The Fall of the House of Wilde (7 page)

William had much to say about many specialist medical topics, and also about the social interaction of the Austrians. Doctors required patients and nurses to kiss their hand, a practice William dismissed as ‘servile'. In general he found them too ‘submissive' towards authority, and the least likely people to incite revolution – an ironic statement in the light of Austria's subsequent unfortunate history.

A visit to a lunatic asylum furnished William an occasion for angry denouncement of a system that allowed the public to come and gape at the unfortunate patients. Women came from the country specifically to witness what was akin to a staged circus scene, where the warders lashed the victims into a bleeding frenzy, indulging the public gaze and gratifying their morbid curiosity. By refusing to recognise insanity as a medical condition, the system fostered an attitude that treated the patients as worse than criminal. Health, hope and humanity were sorely in want in a place where inmates were left ‘frantic, chained, and many of them naked'. As William put it, ‘with the greatest care and under the kindest treatment, insanity is ever humiliating, even to those accustomed to its horrors; but here it was, and I fear it still is, sickening to behold.' He concluded, ‘Further details, I feel, are superfluous; but since I visited Grand Cairo, I have not witnessed such a scene. This state of things in a city calling itself civilised, and under the very nose of monarchy, surprised me the more, for, that one of the best managed institutions of the kind I have ever seen is that at Prague . . . and those of Berlin and other parts of Germany, are models for general imitation.'

Being the intellectual that he was, William was determined to voice his opinions on Austria's civil rights. He charged the monarchy and the Church with interfering in scientific enquiry. He thus championed the establishment of an academy to support research, free from state censorship. ‘Were such an academy in existence,' he said, ‘it would elicit native talent . . . [and] acting as a touch-stone of real merit, independent of royal patronage, it would generate a spirit and create a desire for scientific knowledge and investigation, as experience amply proves it has done in other countries; and moreover it would advance and give greater scope to the mind of that class who naturally feel that Austria is not a free country – the thinking and the educated.'
²
The Voltairean spirit in William would never allow him to censor his indignation.

William did not spend his entire time in Austria working. He dressed up, following the Viennese habit, and frequented the city's underground cellars. He also sought out quirky, erudite, colourful men like himself. One such was Baron Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall (1774–1856), a renowned orientalist. A spell in Constantinople as the Austrian ambassador allowed the baron to further his oriental expertise. When William met him he had completed that very nineteenth-century mammoth task, a ten-volume
History of the Ottoman Empire
(1827–35), and had already devoted some 600 pages to contesting the origin of
The Thousand and One Nights
with Edward William Lane. The eclectic and confrontational Hammer-Purgstall was the type of man to appeal to William. They kept in contact, made easier when Hammer-Purgstall became the first president of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna.

After six months William left Vienna for Munich, and then moved on to Prague. While in Prague, he stayed with Count von Thun with whom he formed a lasting friendship. A nationalist who supported Bohemia's calls for full autonomy, Thun was locked up for his role in 1848. Thun led the revival of Czech language and literature, and remained active as a federalist in politics until his death in 1888. From Prague, William visited Dresden and Heidelberg, and in Berlin studied under J. F. Dieffenbach, a pioneer in plastic surgery. Here he watched the surgeon cut out a wedge-shaped portion of the back of the patient's tongue, the solution he pioneered to stop children stammering.

In Berlin William took the opportunity to present a paper to the Berlin Geographical Society on Irish ethnology. This topical and controversial subject of racial characteristics attracted the attention of a distinguished audience, including Baron von Humboldt (1769–1859). A scientific explorer whose work as a biologist influenced Darwin, Humboldt had been part of the Weimar coterie, which had gathered around the poet Friedrich Schiller, and when William met him, he was writing
Asie Centrale
. On Humboldt's suggestion, William sent the King of Prussia a copy of
Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Teneriffe, and along the Shores of the Mediterranean, including a visit to Algiers, Egypt, Palestine, Tyre, Rhodes, Telmessus, Cyprus, and Greece
, and the autographed letter of thanks he received from the king remained among his possessions until his death.
³
In a similar vein, in 1877, Oscar, then twenty-two, was audacious enough to send to the liberal politician, William Gladstone, one of his early poems, ‘On the recent massacres of the Christians in Bulgaria'. Having suffered electoral defeat in 1814, Gladstone won the support of many for his opposition to Turkey's Bulgarian atrocities. Oscar audaciously suggested Gladstone pass it on to an editor for publication.
⁴

