In 1826 young Wilson had become a resident pupil with Mr. Langstaff, father of a fellow-student, surgeon to the parish infirmary of Cripplegate. Here in Langstaff’s dissecting-room, where many pathological researches were carried on, Wilson made the acquaintance of numerous men of mark who resorted thither, including Jones Quain and William Lawrence. On the establishment of the Aldersgate School of Medicine under Lawrence’s régime, Wilson joined it as student, and in 1829-30 won both the surgical and the midwifery prizes. On the day when he attained his majority, November 25, 1830, Wilson took the Apothecaries’ Hall diploma.
Having become a member of the London College of Surgeons in 1831, Wilson was asked by Dr. Jones Quain, then Professor of Anatomy and Physiology at University College, London, to be his assistant, and he soon after was appointed Demonstrator of Anatomy under Richard Quain. Wilson was a capital teacher of anatomy, and his private museum of dissections prepared by his own hands fully illustrated his manipulative capacity. He superintended the execution of the illustrations to the celebrated Quain’s Anatomy, and also those to Liston’s Practical Surgery (1837).
When Dr. Jones Quain retired from University College Hospital in 1838, Wilson resigned his appointments also, and established a school of anatomy under the title of Sydenham College, which however did not prove ultimately successful. He then devoted himself to such private practice as he could obtain in Charlotte Street, Fitzroy Square, eking out his income by taking pupils, and by literary work. In 1838 he appeared as an author with “The Dissector’s Manual of Practical and Surgical Anatomy,” subsequently producing the “Anatomist’s Vade Mecum” (1840), of which many editions have been called for. In the same year he became Lecturer on Anatomy and Physiology at the Middlesex Hospital.
Meanwhile Wilson had made the acquaintance of a man who was destined to turn his thoughts in the direction which became permanent. His father, after retiring from the navy, had taken a mansion at Deham, Bucks, and set up a private lunatic asylum; and in connection with this establishment Wilson met Mr. Thomas Wakley, M.P., the founder of the Lancet, and coroner for Middlesex. Mr. Wakley appointed Wilson sub-editor of the Lancet in 1840, a post which he held for several years, continuing to write for that journal after resigning the more onerous post when his private practice increased. About this time he became Consulting Surgeon to the Marylebone Infirmary, and gained a very extensive experience of every department of hospital surgery. In fact, it appeared at first that Wilson would probably make his mark as a pure surgeon.
No more certain path, however, opening in this direction, Mr. Wakley considerably influenced Wilson towards choosing a special line of practice as a means of success. There was much open opposition at that time among medical men to the idea of specialisation, and Mr. Wakley succeeded in overcoming Wilson’s fear of sinking under the dreaded name of quack. The choice of a specialty was not difficult, as skin diseases or dermatology then constituted an almost uncultivated field. “I have never regretted my choice,” he remarked on one occasion;[22] “there is only one more beautiful thing in the world than a fine healthy skin, and that is a rare skin disease.”
In 1842 Wilson brought out his extended systematic work on Diseases of the Skin, and subsequently produced twelve fasciculi of folio “Portraits of Diseases of the Skin.” In connection with these we may mention that he took a large share in the well-known five volumes of Anatomical Plates, issued jointly by Dr. Quain and himself. In 1843 he was elected a Fellow of the College of Surgeons, and in 1844 a Fellow of the Royal Society, having contributed to the latter a memoir on a newly-discovered parasite on the human skin, the Entozoon folliculorum . He made himself familiar with varieties of skin diseases by extensive vacation rambles—in Switzerland and the Valais studying goitre, in Italy searching out ringworm cases among the peasantry, in the East making leprosy a special object of inquiry. He wrote the article “Skin” in Cooper’s Surgical Dictionary, a Report on Leprosy, and many articles on various subjects connected with the specialty.
Thus Wilson became a specialist of great merit as well as profitable practice, and, says the Lancet (August 16, 1884), “knew more about skin diseases than any man of his time. He cured when others had failed to cure; and his works on dermatology, though they met with pretty searching criticism at the time of their appearance, have nearly all maintained their position as text-books. The horrible cases of scrofula, anæmia, and blood-poisoning which he witnessed among the poor of London—they are happily rarer now than they were half a century ago—enlisted his warm sympathies. But he had to deal with rich patients as well as poor, and over these the masterful stamp of his mind enabled him to exercise despotism in matters of diet. Wilson was not only a consummate dietician, but he knew how to make his patients submit to have their bodies placed under martial law.” He in fact largely viewed skin diseases as expressions of internal derangement and constitutional defects. He was continually on the look out for deficiency of nutrition in children and remedying it.
Wilson was much pleased to be the means of bringing forward a little work on “Infant Life: its Nurture and Care,” written anonymously by a lady, and first published in his “Journal of Cutaneous Medicine.” In the preface which he wrote to it he expresses his strong beliefs that hygiene is the first necessity of a scholastic institution, that with proper nurture almost all the diseases of infants would be extinguished, that illness following vaccination properly performed can only occur owing to neglect of proper nurture and care, and that “healthy children never suffer, never die from vaccination.”
An incident which brought Erasmus Wilson prominently before the public was the inquest held at Hounslow on a soldier who had died after a regimental flogging. Mr. Wakley held the inquest, which lasted eleven days. It was in a great measure owing to Mr. Wilson’s decided evidence that a verdict was returned declaring that the flogging had been the cause of death. The public feeling was aroused, a Parliamentary inquiry was subsequently held, and the punishment of flogging was at last removed from the regimental code.
Several works of considerable merit made Wilson’s name very widely known. One of the most popular of these was entitled “Healthy Skin,” first published in 1845. It strongly advocated that constant use of the bath which has become far more prevalent than when it was first issued. A translation of Hufeland’s “Art of Prolonging Life,” which he edited, appeared in 1853. In “The Eastern or Turkish Bath,” in 1861, Wilson gave a powerful impetus to the establishment and spread of the Turkish bath in England, and laid down principles and plans of procedure calculated to make this bath safe for persons of very varied constitutions.