Charles White (physician)
Charles White FRS (4 October 1728 – 20 February 1813) was an English physician and a co-founder of the Manchester Royal Infirmary and the St Mary's Hospital for Lying in Women in 1790.
He was a founding member of the Portico Library and of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, where he was also Vice President for twenty three years.
White will be forever remembered in Manchester as the founder of the hospital and a formidable surgeon, and often acclaimed as the "father of conservative surgery".
After delivery, she was confined in a horizontal position for days so that the lochia tended to remain in the vagina stagnating and festering.
He insisted on hygienic conditions, regular hand washing, changes of bed linen, towels and sponges and instruments.
Although unaware specifically of bacteria he urged not only scrupulous cleaning but also separate bed chambers for women in labour.
Such an innovation is also often called a Fowler Chair after the American Surgeon who designed something similar a hundred years later for treatment of Peritonitis.
He was deposed by Professor Klein who discarded White's methods and also at the same time he brought in the practice of teaching on the cadaver to his juniors.
He stopped the students attending cadavers in 1846 but it took him until 1861 to emphasise the importance of foul bed clothes, general cleanliness and the washing of hands of midwives etc.
Even in our time there have been advocates of early clamping but it would appear that he was right as made clear by Dr. Peter Dunn in his article on the safe delivery of preterm infants where he cites in detail the work of White over two hundred years earlier.
When he returned to Manchester in 1751, he agitated so actively for the establishment of an infirmary that the prominent local merchant Joseph Bancroft was persuaded to defray all expenses, provided Dr. White would give the institution his medical services.
Dr. Thomas White, his son, died in a riding accident, but he continued to serve there until after the turn of the century.
[10] When the museum was made over to the St Mary's hospital the mummy was moved to the attic at Sale Priory.
White's Account of the Regular Gradation in Man, and in Different Animals and Vegetables[17] (1799) attempted to provide empirical science for the theory of polygenism.
White proposed the theory of polygeny, refuting French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon's inter-fertility argument – the theory that only the same species can interbreed – pointing to species hybrids such as foxes, wolves and jackals, separate groups that were still able to interbreed.
[19] Though these theories were clearly incorrect and reflected—and contributed to—the racist ideologies of the time, White said that his work must never be "construed so as to give the smallest countenance to the pernicious practice of enslaving mankind, which [he wished] to see abolished throughout the world" and that he was opposed to "assigning to any one a superiority over another".
In 1803, White suffered an attack of ophthalmia, which initially only affected his left eye, and — with difficulty — he continued to work.
