Sir Samuel Wilks, 1st Baronet, was a British physician and biographer.
Early life
Samuel Wilks was born on 2 June 1824 in Camberwell, London, the second son of Joseph Barber Wilks, a cashier at the East India House. After attending Aldenham School and University College School he was apprenticed to Richard Prior, a doctor in Newington.
Career
In 1842 he entered Guy's Hospital to study medicine. After graduating MB in 1848 he was hired as a physician to the Surrey Infirmary. In 1856 he returned to Guy's Hospital, first as assistant physician and curator of its museum, then as physician and lecturer on medicine. 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.
Achievements
Among his major discoveries, Wilks recognised ulcerative colitis in 1859, differentiating it from bacterial dysentery. His work was confirmed later by Sir Arthur Hurst. Wilks' autopsy of a 42-year-old woman who died after several months of diarrhoea and fever demonstrated a transmural ulcerative inflammation of the colon and terminal ileum. Wilks also firstly described trichorrhexis nodosa, in 1852. The term was proposed in 1876 by Moritz Kaposi, a Hungariandermatologist. In 1957, he provided the first autopsy description of a condition of the upper airways, later known as tracheobronchopathia osteochondroplastica. Subsequently, in 1868, he published the characteristic mental symptoms on alcoholic paraplegia. Wilks described the first case of myasthenia gravis, in 1877. 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.
In later life he suffered a stroke and was terminally paraplegic. He died aged 87 at his home in Hampstead on 8 November 1911. After his death the baronetcy became extinct. He had married Mrs. Elizabeth Anne Prior, widow of previous employer Richard Prior; they had no children.
