William John Bishop FLA (1903 – 27 July 1961) was a British librarian, the first editor of the journal Medical History, and a prolific writer.

[1] He began a career in librarianship as a junior assistant at the London Library, under the supervision of Sir Charles Hagberg Wright.

Titled "English Physicians in Russia- in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries", it was published in 1929 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine.

[1] In 1951, with his friend Frederick Noël Lawrence Poynter, he published a study of a sometime physician to Oliver Cromwell titled A Seventeenth Century Doctor and his Patients: John Symcotts, 1592?–1662.

[5] The book was described as particularly welcome for dealing with the type of everyday medical practice of a merciful but "not very exalted" physician for whom there had previously been no memorial.

[7] He received an obituary from John Fulton in the British Medical Journal who compared him to Charles Singer as "prime fosterers of medico-historical studies in England".