Wilde's Worlds: Sir William Wilde in Victorian Ireland

Ir J Med Sci DOI 10.1007/s11845-016-1428-4 ORIGINAL ARTICLE Wilde’s worlds: Sir William Wilde in Victorian Ireland J. McGeachie1 Received: 25 July 2015 / Accepted: 21 February 2016 Ó The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract invoked a specifically Irish scientific and medical tradition Introduction Other contributors to this collection have going back to the engagement with the condition of Ireland evoked the disparate worlds inhabited by Sir William by enlightened medical men in the seventeenth and eigh- Wilde. teenth centuries. Aims To provide an overall assessment of his career. Materials and methods Looking at the historical condi- Keywords Parallels with Darwin’s early career Á tions that made possible such a career spanning such dis- Network of enterprises Á Centres of calculation Á Savant parate worlds. Deploying methodologies developed by Dublin Á Victorian elite medicine Á Irish complexities Á historians of medicine and sociologists of science, the National catastrophe, medical deliverance from Á Irish article brings together Wilde the nineteenth century clini- tradition of scientific medicine cian and Dublin man of science, the Wilde of the Census and of the west of Ireland, William Wilde Victorian In looking at the roots of the disparate involvements that medical man and Wilde the Irish medical man—the his- characterised Wilde as a Dublin savant, a man of science I torian of Irish medical traditions and the biographer of Irish draw on the work of the Cambridge historian of science medical men, and William Wilde as an Irish Victorian. Martin Rudwick for the concept of a ‘network of enter- Conclusions A variety of close British Isles parallels can prises’; and also on that of the French social theorist Bruno be drawn between Wilde and his cohort in the medical elite Latour for his concept of ‘centres of calculation’. of Dublin and their clinical peers in Edinburgh and London As a medical student, Wilde was mentored by two of both in terms of clinical practice and self-presentation and his teachers, the physicians Robert Graves and William in terms of the social and political challenges facing their Stokes. It was through their patronage that immediately respective ancient regime hegemonies in an age of demo- after the completion of that training he went on to acquire cratic radicalisation. The shared ideological interests of a ‘network of enterprises’ comparable to that which Wilde and his cohort, however, were also challenged by the Martin Rudwick has shown the young Charles Darwin socio-political particularities and complexities of Ireland acquiring whilst living in London after returning from the during the first half of the nineteenth century culminating Beagle voyage [1]. in the catastrophe of the Great Famine. William Wilde saw Through the patronage network of his Cambridge the practice of scientific medicine as offering a means of mentor, the botanist JB Henslow, Darwin had been deliverance from historical catastrophe for Irish society and appointed resident naturalist to HMS Beagle after he graduated. The writing up and publishing in 1839 of the observations and researches Darwin had gathered during & J. McGeachie the ship’s extended voyage of scientific exploration [email protected] between 1832 and 1836 established his credentials as a 1 Centre for the History of Medicine in Ireland, School of savant in the institutions of the British scientific estab- English and History, Ulster University, Shore Road, lishment. It also laid the foundations for the wide-ranging Newtwnabbey, Co. Antrim BT37 OQB, Northern Ireland, UK 123 Ir J Med Sci but interlocking research trajectories—the ‘network of have been intended is Wilde’s frequent self-designation as enterprises’—through which Darwin’s work on species ‘English’. was put together. In a specifically Irish context, Wilde’s Voyage provided Likewise, Wilde’s Dublin mentors, Graves and Stokes, its author with a gateway into the savant institutions of ensured that the completion of his medical apprenticeship Dublin—the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Dublin in 1834 was followed by a period of voyaging roughly Society, the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons contemporary to that of Darwin and which similarly laid and Trinity College—in a way comparable to what the the foundations of Wilde’s own ‘network of enterprises’ as Beagle voyage and resultant researches were doing for a Dublin savant. Writing up his researches and observa- Darwin’s position within London science at the same time. tions whilst travelling on the steam yacht Crusader as Indeed, a further Wilde-Darwin parallel can be drawn here, medical attendant to a wealthy invalid [2, 3], led to the with Wilde’s period living on Westland Row before 1840 publication of Narrative of a voyage to Madeira, moving to the more spacious and prestigious address of Tenerife and along the shores of the Mediterranean after number 1, Merrion Square, and