Online Encyclopedia

SIR WILLIAM WITHEY GULL

Online Encyclopedia
Originally appearing in Volume V12, Page 714 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
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SIR WILLIAM WITHEY GULL  , 1st Bart . (1816-1890),
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English physician, was the youngest son of John Gull, a barge-owner and wharfinger of Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex, and was born on the 31st of December 1816 at Colchester . He began
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life as a schoolmaster, but in 1837 Benjamin Harrison, the treasurer of Guy's Hospital, who had noticed his ability, brought him up to
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London from the school at Lewes where he was usher, and gave him employment at the hospital, where he also gained permission to attend the lectures . In 1843 he was made a lecturer in the medical school of the hospital, in 1851 he was chosen an assistant physician, and in 1856 he became full physician . In 1847 he was elected Fullerian professor of physiology in the Royal Institution, retaining the
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post for the usual three years, and in 1848 he delivered the Gulstonian Lectures at the College of Physicians, where he filled every office of honour but that of president . He died in London on the 29th of
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January 1890 after a series of paralytic strokes, the first of which had occurred nearly three years previously . He was created a
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baronet in 1872, in recognition of the skill and care he had shown in attending the prince of Wales during his attack of typhoid in 1871 .
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Sir William Gull's fame rested mainly on his success as a clinical practitioner; as he said himself, he was " a clinical physician or nothing." This success must be largely ascribed to his remarkable powers of observation, and to the
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great opportunities he enjoyed for gaining experience of disease . He was sometimes accused of being a disbeliever in drugs . That was not the case, for he prescribed drugs like other physicians when he considered them likely to be beneficial . He felt, however, that their administration was only a
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part of the physician's duties, and his
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mental honesty and outspokenness prevented him from deluding either himself or his patients with unwarranted notions of what they can do . But though he regarded
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medicine as primarily an
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art for the
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relief of
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physical suffering, he was far from disregarding the scientific side of his ' The word " gulf," a portion of the sea partially enclosed by the coast-
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line, and usually taken as referring to a tract of
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water larger than a
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bay and smaller than a sea, is derived through the Fr. golfe, from
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Late Gr. s6X 'os, class .

Gr . Kogiros, bosom, hence bay, cf .

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Lat. sinus . I.n University
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slang, the
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term is used of the position of those who fail to obtain a place in the honours list at a public examination, but are allowed a "pass."profession, and he made some real contributions to medical science .

End of Article: SIR WILLIAM WITHEY GULL
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