Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 59.djvu/11

. He was afterwards transferred to his brother-in-law, Phelps, a surgeon of Beaminster, as a pupil, and from him passed to Coulson at Henley-on-Thames. In 1815 he proceeded to London to study at the united schools of St. Thomas's and Guy's, known as the Borough Hospitals. The greater part of his medical knowledge was gained, however, at the private school of anatomy in Webb Street, founded by [q. v.], who was assisted by his brother, [q. v.] In October 1817 he qualified for membership of the Royal College of Surgeons, and in the following year went into private practice in the city, taking up his residence in Gerard's Hall. In 1819, with the assistance of Joseph Goodchild, a governor of St. Thomas's Hospital, to whose daughter he was engaged, he purchased a practice at the top of Regent Street. About six months after his marriage, on 27 Aug. 1820, he was murderously assaulted by several men and his house burnt to the ground. The authors of these outrages were never traced, but by some it was conjectured that they were members of Thistlewood's gang, an unfounded rumour having gone abroad that Wakley was the masked man in the disguise of a sailor who was present at the execution of Thistlewood and his companions on 1 May 1820, and who decapitated the dead bodies in accordance with the sentence. Wakley had furnished his house handsomely and insured his belongings, but the Hope Fire Assurance Company refused payment, alleging that he had destroyed his own house. The matter was brought before the king's bench on 21 June 1821, when Wakley was awarded the full amount of his claim with costs. He found that his practice, however, had totally disappeared during the nine or ten months of enforced inaction that followed his wounds, and two years later he settled in practice at the north-east corner of Norfolk Street, Strand. Although the charge of incendiarism was impossible, it was several times revived by ungenerous opponents in the course of his controversies, and on 21 June 1826 Wakley obtained 100l. damages from (1777–1845) [q. v.] for a libel in the ‘Medico-Chirurgical Journal,’ in which, with more malice than wit, he compared him to Lucifer.

During this period of his life Wakley made the acquaintance of [q. v.], who also believed himself destined to be a victim of the Thistlewood gang. Under Cobbett's radical influence he became more keenly alive to the nepotism and jobbery prevalent among leading surgeons. In 1823 he founded the ‘Lancet,’ with the primary object of disseminating recent medical information, hitherto too much regarded as the exclusive property of members of the London hospitals, and also with a view to exposing the family intrigues that influenced the appointments in the metropolitan hospitals and medical corporations. For the first ten years of its existence the ‘Lancet’ provoked a succession of fierce encounters between the editor and the members of the privileged classes in medicine. In the first number, which appeared on 5 Oct., Wakley made a daring departure in commencing a series of shorthand reports of hospital lectures. These reports were obnoxious to the lecturers, who feared that such publicity might diminish their gains and expose their shortcomings. On 10 Dec. 1824 (1764–1831) [q. v.], the senior surgeon of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, applied to the court of chancery for an injunction to restrain the ‘Lancet’ from publishing his lectures. The injunction was refused by Lord Eldon, on the ground that official lectures in a public place for the public good had no copyright vested in them. On 10 June 1825, however, a second application was granted, on the plea that lectures could not be published for profit by a pupil who paid only to hear them. The injunction was, however, dissolved on 28 Nov., because hospital lectures were delivered in a public capacity and were therefore public property. After this decision the heads of the medical profession decided to admit the right of the medical public to peruse their lectures, a right which the greatest of them, Sir [q. v.], had already tacitly allowed by promising to make no attempt to hinder the publication of his lectures, on condition that his name was omitted in the report.

On 9 Nov. 1823 Wakley commenced in the ‘Lancet’ a regular series of ‘Hospital Reports,’ containing particulars of notable operations in the London hospitals. The irritation produced by these reports, and by some remarks on nepotism at St. Thomas's, led to the order for his exclusion from the hospital on 22 May 1824, an order to which, however, he paid no regard. About 1825 he commenced making severe reflections on cases of malpraxis in the hospitals, which culminated on 29 March 1828 in a description of a terribly bungling operation of lithotomy by Bransby Blake Cooper, surgeon at Guy's Hospital, and nephew of Sir Astley Paston Cooper, in which it was plainly asserted that Bransby Cooper was ‘surgeon because he was nephew.’ Cooper sued Wakley for libel, and obtained a verdict, but with damages so small as practically to establish Wakley's main contention of malpraxis.