Samuel Wilks

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For the American mathematician and statistician, see Samuel Stanley Wilks.

Sir Samuel Wilks (1824-1911), British physician and biographer.

Wilks studied medicine at Guy's Hospital from 1844 to 1846. After graduation he was hired as a physician to the Surrey Infirmary (1853). In 1856 he came to Guy's Hospital again, first as assistant physician and curator of its Museum (a post he held for nine years), then as physician and lecturer on Medicine (1857). From 1866 to 1870 he was Examiner in the Practice of Medicine at the University of London and from 1868 to 1875 Examiner in Medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons. Among his many services and honors, Wilks was President of the Pathological Society (1881-1882); President of the Neurological Society (1887); member of the Senate of the University of London (1887-1900); member of the General Medicine Council (1887-1896) and President of the Royal College of Physicians (1896-1899). He was named Physician Extraordinary to Queen Victoria in 1897. He died in 1911.

Among his major discoveries, Wilks recognized ulcerative colitis in 1859, differentiating it from bacterial dysentery. His work was confirmed later (1931) by Sir Arthur Hirst. Wilks autopsy of a 42 year-old woman who died after several months of diarrhea and fever demonstrated a transmural ulcerative inflammation of the colon and terminal ileum. The disease is now named Crohn's disease.

Wilks also firstly described trichorrhexis nodosa (the formation of nodes along the hair shaft), in 1852. The term was proposed in 1876 by Moritz Kaposi (1837-1902), an Hungarian dermatologist. Subsequently, in 1868, he published the characteristic mental symptoms on alcoholic paraplegia (later to be named Korsakoff's syndrome). Wilks described the first case of myasthenia gravis, in 1877 (it was named "bulbar paralysis" in Guy's Hospital Reports 22:7).

He was a collaborator and biographer of the "Three Great", contemporary physicians who worked at Guy's Hospital, Dr. Thomas Addison, the discoverer of Addison's disease, Dr. Richard Bright, discoverer of Bright's disease and Dr. Thomas Hodgkin, discoverer of Hodgkin's lymphoma. After the death of Addison in 1860, he carried out the job of examining specimens from all over the country in order to confirm the diagnosis of Addison`s disease and thus was able to amass a large case archive. He also rediscovered and confirmed the existence of Hodgkin's lymphoma, at the same time recognizing Hodgkin's priority and proposing the eponym.