Resigning his post at the Meath Street Dispensary, Corrigan became successively attached to the Cork Street Fever Hospital, and to the Jervis Street Hospital. Yet the Irish College of Physicians failed to discern his great merits, and blackballed him when he was first proposed for the fellowship, a mistake which they subsequently atoned for in some measure by electing him their president for five successive years, and by commissioning a statue of him, by Foley, at the conclusion of his term of office. In 1833 he began to lecture on the practice of medicine in the Carmichael School of Medicine, and practice grew rapidly. In 1840 he was appointed physician to the House of Industry Hospitals, which post he held till 1866. Here he delivered a noteworthy course of lectures on the Nature and Treatment of Fever, which were published in 1853. He accepted and enforced the modern views as to the distinctness of typhoid from typhus fever.
In 1841 Dr. Corrigan became a member of the Senate of the new Queen’s University, of which after thirty years he was appointed Vice-Chancellor. In 1849 Dublin University gave him the honorary M.D. He was assiduously devoted to the onerous duties of a Commissionership of National Education. As to practice, he became the most popular and highly remunerated physician Dublin had ever seen, having for many years more calls upon him than he could possibly attend to, and receiving in several years as much as £9000 per annum in fees. In 1866 he was made a baronet in consideration both of his medical position and of his important services to national education. He was also Physician-in-Ordinary to the Queen in Ireland.
As member of the General Medical Council from 1858 till his death, Sir Dominic Corrigan exercised a strong influence in favour of elevating the standard of professional education. He was an eloquent and lively debater and not at all averse to a display of verbal pugnacity, but he was much and generally beloved. In 1868 Sir Dominic was induced to come forward as an advanced Liberal candidate for the representation of the city of Dublin in Parliament; but on that occasion, however, he was defeated. In 1870 he was elected by a majority of over a thousand votes, and sat in Parliament till 1874. Originally of a fine constitution, he suffered severely from gout in his later years, and died after an attack of paralysis on Feb. 1, 1880.
The succession of clinical physicians is well sustained at the present day in the person of Sir William Withey Gull, Baronet. Born on the last day of December 1816, at Thorpe-le-soken, Essex, William Gull was educated privately, and early became a student of Guy’s Hospital, London. To this establishment he was so attached that for fifteen years he resided within its walls or immediately adjacent. In 1841 he became M.B. of London University, and in 1846 M.D. He was elected Fellow of the College of Physicians in 1846, and Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution in 1847, which office he held till 1849.
Very early after his graduation as M.B., Dr. Gull was appointed to assist the pupils at Guy’s in their studies, or in other words, he became medical tutor. In 1843 he began to lecture on natural philosophy. In 1846 he undertook the important lectureships of physiology and comparative anatomy in Guy’s Medical School. Meanwhile about 1843 Dr. Gull had been appointed resident superintendent of the asylum for twenty female lunatics which Guy had ordered to be maintained. He formed a close acquaintance with Dr. Conolly, whose name will ever be connected with the rational treatment of the insane in this country, and by adopting improved methods Dr. Gull was finally so successful that the patients were all discharged cured, and the wards occupied by them devoted to the treatment of acute cases more properly coming under care in a general hospital. Meanwhile Dr. Gull was appointed assistant-physician to Guy’s, and in due course succeeded to the full physiciancy. In this capacity his clinical teaching was long one of the important features at Guy’s. In 1856 he became joint-lecturer on medicine, which office he held till 1867 with great distinction. At this date he was compelled by the increasing claims of practice to resign his appointment; but he is still attached to Guy’s as consulting physician.
Practice, indeed, came upon Dr. Gull all too soon for medical science to reap the highest advantage from his original research. But whatever he has written has been of high value and worthy of deep consideration. Among his writings may be mentioned the Gulstonian Lectures on Paralysis (Medical Gazette, 1849), essays on Hypochondriasis and Abscess of the Brain, in Reynolds’ “System of Medicine,” and Guy’s Hospital Reports, 1857; on Paraplegia, in Guy’s Hospital Reports for 1856, 1858, and 1861; on Anorexia Nervosa, and on a Cretinoid State, in the Transactions of the Clinical Society, vol. vii. His Report on Cholera, with Dr. Baly, for the College of Physicians (1854), and his paper, with Dr. Sutton, on Arterio-Capillary Fibrosis (Med. Chir. Transactions, vol. lv.), rank high as original contributions, which must always be consulted by writers on those subjects.
In an oration delivered before the Hunterian Society in 1861 Dr. Gull took occasion to utter a protest against the popular prejudice for specialists. “Who can treat as a speciality,” he asks, “the derangements and diseases of the stomach, whilst its relations and sympathies are so universal? How can there be a special ‘brain doctor,’ whilst the functions of the brain are so dependent upon parts the most distant, and influences the most various? A tumour in the brain may tell of its presence only through disturbance in the stomach, and a disorder of the stomach and its appendages may have for its most prominent symptoms only various disturbances of the brain.”
In his address on “Clinical Observation in Relation to Medicine,” before the British Medical Association in 1868, Dr. Gull thus expressed his impartial attitude in medicine: “We have no system to satisfy; no dogmatic opinions to enforce. We have no ignorance to cloak, for we confess it.” “Medicine is a specialism; but of no narrow kind. We have to dissect nature; which, for practice, is better than to abstract it.” “To clinical medicine the body becomes a pathological museum. In every part we recognise certain proclivities to morbid action; and the purpose of our study is to trace these tendencies to their source on the one hand, and to their effects on the other.” “The effects of disease may be for a third or fourth generation, but the laws of health are for a thousand.” “Happily, at this day, hygiene has gained strength enough to maintain an independent position in science. To know and counteract the causes of disease before they become effective is evidently the triumph of our art; but it will be long before mankind will be wise enough to accept the aid we could give them in this direction. Ignorance of the laws of health, and intemperance of all kinds, are too powerful for us. Still we shall continue to wage an undying crusade; and truly we may congratulate ourselves that no crusade ever called forth more able and devoted warriors than are thus engaged.”
In 1870 Dr. Gull delivered the Harveian Oration before the Royal College of Physicians, and expressed himself forcibly as to the duty of preventing disease. Indeed, it is a strong article of faith with him that at some future time the office of the physician will be gone. “I cannot doubt it is on all sides imperative on us to limit, and if possible to blot out, all diseases of whatever kind. Who would assume the responsibility of letting a preventable evil fester in society, on a pretence of a knowledge of the divine purposes, or under the pretext that public morality would be thereby promoted? The duty which lies nearest to us must ever have the first claim; and it cannot but be admitted that the nearest duty each man has to his fellow is to save him as far as possible from all injury, even though that injury may arise as the consequence of his own fault. Nor will it be questioned that the cause of morality is more advanced by beneficent interference than by permitting ourselves to stand passively by whilst intemperance and vice work ruin and infect the very fountains of life.”