From the PREFACE:
"The account of “The Black Death” here translated by Dr. Babington was Hecker’s first important work of this kind.  It was published in 1832, and was followed in the same year by his account of “The Dancing Mania.”  The books here given are the two that first gave Hecker a wide reputation.  Many other such treatises followed, among them, in 1865, a treatise on the “Great Epidemics of the Middle Ages.”  Besides his “History of Medicine,” which, in its second volume, reached into the fourteenth century, and all his smaller treatises, Hecker wrote a large number of articles in Encyclopædias and Medical Journals.  Professor J.F.K. Hecker was, in a more interesting way, as busy as Professor A.F. Hecker, his father, had been.  He transmitted the family energies to an only son, Karl von Hecker, born in 1827, who distinguished himself greatly as a Professor of Midwifery, and died in 1882.

Benjamin Guy Babington, the translator of these books of Hecker’s, belonged also to a family in which the study of Medicine has passed from father to son, and both have been writers.  B.G. Babington was the son of Dr. William Babington, who was physician to Guy’s Hospital for some years before 1811, when the extent of his private practicecaused him to retire.  He died in 1833.  His son, Benjamin Guy Babington, was educated at the Charterhouse, saw service as a midshipman, served for seven years in India, returned to England, graduated as physician at Cambridge in 1831.  He distinguished himself by inquiries into the cholera epidemic in 1832, and translated these pieces of Hecker’s in 1833, for publication by the Sydenham Society.  He afterwards translated Hecker’s other treatises on epidemics of the Middle Ages.  Dr. B.G. Babington was Physician to Guy’s Hospital from 1840 to 1855, and was a member of the Medical Council of the General Board of Health.  He died on the 8th of April, 1866.