Thomas Wakley

Thomas Wakley (11 July 1795 – 16 May 1862) was an English surgeon. He gained fame as a social reformer who campaigned against incompetence, privilege and nepotism. He was the founding editor of The Lancet, a radical Member of Parliament (MP) of the Liberal Party and a celebrated coroner.

He was born in Membury, Devon, to a prosperous farmer, Henry Wakley (1750 – 26 August 1842), and his wife, Mary née Minifie. His father inherited property, leased neighbouring land and became a large farmer by the standards of the day and a government Commissioner on the Enclosure of Waste Land. He was described as a "just but severe parent" and, with his wife, had eleven children, eight sons and three daughters. Thomas was the youngest son, and attended the grammar school at Chard (now Chard School), then Taunton Grammar School.

When he was eleven, he sailed on a ship captained by a family friend to Calcutta. He joined the ship on 7 March 1807 as one of six midshipmen. He was discharged on 18 August 1808. When he returned, he attended school at Wiveliscombe, Somerset. At fifteen, he was apprenticed to a Taunton apothecary and then later to surgeons in Beaminster and Henley-on-Thames. Young Wakley was a sportsman and a boxer: he fought bare-fisted in public houses.

In 1815, he then went to London, where he attended anatomy classes at St Thomas's Hospital, and enrolled in the United Hospitals of St. Thomas's Hospital and Guy's. The dominant personality at these two hospitals was Sir Astley Cooper FRS (1768–1841). He also studied at a private anatomy college on Webb Street, run by Richard and Edward Grainger. Wakley qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons (MRCS) in 1817.

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. They had three sons and a daughter, who died young. His eldest son, Henry Membury Wakley, became a barrister and sat as deputy coroner under his father. His youngest son, James Goodchild Wakley, and his middle son, Thomas Henry Wakley, became joint editors of The Lancet.

All through his career, Wakley proved to be a man of aggressive personality, and his experiences had a sensational beginning. In August 1820 a gang of men (reputedly, the Thistlewood gang) that had some imagined grievance against him burnt down his house and severely wounded him in a murderous assault. The whole affair is obscure. The assault may have been a follow-up to the Cato Street conspiracy, whose supporters believed (wrongly) that the hangman was a surgeon. Wakley was indirectly accused by the insurance company, which had refused his claim, of setting fire to his house himself. He won his case against the company.

In 1823, he started the now well-known medical weekly, The Lancet, with William Cobbett, William Lawrence, James Wardrop and a libel lawyer as associates. It was extremely successful: by 1830, it had a circulation of about 4,000. In 1828, one of his accounts of medical negligence accused Bransby Cooper (the nephew of Sir Astley Cooper, the General Surgeon) of incompetence in causing a patient immense suffering as he attempted to extract a bladder stone through a cut beneath the scrotum. 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 magazine account led to a libel case, Cooper v Wakley, which would raise the profile and popular prestige of Wakley and his magazine. 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.

At first, the editor of the Lancet was not named in the journal, but after a few weeks, rumours began to circulate. 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. Upon recognising each other, they fell immediately into laughter or perhaps an altercation. Either way, they reached an agreement that was mutually satisfactory.