HIS FAMOUS, flamboyant son remains one of the most tragic figures in Irish cultural history.
But Sir William Wilde (1815-1876), pioneering surgeon, antiquarian, angler, writer and gentleman scholar, is famous in his own right and is the fascinating subject of a seminar that starts this evening and runs all day tomorrow at the Royal Irish Academy on Dawson Street in Dublin.
A series of papers delivered by distinguished scholars will address aspects of his complex, resourceful personality and will place Wilde snr firmly in the context of 19th-century Dublin medical life as well as within the emerging study of Irish antiquities.
The keynote address tonight by Dr Irene Montjoye of the International University of Vienna focuses on Wilde’s early life.
Having qualified as a doctor from the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin in 1837, he set off on a Mediterranean cruise, serving as the personal physician to a wealthy Scot, the owner of a private yacht. The trip lasted nine months and resulted in his first book, Narrative of a Voyage to Madeira, Tenerife and Along the Shores of the Mediterranean.
A classic Victorian travel book, shaped by Wilde's multidisciplinary approach, it was a bestseller and enabled him to complete further medical studies in London, Prague, Berlin and Vienna. While in Vienna, he gathered material for another book, Austria: Its Literary, Scientific and Medical Institutions. It remains a valuable source text for the Vienna of the period.
Tomorrow’s sessions will include Dr Peter Harbison speaking about Wilde’s championing of the Huguenot artist Gabriel Beranger, whose watercolours of field monuments and castles were to prove vital in the recording of a changing landscape.
Dr Michael Herity discusses Wilde and his fellow antiquarians such as the well-intentioned, often chaotic George Petrie, while Raghnall Ó Floinn and Mary Cahill plot one of Wilde’s finest, and most practical, achievements: his cataloguing in three volumes of the 10,000 artefacts in the Royal Irish Academy’s collection, which he completed in five months.
Chester Beatty Library director Michael Ryan examines the man himself. Wilde, the son of a doctor, was born in Roscommon in 1815. His father had died while he was on his nine-month voyage. Soon after his return to Ireland, he settled in Westland Row, Dublin, where his mother joined him. By then he knew he would specialise in diseases of the eye and ear.
His first clinic was in a stable at the rear of Molesworth Street. Blindness was widespread in Ireland at the time; Wilde treated the poor free of charge. In time he established St Mark’s Hospital and designed several surgical instruments, including Wilde’s forceps and Wilde’s angled snare.
His marriage to the colourful Jane Francesca Elgee, known to history as Speranza through her nationalist verse, would in 1854 produce Oscar.
For his work on the census and his study, The Epidemics of Ireland, Wilde was knighted in 1864. But he also featured in an unsavoury court case brought by a former patient, Mary Travers, represented by Isaac Butt. It was an eerie foreshadowing of his son's disastrous experience.
William Wilde endured other tragedies, such as the death in a fire of two daughters born before his marriage.
The William Wilde Seminar takes place today and tomorrow at the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin. www.ria.ie
