The story involved real-life physician William Withering, who appeared to have learned of the value of the purple foxglove in the treatment of dropsy from 'Old Mother Hutton', the Shropshire herb-woman whom he met in Stafford or Birmingham and to whom he gave gold sovereigns for the information, as depicted hypothetically in the painting by William Meade Prince (1893–1951).

[4] Subsequently, various dates have been given including 1765,[5] 1766[3] and 1776,[4] when she was approached by physician William Withering who sought her recipe and deduced that it was the foxglove that was responsible for the success.

[3] Later sources point to 'Mother Hutton' as being a mythical character,[6] fabricated in the 1920s for marketing purposes by a pharmaceutical company that manufactured digitalis, a drug used to treat dropsy.

Since 1928, Mother Hutton's status has grown from being an image in an advertising poster to an acclaimed Wise Woman, Herbalist, Pharmacist and Medical Practitioner in Shropshire who was cheated out of her true recognition by Dr. Withering's unscrupulous methods.

This myth of Mother Hutton has been created by authors not going back to primary sources but instead simply copying and then embellishing the work of others.