Thomas Wakley
You don't need to be Editor-In-Chief to add or edit content to WikiDoc. You can begin to add to or edit text on this WikiDoc page by clicking on the edit button at the top of this page. Next enter or edit the information that you would like to appear here. Once you are done editing, scroll down and click the Save page button at the bottom of the page.
Thomas Wakley (1795 – May 16, 1862), English medical and social reformer, was born in Devon, and was early apprenticed to a Taunton apothecary.
He then went to London and qualified as a surgeon, setting up in practice in Regent Street, and marrying (1820) Miss Goodchild, whose father was a merchant and a governor of St Thomas' Hospital. All through his career Wakley proved to be a man of aggressive personality, and his experiences in this respect had a sensational beginning.
In August 1820 a gang of men who had some grievance against him burnt down his house and severely wounded him in a murderous assault. The whole affair was obscure, and Wakley was even suspected, unjustly, of setting fire to his house himself; but he won his case against the insurance company which contested his claim. He became a friend of William Cobbett, with whose radicalism he was in sympathy.
In 1823 he started the well-known medical weekly paper, The Lancet, and began a series of attacks on the jobbery in vogue among the practitioners of the day, who were accustomed to treat the medical profession as a close borough. In opposition to the hospital doctors he insisted on publishing reports of their lectures and exposing various malpractices, and he had to fight a number of law-suits, which, however, only increased his influence. He attacked the whole constitution of the Royal College of Surgeons, and obtained so much support from among the general body of the profession, now roused to a sense of the abuses he exposed, that in 1827 a petition to parliament resulted in a return being ordered of the public money granted to it.
But reform in the college was slow, and Wakley now set himself to rouse the House of Commons from within. He became a radical candidate for Parliament, and in 1835 was returned for Finsbury, retaining his seat till 1852. In this capacity, and also as coroner for West Middlesex--an appointment he secured in 1839--he was indefatigable in upholding the interests of the working classes and advocating humanitarian reforms, as well as in pursuing his campaign against medical restrictions and abuses; and he made the Lancet not only a professional organ but a powerful engine of social reform. He died on the May 16 1862, leaving three sons, the proprietorship of the Lancet remaining in the family.
There is a blue plaque on his house in Bedford Square, London.
References
Samuel Squire Sprigge, Life and Times of Thomas Wakley (1897).
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
Acknowledgement and Attribution Regarding Sources of Content
Some of the initial content on this page may be incorporated in part from copyleft sources in the public domain including wikis such as Wikipedia and AskDrWiki. Drug information for patients came from the The National Library of Medicine. Infectious disease information may have come from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Differential Diagnoses are drawn from clinicians as well as an amalgamation of 3 sources: 1.The Disease Database; 2. Kahan, Scott, Smith, Ellen G. In A Page: Signs and Symptoms. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004:3; 3. Sailer, Christian, Wasner, Susanne. Differential Diagnosis Pocket. Hermosa Beach, CA: Borm Bruckmeir Publishing LLC, 2002:7 .
