William Gilbert (1544–1603) was born in Colchester, Essex, and educated at St John's College, Cambridge, where he took his medical degree in 1569. He practised as a physician in London from the 1570s, held offices in the College of Physicians, and was elected its president in 1600. In 1601 he became physician to Queen Elizabeth I and, after her death, briefly to James I. For many years he carried out experiments on magnets and on bodies that attract like amber, and published the results in De Magnete in 1600. He died in 1603. A further work on the physics of the earth and heavens, De Mundo Nostro Sublunari, was published from his papers in 1651.
De Magnete, magneticisque corporibus, et de magno magnete tellure (On the Magnet, Magnetick Bodies Also, and on the Great Magnet the Earth) was published in London in 1600 by William Gilbert, a Colchester-born physician who became president of the College of Physicians that year. It is the first large book devoted to experimental study of magnetism and one of the earliest works of natural philosophy built on systematic, repeated experiment.