Darwin initially living on Wilde’s return to Dublin [4]. This became an instant best- Gower Street where the University College London anat- seller, becoming known as Wilde’s Voyage, just as the omy building stands today before adopting the life of a lengthy full title of Darwin’s 1839 Journal of Researches country gentleman in Down House in Kent. into the geology and natural history of those countries Furthermore, the exploration of the Levant was as cru- visited by HMS Beagle under the command of Captain cial for Wilde’s subsequent medical trajectory as travel to Fitzroy, RN, from 1832 to 1836 became popularly abbre- South America and the Galapagos Islands were for that of viated to The voyage of the Beagle [5]. Wilde’s Voyage was Darwin within the bio-medical sciences. In Egypt he was a two-volume account of the natural history and topogra- able to observe at first hand the specialist facilities estab- phy, climate and medical provision to be found in the lished by the modernising pasha, Mohammed Ali for the places visited by the Crusader. It also included extensive treatment of the infectious ophthalmic trachoma which had reflections by Wilde on contemporary debates about the been brought to western Europe, including Ireland, as a Levantine origins of the Celt—Norman Vance’s ‘Celts and consequence of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt. This expe- Carthaginians’ [6]—prompted by his visits to the extensive rience gave Wilde what became a lifelong interest in dis- ruins of the ancient civilizations of the eastern eases of the eye, while the income generated by his book Mediterranean. facilitated the development of that interest in London at The Crusader had functioned for Wilde as the Beagle Moorfields. had for Darwin. This was as the research base for a voyage That income also helped lay the roots of his other of scientific exploration, what Bruno Latour has called a medical specialism by permitting further travel to Vienna ‘centre of calculation’ from which scientific and geo- and Berlin. At the Allegemeines Krankenhaus in Vienna he graphical information could be disseminated to imperial encountered at first hand the beginnings of the systematic centres [7]. And although Wilde’s ship, the Crusader was a study and practice of otology. Vienna also gave him the privately owned vessel, not a ship of the Royal Navy like opportunity to research a second book, the 1843 Austria:Its the Beagle, and Wilde was privately employed as a medical literary, scientific and medical institutions [8], for which he attendant to a private individual, not to a captain of the had to gain the statistical skills in the burgeoning field of Royal Navy as was Darwin, the Crusader’s voyage, like public health and demography that facilitated his appoint- that of the Beagle, was through seas controlled in this post- ment as commissioner to the 1841 Irish Census. In Berlin Napoleonic era by the Royal Navy; its provisioning and thereafter, the ethnological interests acquired during his postal communications likewise relying on outposts of voyage were stimulated by the introductions to Alexander British imperial power. von Humboldt and the Berlin Anthropological Society The book which came out of the voyage displayed the given to him by Maria Edgeworth. All of this further field work of an articulate naturalist in exotic regions. It enhanced his reputation in savant Dublin. also represented a contribution to the burgeoning genre of The network of enterprises that Wilde had acquired thus medical geography and travel writing, a genre pioneered by provided him with the stage on which he could combine the the Scottish physician, Sir James Clark, and which catered roles of clinician, savant, polymath and public intellectual. for the desires of wealthy Victorians for heathy convales- Although the area of medical practice in which he achieved cent locations, with the added bonus of landscapes of such prominence was highly specialised compared to those scholarly interest. Furthermore, Wilde’s book could be of his mentors, the surgeon Abraham Colles, the physicians read as a contribution to the musings, both ethnological and Graves and Stokes, the extent of his public and scholarly antiquarian, of Irish and British celticists. A marker as to hinterland was remarkable, even by the standards of his the wider, imperial readership for whom the book would day. 123 Ir J Med Sci That hinterland encompassed the Irish census, the Ord- Calling what you did scientific was in fact an important nance Survey and the statistical and public health move- rhetorical resource in what Frank Miller Turner has called ments, on the one hand, and the periodical journalism of the contestations of cultural authority, the culture wars that the Dublin University Magazine together with the natu- were a central feature of early-Victorian intellectual culture ralists, ethnologists, antiquarians and archaeologists of the where ‘various groups of Victorian intellectuals… (at- Royal Irish Academy, on the other [9].

Load more