Whitley Stokes (physician)

Stokes was born in Waterford, son of Gabriel Stokes (1732–1806), DD, chancellor of the cathedral, and master of Waterford endowed school, where the young Stokes had his primary education.[1] At age 16 he was admitted to Trinity College Dublin (TCD) (Scholar 1781, BA 1783, MA 1789, MB & MD 1793) and completing studies medicine at the University of Edinburgh.[2]

His first ventures as a medical practitioner was in public health. He studied not only his patients' ailments but also their environments, noting that in the slums of Dublin certain families rented a small room for a few guineas a year, sub-letting to others who paid them sixpence-halfpenny per week to lay down a bed of straw in a corner.[1]

Having been admitted as a licentiate of the College of Physicians in 1795 without examination, in 1798 he was appointed Regius Professor of Medicine at TCD (a position he held until 1811), and was elected a Fellow of the College in 1800. At the same time "with the assurance of a polymath", he was Donegall Lecturer in Mathematics from 1807 and offered a course in natural history. He left TCD to hold the chair of medicine at Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) 1819-1828. Returning to TCD he became Regius Professor of Physic (1830-1840). In 1814 he funded an English-Irish dictionary.[1]

His principal medical works of Whitley Stokes are "On an eruptive disease of children", published in the Dublin Medical and Physical Essays (1808), and Observations on Contagion (1818). From 1818 to 1826 he was on the staff of the Meath Hospital where his services were available to the sick poor, and he worked through two typhus epidemics.[1]

In November 1791, Stokes was elected to the Society of the United Irishmen of Dublin, one of eighteen persons nominated in their absence. With Thomas Russell and Wolfe Tone,[3] he was critical of William Drennan's membership Test. He found Drennan's call for "a brotherhood of affection [...] and a union of power among Irishmen of every religious persuasion" in pursuit of "an impartial and adequate representation of the Irish nation in parliament",[4] too rhetorical, argumentative, and indeterminate. In July 1792 he accompanied Tone on a visit to Belfast where Tone introduced him to his fellow physician-polymath Dr James MacDonnell.[1]

A month in advance of the first of the United Irish risings in May1798, at TCD Stokes was brought before the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Lord Clare. He admitted to having collected and given evidence to the liberal Lord Moira on the atrocities and tortures visited upon country people by Crown forces as they sought to break-up and disarm the United Irish organisation; but denied himself having had any part in the movement as it prepared for insurrection.[5] Clare found him "a most improper person to be entrusted in any degree with the government or direction of the college". He was suspended as a tutor, and barred from election to senior fellowship, for three years.[6]

Stokes's membership of the United Irishmen may have lapsed, but when in January 1793 the Society appointed a committee was appointed to draw up a scheme of parliamentary reform, he submitted a plan (one that fell short of the principle of universal suffrage ultimately approved).[7] As did MacDonnell, he continued in correspondence with Russell and treated him when he became seriously ill during his imprisonment in Newgate in 1797.[1]

In an independent Ireland, Wolfe Tone had imagined Stokes as "the head of a system of national education".[5]

Acknowledging the assistance of, among others, James MacDonnell and John Templeton of Belfast, in 1821 Stokes published Observations on the population and resources of Ireland. Stokes questions the "trap" or "spectre" of population growth proposed in the political economy of Robert Malthus: the proposition that "all attempts at enlightened benevolence to ameliorate the condition of the poor are fruitless and mistaken" [8] because the common people use abundance to enlarge families rather than increase their comforts. Applying this thesis to Ireland, in 1817 Malthus had proposed that "to give full effect to the natural resources of the country a great part of the population should be swept from the soil".[9]

Finding fault in Malthus's calculations, insisting upon the advantages mankind derives from "improved industry, improved conveyance, improvements in morals, government and religion", and disparaging by international comparison the "English" opinion that Ireland, thanks to the potato, was overpopulated, Stokes denied that there was a "law of nature" that procreation must outrun the means of subsistence.[10]

Advising his readers not "to fret about our numbers", Stokes argued vigorously for the division of large holdings, the encouragement and assistance of manufacture, and investment in inland navigation and roads. Once the Irish begin to feel "whole clothes" on their backs, "effort for profit will be made."[11]

In 1796 Stokes married Mary Ann Picknall. They had five sons and five daughters. He was the father the physician William Stokes (1804–78) who succeeded him as Regius Professor of Physic at TCD, and through William the grandfather of Whitley Stokes the Celtic Scholar (1830–1909) and the Irish antiquarian Margaret Stokes (1832–1900).[12]

Whitley Stokes died 13 April 1845 at 16 Harcourt St. aged 82.[5]

• 1795: A reply to Mr Paine's Age of Reason addressed to the Students of Trinity College, Dublin
• 1799: Projects for re-establishing the internal peace and tranquillity of Ireland. Dublin, For James Moore.
• 1808: Observations on the necessity of publishing the Scriptures in the Irish language
• 1808: "On an Eruptive Disease of Children" Stokes W., US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health: Med Phys J. 1808 Apr;19(110):344-350.
• 1818: Observations on contagion. Dublin, For Hodges and McArthur
• 1821: Observations on the population and resources of Ireland, Dublin, Joshua Porter