[21] Fortnightly Review, June 1885, p. 775.
[22] World, September 18, 1878.
[CHAPTER XXVI.]
EMINENT SPECIALISTS—continued.
SIR W. BOWMAN, BRUDENELL CARTER, AND EYE DISEASES; TOYNBEE, HINTON, AND EAR DISEASES.
The eye, the organ of light, was, till recent times, practically a dark chamber. Only its grosser movements and the effects of its lenses upon the rays of light were understood. Its minute structure, its relationship to the brain, and the real nature of the morbid changes occurring in it, were hidden. To-day its microscopic elements are unravelled, and very much is known of their connexion with the great nerve-centres behind them. Experiment and calculation have gone far to settle the precise mode in which light gives rise to sight, and affects our perception and judgment of external objects, and the condition of the eye during life and health or disease has been brought into view by the ophthalmoscope. The names of Helmholtz and of Donders are inseparably connected with modern advances in the physiology of the eye, while no English name is more conspicuous in regard to the surgery of the eye than that with which we commence this chapter.
William Bowman, the third son of Mr. J. Eddowes Bowman, banker, of Nantwich, and afterwards of Welshpool and Wrexham, was born at Nantwich on July 20, 1816. He was early surrounded by scientific associations, for his father was a botanist and geologist of wide cultivation, having formed a very complete herbarium of British plants, and having furnished to Sir Roderick Murchison valuable original matter for his “Silurian System.”
Mr. Bowman placed his son at Hazelwood School, Birmingham, which Sir Rowland Hill’s father was conducting on the principle of the abolition of corporal punishment. The boys largely governed themselves, printing a magazine of their own. They were taught natural science too, a very unusual thing in those days. In such a congenial atmosphere young Bowman flourished, and in time became head boy.
An accident to one of his hands, about the close of his school course, seems to have led to Mr. Bowman’s choice of surgery as a profession. For some months he saw country practice with Mr. T. T. Griffith, of Wrexham, seeing a good deal of cholera, which was then prevailing, and spending his leisure in copying anatomical drawings of the human bones and muscles. He then became, through the interest of Mr. Joseph Hodgson, F.R.S., afterwards President of the College of Surgeons, who had attended to his injured hand, a resident pupil at the General Hospital, Birmingham, where he continued for five years.
These early years were fruitful in microscopical observations of both healthy and diseased tissues, and even in experimental physiology, for Mr. Bowman was one of those whose advancement in science has been considerably due to experiments upon animals. In 1837, after a brief visit to the Dublin medical schools, he became a student at King’s College, London, where Robert Bentley Todd had been lately appointed Professor of Physiology. Mr. Bowman’s skill and extensive knowledge were soon made use of by Todd, and he was successively appointed prosector and demonstrator of anatomy and curator of the anatomical museum.
In 1838 Mr. Bowman visited the hospitals and museums of Holland, Germany, and Vienna, and made a considerable stay in Paris in 1841. Meanwhile his original studies were bearing fruit in important papers contributed to the Royal Society, “On the Minute Structure and Movements of Voluntary Muscle” (1840), “On the Contraction of Voluntary Muscle in the Living Body” (1841), and, “On the Structure and Use of the Malpighian Bodies of the Kidney” (1842). The latter marked a conspicuous advance in the physiology of the kidney, and Mr. Bowman was distinguished by receiving a royal medal for it, having been elected F.R.S. in the previous year. Professor Michael Foster, in his address on Physiology to the International Medical Congress of 1881, referred to these memoirs on muscle and the kidney as “classic works, known and read of all instructed physiologists.”
In 1840 Mr. Bowman, at the early age of twenty-four, was appointed Assistant-Surgeon to King’s College Hospital. His scientific writing became much in demand. He wrote on Surgery in the “Encyclopædia Metropolitana,” on Muscle, Motion, and Mucous Membrane in Todd’s “Cyclopædia of Anatomy and Physiology,” and took a large share with Dr. Todd in writing and illustrating the “Physiological Anatomy and Physiology of Man,” which was brought out in parts. The desire to render this book as far as possible accurate and original by repeating most of the observations of others and making new ones where necessary, led to successive delays in the appearance of the parts. Finally the closing part was written by Dr. Lionel Beale, and published in 1856.