John Henry Wishart

John Henry Wishart FRCSEd FRSE (19 March 1781 – 9 June 1834) was a Scottish surgeon who worked at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.

[1] His father, William Thomas Wishart (27 Feb 1746 – 1799) owned the estate of Foxhall, Kirkliston in West Lothian, Scotland (formerly known as Todshaugh).

In 1797, at the age of sixteen, he matriculated as a student at the University of Edinburgh to study medicine but, as was common at that time, did not graduate.

[5] In 1805 Wishart qualified as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh with a probationary essay entitled Ophthalmia., which he dedicated to Professor James Russell.

In this he gave accounts of conditions which caused inflammation of the eye, such as conjunctivitis which had increased incidence, partly as a result of trachoma which had been introduced into the population of Britain by soldiers returning from Egypt and Spain during the Napoleonic wars.

[6] Having decided to develop a special interest in ophthalmology, Wishart visited European centres to learn from some of the leading ophthalmic specialists.

This was the first specialist eye hospital in Scotland, and served the sick poor as well as being a place for the teaching of medical students.

During his presidency John Barclay offered to the college his large collection of specimens on condition that a suitable building was obtained to house them.

After consulting his physician colleague Dr John Abercrombie, who worked alongside him at the Royal Public dispensary, he dissected the tumour and established that it arose from the dura mater and was therefore not amenable to excision.

From the features he describes (child with watery inflamed eye, unreactive pupil, cloudy white exudate in posterior chamber and lesion arising from the retina), it has been interpreted as representing a retinoblastoma, for which enucleation was, and remained the only treatment offering the prospect of a cure.

[15] Wishart continued to take an interest in other aspects of surgery and in 1818 he translated Scarpa's Memoir on the congenital club feet of children from the Italian.

[3] Their second son, James Alexander Wishart (1822–1855) became a doctor, graduating MD from the University of Edinburgh in 1843 with a thesis on cataract.