Complete Record - Heirs of Hippocrates No. 1156

WILLIAM CHARLES WELLS (1757-1817) An essay upon single vision with two eyes. Printed for T. Cadell 1792 144 pp. 20.7 cm.

Wells was born in Charleston, South Carolina but he and his father returned to Great Britain in 1775 to avoid the political and social repercussions of being zealous and outspoken Tories. He studied medicine at Edinburgh and then served briefly as surgeon with a Scottish regiment in Holland. He returned to the United States in 1782 in order to liquidate his father's personal and business holdings. After several exciting adventures in South Carolina and Florida, he returned to London in 1784 to enter medical practice. Although Wells himself admitted to having a volatile temperament and the habit of swearing with little or no provocation, he was an original thinker and made a number of important clinical and scientific contributions. He demonstrated that it was not iron that gave blood its color but a substance later identified as hematin. He gave an early description of the cardiac complications of rheumatic fever and was the first to notice blood and albumin in the urine of patients with dropsy. He proposed the idea of the theory of natural selection which was developed by Darwin (see No. 1724 ff.) and was awarded the Rumford Medal by the Royal Society for his experiments that showed how dew is formed. His contributions in ophthalmology included his description of hyperopia, discussions of the effects of belladonna on the refractive point of the eye and consensual pupillary reaction, as well as the present work on single vision with two eyes. Wells' chief object in writing the treatise was to offer "a new solution of the question, why objects are perceived single with two eyes" (p. 1). His contemporaries deemed it a major contribution and, as a result elected him to membership in the Royal Society the following year. The University of Iowa Libraries' copy was inscribed by the author to Charles Shaw.

See Related Record(s): 1724

Cited references: Osler 4210 (1818 ed.)

Gift of John Martin, M.D.