Watson was recognised from the commencement of his London career as a man of mark, and in 1827 he was elected Physician to the Middlesex Hospital. In 1828, on the opening of the University College, he was appointed Professor of Clinical Medicine, retaining his post at the Middlesex Hospital; but he transferred his services as lecturer to King’s College in 1831, becoming Professor of Forensic Medicine. Practice had come but slowly in these years. In 1831 he made his first contribution to medical literature, in the shape of “Remarks on the Dissection of Bishop, and the Phenomena attending Death by Strangulation” (Medical Gazette). Bishop had murdered an Italian organ-boy, and brought the body to King’s College for sale: Bishop was hanged, and his body, like that of his victim, came to King’s College for dissection. From this time Dr. Watson made numerous contributions to the Medical Gazette, largely embodied in his subsequent great work. In July 1832 he was chosen to accompany Sir Walter Scott from London to Edinburgh when he was returning from Italy to Abbotsford for the last time.
In 1836 Dr. Watson was appointed to the chair of the Principles and Practice of Medicine at King’s College, and in the ensuing winter delivered the first draught of those lectures on which his fame rests. They soon became well known, and they were printed weekly in the Medical Gazette in 1840-2. Finally they were published in two volumes by Parker in 1844, and became acknowledged as medical classics. Mr. Parker showed a righteous liberality when their great sale had brought in a large sum, in granting the author two-thirds of the profits instead of one-half, as had been agreed, and handing him twelve hundred pounds as a first payment. Watson had already, in 1840, resigned his chair at King’s College rather than leave his old post at Middlesex Hospital, but in 1843 he was compelled by the increase of private practice to resign even this. Henceforward, especially after the retirement of Dr. Chambers in 1848, he was at the head of London practice for many years. He was not, however, appointed one of the Queen’s Physicians-Extraordinary till 1859; in 1861 he was called in to attend the Prince-Consort in his fatal illness, and in 1866 he was created a baronet, receiving in 1870 the further appointment of Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen. The College of Physicians elected him President in 1862, an office he held for five years. From 1858 to 1860 he represented the College on the General Medical Council. In 1857-8 he was President of the Pathological Society, and he was in 1868 the first President of the Clinical Society. In 1859 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Two quotations from Watson’s Introductory Lecture to his course will serve to indicate some of the qualities which have given his book such popularity. Referring to the study of anatomy and physiology, he says; “Do not think that I am wandering from my proper subject when I bid you to remember how profoundly interesting, how almost awful, is the study in itself and for its own sake, revealing, as it surely does, the inimitable workmanship of a Hand that is Divine. Do not lose or disregard that grand and astonishing lesson. Do not listen to those who may tell you not to look for the evidence of purpose in this field of study, that the visible mechanism of that intricate but marvellously perfect and harmonious work, the animal body—the numberless examples of means suited to ends, of fitness for a use, of even prospective arrangements to meet future needs, of direct provisions for happiness and enjoyment—that all these have no force at all, in true philosophy, as evidences of design. For my own part, I declare that I can no more avoid perceiving, with my mental vision, the evidential marks of purpose in the structure of the body, than I can help seeing with my open eyes, in broad daylight, the objects that stand before my face.”
Again, he characterises the profession of medicine in noble terms. “The profession of medicine having for its end the common good of mankind, knows nothing of national enmities, of political strife, of sectarian divisions. Disease and pain the sole conditions of its ministry, it is disquieted by no misgivings about the justice or the honesty of its client’s cause; but dispenses its peculiar benefits, without stint or scruple, to men of every country or party, and rank and religion, and to men of no religion at all. And like the quality of mercy, of which it is the favourite handmaid, it “blesses him that gives and him that takes,” reading continually to our own hearts and understandings the most impressive lessons, the most solemn warnings. It is ours to know in how many instances, forming indeed a vast majority of the whole, bodily suffering and sickness are the natural fruits of evil courses—of the sins of our fathers, of our own unbridled passions, of the malevolent spirit of others. We see, too, the uses of these judgments, which are mercifully designed to recall men from the strong allurements of sense, and the slumber of temporal prosperity, teaching that it is good for us to be sometimes afflicted. Familiar with death in its manifold shapes, witnessing from day to day its sudden stroke, its slow but open siege, its secret and insidious approaches, we are not permitted to be unmindful that our own stay also is brief and uncertain, our opportunities fleeting, and our time, even when longest, very short, if measured by our moral wants and intellectual cravings.”
