloride is the best known, and he invented the first double-valved mouthpiece for use in the administration of chloroform.

Being destined by the deathbed wish of his mother for the medical profession, his studies were always directed to that end, and he was apprenticed early to Henry Hudson, the surgeon at Somerby.

[1] He entered Anderson's University (now [University of Strathclyde]), in 1847, but a severe attack of famine fever (either typhus or relapsing fever) that he caught while he was a pupil at St Andrews Lying-in Hospital (now Princess Royal Maternity Hospital), interrupted his studies, and led him to become an assistant, first to Thomas Browne of Saffron Walden in Essex, and afterwards to Edward Dudley Hudson at Littlethorpe, Cosby, near Leicester.

[1] In 1849, Richardson left Hudson and joined Dr Robert Willis of Barnes, well known as the editor of the works of William Harvey, and librarian of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (1828–1845).

He was admitted as a member of the Royal College of Physicians of London in 1856, and was elected a Fellow in 1865, serving the office of materia medica lecturer in 1866.

[4] Like his predecessor, Sir Edwin Chadwick, he took a close interest in the Association, on many occasions leading deputations to the President of the Local Government Board to argue the case for security of tenure for inspectors against arbitrary dismissal.

[1] Richardson was a sanitary reformer, who busied himself with many of the smaller details of domestic sanitation which tend, in the aggregate, to prolong the average life in each generation.

He spent many years in attempts to relieve pain among men by discovering and adapting substances capable of producing general or local anaesthesia, and among animals by more humane methods of slaughter.

He also produced local insensibility by freezing the part with an ether spray, and he gave animals euthanasia by means of a lethal chamber.

[1] Richardson was an ardent and determined champion of total abstinence, for he held that alcohol was so powerful a drug that it should only be used by skilled hands in the greatest emergencies.