Thomas Wakley

He was born in Membury, Devon, to a prosperous farmer, Henry Wakley (1750 – 26 August 1842), and his wife, Mary née Minifie.

A surgeon at 22, he set up in practice in Regent Street and in 1820 married Elizabeth Goodchild, whose father was a merchant and a governor of St Thomas' Hospital.

His eldest son, Henry Membury Wakley, became a barrister and sat as deputy coroner under his father.

Such operations were regularly completed in only a minute's time by excellent surgeons such as the previous century's William Cheselden, but Cooper took more than an hour and was seen to have great difficulty in locating the stone.

The court found in Cooper's favor, but awarded him much smaller damages than requested, which was generally taken as an acknowledgment that Wakley's accusations of incompetence and nepotism were justified.

After the journal began printing the content of Sir Astley Cooper's lectures without permission, the great man paid a surprise visit to his former pupil to discover Wakley correcting the proofs of the next issue.

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 that he exposed, that in 1827, a petition to Parliament resulted in a return being ordered of the public money granted to it.

[7] Wakley's campaigning was rough and outspoken: [We deplore the] "state of society which allows various sets of mercenary, goose-brained monopolists and charlatans to usurp the highest privileges....

This is the canker-worm which eats into the heart of the medical body""The Council of the College of Surgeons remains an irresponsible, unreformed monstrosity in the midst of English institutions – an antediluvian relic of all... that is most despotic and revolting, iniquitous and insulting, on the face of the Earth".He was especially severe on whomever he regarded as quacks.

[4]: 145 One of Wakley's best ideas came in 1831, when a series of massive meetings were held to launch a rival to the Royal Colleges.

Though successful, not eventually unsuccessful, and the LCM incorporated ideas that formed the basis of reforms in the charters of the main licensing bodies, the Apothecaries, the Royal Colleges of Surgeons and Physicians.

Wakley also played a leading role in the reform of the London Veterinary College and the creation of the Society of Coroners.

[13] He spoke in the House of Commons against the Poor Laws, police bills, newspaper tax and Lord's Day observance and for Chartism, Tolpuddle Martyrs, free trade, Irish nationalism and, of course, medical reform.

[11]: 428  All the topics were vigorously debated and fought over, for the 1830s was a turbulent decade; the origin of the difficulties lay in the massively expensive Napoleonic Wars, and in the inherent injustice of the way British law and Parliament operated.

As an Anglican and a regular church-goer, Wakley's opposition to aspects of the Lord's Day Observance legislation was based not on secularism but on his sympathy for the ordinary man.

Wakley was Coroner when Private James White, after committing a disciplinary offence, was subjected to 150 lashes of the cat-o'-nine-tails in the 7th Hussars in 1846 and died a month later after symptoms of "serious cardiac and pulmonary mischief" were followed by pleurisy and pneumonia.

The army doctors, under direct pressure from the colonel of the regiment, signed the certificate saying "cause of death was in no way connected with the corporal punishment."

In the event, it was the evidence of Erasmus Wilson, consulting surgeon to the St Pancras Infirmary, who made it clear that the flogging and the death were causally connected.

[2]: 404  The jury concurred and added a strongly worded rider that expressed their "horror and disgust that the law of the land provided that the revolting punishment of flogging should be permitted upon British soldiers."

Sprigge added that it was not Wilson's able scientific arguments that convinced the jury, but it was his assertion that had it not been for the flogging, White would be alive.

The methods were devised by Wakley, Sir William Brooke O'Shaughnessy and Dr Arthur Hill Hassall, who was the Commissioner.

His funeral was a very private affair, attendance restricted to family and close friends; the long-term consequences of his radicalism were eventually appreciated, at least to some extent.