In 1869 Erasmus Wilson founded at his own cost a museum and professorship of dermatology at the College of Surgeons, with an endowment of £5000, and was appointed the first professor. In this capacity he lectured for nearly ten years. Several successive series of lectures were published, as well as a catalogue of the museum. He was also the founder of the Chair of Pathology in Aberdeen University. He also endowed a pathological curatorship at the College of Surgeons. He was elected on the Council of the College in 1870, and was President in 1881. A special grant of an honorary gold medal was made to him by the College in 1884, just before his death.
His early Eastern travels had particularly interested Wilson in Egyptology, and he became by wide reading and study very competent in Egyptian lore, as is evidenced by his “Egypt of the Past,” published in 1881. His munificence in connection with the bringing of the obelisk known as “Cleopatra’s Needle” to London in 1877-8 is a familiar story. Many abortive proposals had been made to secure its being brought to England, but Government had always failed to make any arrangement. General Sir James Alexander was the means of starting the idea in Erasmus Wilson’s mind, by speaking to him of a project for raising sufficient money by a general subscription. Wilson, who was greatly interested, thought the sum needed, £10,000, would not be forthcoming, and undertook to pay the entire sum himself, Mr. John Dixon, C.E., having undertaken its successful transport. Thus Britons will ever owe to him the possession of this choice treasure of Egyptian antiquity. The book entitled “Cleopatra’s Needle: with Brief Notes on Egypt and Egyptian Obelisks,” which Wilson brought out in 1877, went through several editions.
But these were only a few of the public objects to which Erasmus Wilson devoted his wealth, which had been vastly increased by singularly skilful investments in gas and railway companies’ shares. He restored Swanscombe Church, near his birthplace, in 1873. He founded, at a cost of £2500, a scholarship at the Royal College of Music, besides contributing considerably to its general funds. He was a large subscriber to the Royal Medical Benevolent College at Epsom, and built at his own cost a house for the head-master; further, he built at a cost of £30,000 a new wing and chapel for the Sea-Bathing Infirmary at Margate, in which skin diseases are largely treated. He was a strong Freemason, and contributed liberally to various Masonic charities. In recognition of his many public benefactions he was knighted in 1881.
“From his earliest life,” says the British Medical Journal (August 16, 1884), “he was characterised particularly by his kindliness and gentleness of manner, which made him many friends; indeed, to know him was to love him. His generosity to poor patients who came to consult him was very great, not only prescribing for them gratis, but supplying the means for carrying out the treatment, and that not only after he became wealthy, but even at a time when he could ill afford to be generous. The amount of good he did privately will probably never be known, as he was one of whom it may truly be said, that he never let his left hand know what his right hand did—so unostentatious was he in regard to his charity.”
Sir Erasmus Wilson had been in ill-health for two years before his death, and for a year was quite blind, yet never lost cheerfulness. On July 23, 1884, he was at the consecration of St. Saviour’s Church at Westgate on Sea, of which he had laid the foundation-stone a year before. Within three days he became seriously ill, and died on August 7th. He had married in 1841 a Miss Doherty, who survived him. He left no family, and the bulk of his property, something like £180,000, reverts on Lady Wilson’s death to the College of Surgeons, without any restriction as to the disposal of the fund. Other legacies of £5000 each he bequeathed to the Sea-Bathing Infirmary at Margate, the Medical Benevolent College, and the Society for the Relief of the Widows and Orphans of Medical Men. Such bequests alone would place a man among great public benefactors. Wilson had not waited till death came before he became beneficent, and if his gifts are used in the spirit in which he gave them, he will rank with John Hunter as to the material if not the intellectual legacy he has bequeathed to mankind.
Descended from an old Scotch family (the Mackenzies of Scutwell), Dr. Morell Mackenzie is the son of the late Mr. Stephen Mackenzie, surgeon, of Leytonstone, by his wife Margaret, daughter of Mr. Adam Harvey of Lewes. Morell Mackenzie was born at Leytonstone, on the borders of Epping Forest, on the 7th July 1837. His father was a man of exceptional intellectual power, whose studies took the direction of metaphysics and mental diseases; hence he acquired great skill in treating nervous affections which border on insanity. His ability was testified to by Mr. Brudenell Carter in his valuable essay on Hysteria (see p. [268]). Mrs. Mackenzie was a clever woman of a highly practical tendency. The untimely death of Stephen Mackenzie in 1851, when he was thrown out of his gig and killed on the spot, left his widow with nine children very slenderly provided for.
Morell Mackenzie was educated by Dr. Greig of Walthamstow, many of whose pupils entered the service of the East India Company. Mackenzie always took a great interest in natural history, in which he was largely encouraged by his mother, and from an early period greatly desired to enter the medical profession. But a medical education being then beyond the means of the family so suddenly bereaved, he was placed at the age of sixteen in the office of the Union Assurance Company in Cornhill. Here he got on very well, but never abandoned the hope of becoming a doctor. Fortunately, by the kind aid of a relative, he was enabled to gratify this desire, and he accordingly resigned his clerkship, and became a student at the London Hospital.
On commencing his medical studies Mackenzie determined to take his degree at the University of London, combining with his hospital work the preparation for matriculation. Having become a member of the College of Surgeons in 1858, he subsequently took the M.B. degree with high honours in three subjects. At the London Hospital he obtained the senior gold medal for surgery, and the gold medal for zeal, talent, and humanity to the patients, awarded by the governors. On leaving the hospital he went to Paris, where he studied for a year under Trousseau, Nélaton, Ricord, and others. He spent another year in Vienna, where he studied pathology under Rokitansky, chest diseases under Skoda, skin affections under Hebra, and diseases of the eye under Arlt and Jäger. During his stay at Vienna Mackenzie made an expedition to Pesth in order to become acquainted with the laryngoscope, an instrument invented by Manuel Garcia, which Czermak was then beginning to use. A friendship sprang up between these two men which only terminated with Czermak’s lamented death. Czermak was very desirous that Mackenzie should translate some of his papers and publish them in the English medical journals, but he had determined to study for a few months in Italy, and before he returned home Czermak had himself come over to London and introduced the laryngoscope into England. On arriving in London Mackenzie was at once appointed Resident Medical Officer at the London Hospital, and shortly afterwards Registrar to that institution. He now began to make daily studies with the laryngoscope, and soon published cases in the medical journals which had been treated by its aid. In 1862 he completed the M.D. degree at London University.
In 1863 the Jacksonian prize for an essay on the Diseases of the Larynx was awarded to Mackenzie by the Royal College of Surgeons, and on the urgent advice of many of his medical friends, especially that of the late Dr. Herbert Davies, he determined to make throat diseases a specialty, and having established himself in practice in the West End, he was largely instrumental in founding the Throat Hospital in King Street, Golden Square, in the same year. In 1866 Dr. Mackenzie was appointed Assistant-Physician to the London Hospital, and his colleagues subsequently offered to recommend to the committee of that institution that a department for throat diseases should be established under his supervision. This however he declined, on the ground that he wished to treat diseases of every kind whilst attached to the London Hospital. He, however, gave a course of lectures on Throat Diseases at the London Hospital Medical College, whilst he also lectured on Physiology for three years. Dr. Mackenzie was afterwards obliged, owing to his increasing practice, to resign his connection with the London Hospital.