Sir William Robert Wills Wilde MD, FRCSI, (March 1815 – 19 April 1876) was an Irish eye and ear surgeon, as well as an author of significant works on medicine, archaeology and folklore, particularly concerning his native Ireland. He was the father of Oscar Wilde.
Contents |
William Wilde was born at Kilkeevin, near Castlerea, in County Roscommon, the youngest of the three sons and two daughters of a prominent local medical practitioner, Thomas Wills Wilde, and his wife, Amelia (d. c.1844),[1] and received his initial education at the Elphin Diocesan School in Elphin, County Roscommon. In 1832, Wilde was bound as an apprentice to Abraham Colles, the pre-eminent Irish surgeon of the day, at Dr Steevens' Hospital in Dublin. He was also taught by the surgeons James Cusack and Sir Philip Crampton and the physician Sir Henry Marsh. Wilde also studied at the private and highly respected school of anatomy, medicine, and surgery in Park Street (later Lincoln Place), Dublin.[1] In 1837, he earned his medical degree from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. He was awarded a knighthood in 1864 for his medical contributions and his involvement with the Irish census - he had been appointed medical commissioner to the Irish census in 1841. In 1845, he became editor of the Dublin Journal of Medical Science, to which he contributed many articles.
He ran his own hospital, St Mark's Ophthalmic Hospital for Diseases of the Eye and Ear, in Dublin and was appointed to serve as Oculist-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria. At one point, Wilde performed surgery on the father of another famous Irish dramatist, George Bernard Shaw.
Wilde had a very successful medical practice and was assisted in it by his natural son, Henry Wilson, who had been trained in Dublin, Vienna, Heidelberg, Berlin, and Paris. Wilson’s presence enabled Wilde to travel and he visited Scandinavia, where he received an honorary degree from Uppsala, and was welcomed in Stockholm by Anders Retzius, among others. King Karl XV of Sweden conferred on him the Nordstjärneorden (Order of the North Star).
Wilde married the poet Jane Francesca Agnes Elgee in 1851, who wrote and published under the name of Speranza. The couple had two sons: Willie and Oscar Wilde, and a daughter, Isola Francesca, who died in childhood. In addition to Henry Wilson, William Wilde had two other illegitimate children by earlier liaisons, Emily and Mary Wilde, both of whom died in a tragic fire accident in 1871.
In 1864, Wilde was knighted, but his reputation suffered when Mary Travers, a long-term patient of his and the daughter of a colleague, claimed that he had seduced her two years earlier.[2] She wrote a pamphlet crudely parodying Wilde and Lady Wilde as Dr and Mrs Quilp, and portraying Dr Quilp as the rapist of a female patient anaesthetized under chloroform. She handed these out outside the building where Wilde was about to give a public lecture. Lady Wilde complained to Mary's father, Robert Travers, which resulted in Mary bringing a libel case against her. Mary Travers won her case but was awarded a mere farthing in damages by the jury. Legal costs of £2,000 were awarded against Lady Wilde. The case was the talk of all Dublin, and Wilde's refusal to enter the witness box during the trial was widely held against him as ungentlemanly behaviour.
From this time onwards, Wilde began to withdraw from Dublin to the west of Ireland, where he had started in 1864 to build what became Moytura, his house overlooking Lough Corrib in Connemara. He died aged 61 in 1876,[3] and is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Dublin.