These lectures had the largest sale of any similar work in the author’s lifetime. Five large editions were published under his own revision. He most unsparingly altered his previous views with the advance of science, and showed rare modesty in his expressions thereupon. Dr. Charles West has admirably sketched his friend’s character (Medical Times and Gazette, Dec. 16, 1882): “He laid no claim to genius; he made no great discovery. Though a scholar he was not more learned, though a good speaker he was not more eloquent, than many of his contemporaries whose names are now well-nigh forgotten; and yet he was by universal consent regarded as the completest illustration of the highest type of the physician. His moral as well as his intellectual qualities had much to do with the estimate which all formed of his character. His faculties were remarkably well balanced, his mind was eminently fair. He had that gift—the attribute and the reward of truth—the power intuitively to detect all specious error. Hence, while the added experience of each year gave increased value to his teachings and his writings, it brought but little for him to unlearn or to unsay. He took a wide view of every question.... He availed himself of knowledge from all sources, and for all purposes except vain display; he used theories to illustrate his facts and to point their meaning, but no further, conscious that, with imperfect knowledge, it would be idle to attempt to build up correct theory.... Take him in his teaching, all in all, he seems to me, more than any one I ever knew, to be the undoubted heir of England’s greatest practical physician, Thomas Sydenham.”
Another writer in the British Medical Journal, Dec. 23, 1882, speaks of his serene and gentle temper, his modest dignity, his benevolent kindness, his unfailing clearness of judgment. “Nothing that happened in the professional world, of human or scientific importance, was alien to him; and there are few men among his contemporaries who have not at one time or another come to him for advice and guidance. Conciliatory to the utmost bounds of kindness, he was never open to the charge of favouring compromise.... It is rare indeed to find any man of whom it may be said as of him, that there is not one man in the profession who would at any time have declined to accept Sir Thomas Watson’s judgment on any personal or professional question as final. His sense of justice, his habitual reference of all questions of detail to unassailable principle, his flexibility of mind, and his quick perception of character, gave him a rare but well-justified ascendancy over even the ablest of his contemporaries.” After a long old age spent in retirement from practice, but in continued vigorous professional study, of which he gave evidence in a little book on the Abolition of Zymotic Diseases, published as late as 1879, the venerable man died of old age at his son’s residence at Reigate, in Surrey, on December 11, 1882.
Born about ten years after the last-mentioned eminent physician, Dominic John Corrigan for many years held a position in Dublin somewhat parallel to that of Watson in London. He was a native of Dublin, born on December 1st, 1802, his father having been a merchant in Thomas Street. Educated first at the lay college of St. Patrick’s at Maynooth, he entered upon medical study as the pupil of Dr. O’Kelly of Maynooth, who had foresight to discern that his pupil was capable of rising to the highest position in the profession, and advised his being sent to the Edinburgh Medical School. Part of his medical study was, however, pursued in Dublin, where he attended clinical lectures at Sir Patrick Dun’s Hospital. His Edinburgh degree dates from 1825.
The rising science of pathology had deeply impressed young Corrigan’s mind, and he devoted himself, after settling in Dublin as physician to the Meath Street Dispensary, to original study. One of the principal fruits of his inquiries was his classic paper on “Permanent Patency of the Mouth of the Aorta, or Inadequacy of the Aortic Valves,” published in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, April 1832. This paper commenced with the following statement, “The disease to which the above name is given has not, so far as I am aware, been described in any of the works on diseases of the heart. The object of the present paper is to supply that deficiency. The disease is not uncommon. It supplies a considerable proportion of cases of deranged action of the heart, and it deserves attention from its peculiar signs, its progress, and its treatment. The pathological essence of the disease consists in inefficiency of the valvular apparatus at the mouth of the aorta, in consequence of which the blood sent into the mouth regurgitates into the ventricle. This regurgitation, and the signs by which it is denoted, are not necessarily connected with one particular change of structure in the valvular apparatus.” One particular feature attending these cases, which Corrigan was the first fully to describe, was the extraordinary character of the pulse, since known very generally as “Corrigan’s pulse.” The strong visible pulsation in the arteries of the head, neck, and arms, bounding into a new position with each beat of the heart, and becoming prominent under the skin, has since proved the means whereby aortic valvular disease of the heart has been recognised in multitudes of cases. The full pulse, followed by almost complete collapse, has since been termed “jerking, splashing, or collapsing,” or the “water-hammer pulse.” The peculiar rushing thrill felt by the finger in the large superior arteries was also dwelt upon, as well as the “bruit de souffle” heard as an accompaniment of the heart-sounds. Corrigan had corrected Laennec’s erroneous view of the cause of this bruit, in a previous paper in the Lancet of vol. ii., 1829, p. 1.
Dr. Corrigan continued for some years zealously to investigate the functions of the heart, and he experimented largely upon the hearts of fishes and reptiles. He published an important paper “On the Motions and Sounds of the Heart,” in the Dublin Medical Transactions, 1830, part i. At this period of his career, when practice as yet was but scanty, he was much encouraged by reading “The Lives of British Physicians, from Linacre to Gooch,” published in 1830, and he referred to it afterwards as showing that “there is but one road to excellence and success in our profession, and that is by steady study and hard labour; and you will at least always have this consolation in your dreariest hour of labour, that no proud man’s contumely, no insolence of office, nor ‘spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes,’ can bar your way.”