Sent to the University of Edinburgh by John Porter (1770–1855), (first president of the 'Portsmouth and Portsea Literary and Philosophical Society') to whom he was originally apprenticed, Engledue took his final exams after only two years study.
[4] Having spent a year as the anatomical demonstrator for John Lizars, Professor of Surgery to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, he returned to Portsmouth in the winter of 1835, and started to practice there.
Having formed his opinion, he had great energy in acting on it: yet, though highly proficient in surgery, he invariably strove (sometimes it was thought with a doubtful daring) to save a limb rather than amputate it.
Marked by great energy of character, he was, nevertheless, distinguished by such gentle bearing, that he was the object of the intense affection of his patients – their friend and counsellor in the most difficult and trying circumstances; and he sacrificed his time, when most pressed and worried, to relieve their personal anxieties and sorrows.
We rank ourselves with the second party, and conceive that we must cease speaking of "the mind", and discontinue enlisting in our investigations a spiritual essence, the existence of which cannot be proved, but which tends to mystify and perplex a question sufficiently clear if we confine ourselves to the consideration of organised matter – its forms – its changes – and its aberrations from normal structure.
[19] Engledue and John Elliotson were the co-editors of The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology & Mesmerism, and Their Applications to Human Welfare, an influential British journal, devoted to the promotion of the theories and practices (and the collection and dissemination of reports of the applications) of mesmerism and phrenology, and the enterprise of "connecting and harmonizing practical science with little understood laws governing the mental structure of man",[20] that was published quarterly, without a break, for fifteen years: from March 1843 until January 1856.
In a state of deep melancholy consequent upon a nosocomial infection, namely erysipelas, acquired whilst hospitalized for surgery on an otherwise unremarkable small tumour, he took his own life in December 1858.
[22] DR. WILLIAM ENGLEDUE, of Gloucester House, Southsea, a physician of considerable eminence, and having a very extensive practice in that neighbourhood, committed suicide on Thursday, December 30th, by swallowing a dose of prussic acid.Dr.