Overseas training helped William to break free from his origins, and by the time he published his book on
Austria: Its Literary, Scientific, and Medical Institutions
in 1843, the twenty-eight-year-old man from Roscommon was an honorary member of the Institut Afrique of Paris, a Member of the Imperial Society of Physicians of Vienna, the Geographical Society of Berlin and the Natural History Society of Athens.
⁵
Education and travel had certainly set the local doctor's son apart from his father.

Back in Dublin, William lived at 15 Westland Row with his mother, who had moved from Roscommon on the death of his father in 1838. The two lived together in a sombre, grey stone Georgian house, four storeys high, overlooking the grounds of Trinity. Nearby, he acquired an abandoned charitable hospital, St Mark's, and equipped it to serve as an ophthalmic hospital and dispensary for diseases of the eye and the ear. Whether he financed the hospital himself or received public support is not clear. What is clear is that he invited Robert Graves to join him as a consulting physician. For a long time William's hospital was the only one in Ireland and Britain in which aural surgery was taught, and so it attracted undergraduate and postgraduate students from Europe, and as far afield as America. William's establishment of a hospital was not exceptional. Many Protestant physicians before him had endowed Ireland with hospitals. The first voluntary hospital in the United Kingdom was set up in 1718 by six surgeons in Jervis Street, Dublin. This was followed by several more endowments and crowned by the establishment of Dr Bartholomew Mosse's Rotunda in 1745 as the first maternity hospital in the British Isles.

William made a number of advancements in medical science. He introduced the operative practices for mastoiditis, still called Wilde's incision, developed the first dressing forceps, as well as an aural snare known as Wilde's snare. He has been credited by medical history as the first to establish the importance played by the middle ear in the genesis of aural infections. His magnum opus,
Practical Observations on Aural Surgery and the Nature and Treatment of Diseases of the Ear
, published in 1853 and shortly afterwards translated into German, is considered the first textbook of significance on the subject. It confirmed his international professional reputation, helped in part by one of his former students bringing out an American edition. Indeed, in medical history William is ranked as one of the greatest aural experts of his generation.

If we thought that as surgeon, teacher and administrator, he wore enough hats to keep three men employed, then we have not quite got the measure of the man. In 1842 he took on the editorship of the
Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science
, making him a central figure in the Dublin medical world. He broadened its remit with works such as his own biography of the closing years of Jonathan Swift's life. The work was serialised in the journal before being published in 1847 in a single volume,
The Closing Years of Dean Swift's Life
. Swift suffers from the biographical fallacy that because his work is strange, he too must have been half mad. It was thought that the problem must have been with Swift, who was seen as projecting his own warped misanthropy onto the world. The idea that his rage at human degradation might have had some basis in evidence was not something the novelist William Thackeray, for instance, was prepared to countenance. He pronounced Swift ‘filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene'.
⁶
Freeing Swift from these fallacies was William's objective. And he went some way to achieving his purpose, according to the judgement of the
Belfast Mail
, which described the work as ‘throughout an able and successful defence of the Dean's character against the libels and insinuations of nearly all of his biographers'.
⁷
From examining a plaster cast of the Dean's skull, William found he had suffered from Ménière's disease – a deformity of the inner ear that gave him spells of dizziness and nausea. But in an age when physical ailments often carried moral meanings, William did little to stop future biographers from exploiting Swift's illness and taking Ménière's disease as evidence of mental imbalance.

