William Boericke was born on October 25, 1849 in Austria. He graduated from the Philadelphia Medical College in 1876 and from Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia in 1880. Moving to San Francisco he practiced as a homeopath for over fifty years. He was editor of the California Homoeopath and co-founder of the Pacific Homoeopathic Medical College and Hahnemann Hospital in 1881 where Boericke became the first professor of Homoeopathic Materia Medica and Therapeutics, a post he held for thirty years. He was also on the faculty of the Hahnemann Medical College in San Francisco.In 1901 he authored Boericke's Materia Medica. His brother Oscar added a repertory to the book in 1906. This 'pocket manual' finds its way into almost every homeopath's library. It is a concise guide to hundreds of remedies, some of which appear nowhere else.On April 1, 1929 he died of a massive heart attack. Two months after he died, his house burned down. All that was left was the stone fireplace and all of his homeopathic books.