Pure Intelligence: The Life of William Hyde Wollaston is a biography two centuries overdue: but well worth the wait.
Wollaston was an exact contemporary of Humphry Davy and Thomas Young, the three having arrived in London to pursue scientific careers at the turn of the 19th century. Furthermore they died within 6 months of each other: Wollaston in 1828, Davy and Young the following year. All three had illustrious careers and were regarded as equals in achievement although differing in style and approach. Hudson Gurney’s Memoir of the Life of Thomas Young (Gurney, 1831) and John Ayrton Paris’s two-volume work The Life of Sir Humphry Davy (Paris, 1831) were both published as early as 1831 and many more biographies of these two scientific luminaries subsequently appeared. Recognition and remembrance of the lives of two of the nation’s greatest scientists was secure. Wollaston, in contrast, was neglected. The task of celebrating his life was entrusted to Henry Warburton, an amateur scientist who had been a close friend of Wollaston. He had planned to write a biography and assembled a collection of documents but by the middle of the 19th century nothing had emerged from the project. Some who had known Wollaston began to publish short reminiscences (Hasted, 1853). Warburton, meanwhile, died in 1858. The work had barely been started and the irreplaceable collection of documents could not be found.
The mantle was not assumed until the 20th century when the task of writing a book-length biography was begun by Lionel F. Gilbert. Gilbert, a chemist at University College London, spent many years collecting material but died in 1955, also without accomplishing his vision. This was despite the revelation in 1949 that the Warburton papers were languishing unidentified in Cambridge, to be precise in a cupboard in the Department of Mineralogy and Petrology. Gilbert had time to do little more than catalogue them (Gilbert, 1952).
I first became interested in Wollaston’s work when carrying out some research on why the migraine aura was referred to as resembling a fortification and the origin of the term ‘teichopsia’ (Plant, 1986). In researching various descriptions of the migraine aura I came across Wollaston who had experienced a transient homonymous hemianopia twice in his life and reported the phenomenon to the Royal Society in 1824. The experience led him to deduce the existence of a semi-decussation of the optic nerves (Wollaston, 1824), an anatomical question that was still in dispute at the time. I subsequently became fascinated by his life and came to realize how little known was the man and his achievements. I was later contacted by Melvyn C. Usselman, Professor of Chemistry at Western University, London, Ontario, who had read my paper, and who was then already well advanced in preparing a biography.
It was entirely to be expected that it was two chemists, Gilbert and Usselman, who were drawn to Wollaston. Many of his greatest achievements were in that field. In this volume you will read fascinating accounts of Wollaston’s discoveries that led to the successful extraction of malleable platinum. You will read of experiments carried out in the back room of his house near Regent’s Park, which led eventually to a highly lucrative business (Wollaston’s word) producing purified platinum for scientific, industrial and even military applications. The house was destroyed by bombing in 1945 but the commemorative ‘blue plaque’ survives in the archives of the Geological Society. It is noteworthy that the plaque was sponsored by no less than six of England’s scientific societies, reflecting the wide-ranging achievements of Wollaston in many branches of enquiry.
Wollaston attended Charterhouse in London and Gonville and Caius College in Cambridge, graduating MB in 1788 and MD in 1793. Although he had not yet published a scientific paper his family connections and potential to become a good natural philosopher led to his being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society later in the same year. He began practising as a physician in Bury St Edmunds and became a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 1795. Wollaston’s notebooks attest to his eclectic interests in this period of his life: within a few weeks of beginning to treat patients he had recorded the temperature of the water in neighbouring wells and developed an interest in identifying the solids remaining after evaporation of the water from various sources. It was the development of chemical and analytical techniques on a minute scale that was to be one of his greatest skills. These techniques led to his first scientific publications on the composition of urinary calculi including the purification of what he called ‘cystic oxide’, which we now know is an amino acid—the second to be described—to this day named ‘cystine’. Although his first publication was on a medical topic Wollaston was beginning to realize that medical practice would not provide the freedom that he needed to pursue a life in science. Halsted’s reminiscences give an account of Wollaston’s reasons for giving up the practice of medicine although he was always circumspect regarding his plans to gain an income from a chemical business, as this activity was to remain a closely guarded secret.