The other issue that preoccupies biographers is Swift's attitude to women, but here William allowed Swift freedom to please himself. William does not approach the question of Stella and Vanessa with the assumption that some kind of aberration must be identified in order to explain why he carried on long-term relationships with two younger women without marrying either of them. He simply says, ‘Swift was no ordinary man in any of his relations in life, and, therefore, cannot well be judged by those rules wherewith society judges ordinary men.'
⁸
As we will see, this is also how William himself acted.

In 1841 the government chose William to undertake the first medical census in Ireland, thus adding to his profile. The census required him to report on the contentious political issue – the connection between poverty and mortality. He did not flinch. His first report classified the majority of Dublin's population of 232,000 as paupers, and the situation was no better elsewhere in a country in which it was estimated that a third of those born in the 1840s died within a year, half within eight years, and two-thirds before their thirty-eighth birthday. The recurrent crop failures of the 1840s drove many rural families to seek a living in the city, swelling the population of Dublin, where living in proximate and squalid conditions led many to succumb to typhus, dysentery and cholera. Physicians used their power to harangue a stubborn government over the inadequacy of medical services across the country. Doctors William Stokes and James Cusack made representations to Westminster, their calculations showing that the mortality rate of army officers in combat was but half that of Irish doctors carrying out their duties. As Stokes put it, ‘I look upon it almost as going into battle.' To extend resources, the House of Commons introduced a bill in 1842, which was eventually passed as the Medical Charities Act in 1850.
⁹
But by that time much damage had been done by the harvest failures in the late 1840s.

William soon won the admiration of many of the medical fraternity and the ire of a few, including Arthur Jacob, professor of anatomy and physiology at the Royal College of Surgeons, and a fellow eye surgeon. Jacob had been the city's leading specialist when William started his practice. The attention lavished upon his colleague, his junior by twenty-five years, and his appointment as editor of the
Dublin Quarterly Journal of Medical Science
and as census commissioner by the government led Jacob to accuse William of using his public positions to inflate his importance and attract patients. Having been ousted as assistant editor of the journal when William was appointed editor, Jacob set up a rival journal, the
Dublin Medical Press
, and used its pages to vent his frustration. William was never mentioned in Jacob's journal without being the butt of some salty quip, though they were often quite harmless. When Jacob discussed the itinerary of an American doctor then touring European clinics, he snidely remarked: ‘In Dublin he is sure to dine with Dr Stokes and sup with Surgeon Wilde.' Brewing underneath this statement was resentment of a confrère's greater talent and prestige. But the bland jibes eventually turned into ad hominem attacks on his ‘wild' behaviour, which came to matter more to Jacob than William's alleged self-promotion. Obsessed with the notion of a social decorum that befitted his profession, Jacob implied William's lack thereof.
¹⁰
William never publicly opposed Jacob; then again, he didn't seem to give a fig what Jacob or many others thought about him.

5

The Bourgeois Rebel

After the Act of Union in 1801, Ireland was directly governed from Westminster as part of the United Kingdom. The British government directly appointed a lord lieutenant and a chief secretary with executive responsibilities for Ireland, and Ireland elected 105 members to the House of Commons. Most were Protestant landlords. From 1829, following the Act of Catholic Emancipation, Irish Catholics could be elected to sit in Parliament, but it took time before any were. And for two centuries, the seventeenth and eighteenth, Irish Catholics had been prohibited from purchasing or leasing land, voting, holding public office, obtaining education, entering a profession, and doing many other things necessary for a person to live, let alone succeed in society.

During the late 1840s, mass starvation, disease and emigration caused over a million deaths and a further million to emigrate – reducing the population by a quarter, from eight to six million. Known as the Great Famine, the ostensible cause was potato blight. The blight ravaged crops across Europe, but the impact on Ireland was disproportionate. A third of the population relied on the potato for a range of ethnic, religious, political, social and economic reasons. While many died of hunger, Ireland continued to export large amounts of food, including butter, wheat and other grain and vegetable crops. Between thirty and fifty shiploads a day went to Britain, sufficient to have fed the Irish population. The absurdity of exporting food, combined with the draconian laws of the time, have led some historians to use the term ‘genocide'. Famine worsened the already strained relations with the British Crown and became a rallying cry for Home Rule movements.