A drawing by Wollaston of an episode of teichopsia. Reproduced by kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library.
PURE INTELLIGENCE. THE LIFE OF WILLIAM HYDE WOLLASTON By Melvyn C. Usselman, 2015 Chicago: University of Chicago Press ISBN-13: 978-0-226-24573-7 Price: $35
In addition to this important contribution to the anatomy of the visual pathways, Usselman relates how Wollaston made an important neurological discovery when still a medical student by inserting his finger into his ear! His findings were not published until he delivered the Croonian lecture at the Royal Society in 1809 (Wollaston, 1810). In his own words when the little finger is inserted in to the ear or the ball of the thumb pressed against the tragus, ‘A sound is then perceived which resembles most nearly that of carriages at a great distance passing rapidly over a pavement.’ He deduced that muscular contraction was discontinuous and calculated that the frequency of the contractions had a range of 14 to 36 beats per second with a mean of 20 to 30. These sounds are at the lower limit of human hearing and indeed often beyond it. One wonders whether, if a study of the sound generated by muscle activity had been taken up, much could have been learned about the physiology and pathology of muscular action long before the development of electromyography. The low rumble reflects oscillations in the activity of individual fast twitch muscle fibres, as was identified a century and a half later (Oster, 1984). The stethoscopes that were later developed filter out sounds below 75 Hz and could never have been used to study the sound of the muscles.
In a footnote to his Croonian lecture Wollaston states:
Wollaston’s guess that the basic frequency was 24 Hz was a remarkable insight as this is indeed the frequency of the oscillations produced by fast twitch muscle fibres and is likely to be related to the periodicity generated by the turnover of ATP. However, the suggestion that Wollaston ordered his own carriage to be driven along London streets at different speeds (Oster, 1984) was, I fear, a flight of fancy on Oster’s part. Other than working backwards to derive the speed at which a carriage might be moving in the footnote quoted above, Wollaston records only the much more easily controllable method of matching the sound. He rubbed a pencil at a range of speeds along notched pieces of wood with a range of notch separations. It is worth pointing out that this departure into muscle physiology was necessitated because William Croone (who had been anatomy lecturer on muscles at the Company of Surgeons) decreed that his lecture should be ‘for the support of a lecture and illustrative experiment for the advancement of natural knowledge on local motion’.‘If the number of vibrations be supposed to be 24 in a second, and the breadth of each stone be about 6 inches, the rate of a carriage thus estimated would be about 8 miles an hour, which agrees with the truth as nearly as the assumption on which the estimate is founded’.
Wollaston also discovered that individuals differ in their ability to detect high and low frequency sounds (Wollaston, 1820). This was a real innovation in audiology as he was the first to describe hearing loss dependent on the frequency of sounds, rather than loudness. The paper was delivered to the Royal Society on the evening he became their President.
Professor Usselman has covered Wollaston’s scientific achievements in their entirety at a level of scholarship that can only be described as magnificent. This is not all, however, we are also given fascinating insights into the personal and political life of a 19th century British scientist. His work on various committees is described in great detail with meticulous reference to the available evidence. For example Wollaston sat on the Board of Longitude and on a committee that was charged with approving an accurate hydrometer to be used by the Board of Excise. In this biography we also obtain insights into rivalries and collaborations with contemporary scientists including Davy and Young and the personalities and politics of the Royal Society itself.
Professor Usselman writes that he had himself discovered Wollaston while preparing a History of Medicine course in the University of Western Ontario in the mid 1970s. This book is the end result of 40 years of painstaking research. We can say that this, the first full biography of Wollaston, is the definitive biography. Sadly Mel Usselman passed away on 23 March 2015 at the age of 70. Thankfully unlike his two predecessors he lived not only to complete the work but also to see it published. In his memory may I here record my personal debt of gratitude.
