Wilde Senior

VICTORIAN DOCTOR (336 pp.)--T. 6. Wilson--Fischer ($3.50).

One day in Dublin in 1864, the world caved in on a Victorian doctor. A leading light in the Irish medical profession, he had been accused before a crowded courtroom of criminally attacking one of his patients, a young woman. The woman was clearly of a durable sort, for she admitted that she had returned to the doctor's office again & again. She also said that in "vengeance" she had circulated scurrilous pamphlets about him, put garlic in the soap-tray of his consulting room. The jury deliberated, found in her favor, assessed the net damage to her reputation and virtue at one farthing ( 1/4 cent).

The case rocked Ireland. It practically ended the career of the Victorian doctor, whose name was William Wilde. Then nearing 50, he was talented, versatile and unquestionably eccentric. His professional standing in Dublin and elsewhere was of the highest; he had, in fact, been knighted only a few months before. The Wildes lived in a fine house on fashionable Merrion Square, Dublin. They had three children: a daughter, Isola, 7; a son, Willie, 12; and another son, 10, named Oscar.

Sins of the Father. The scandal in 1864 did not involve the children. But many years later Oscar Wilde, too, had his day in court.* People then inevitably recalled Sir William's troubles, though by that time he had long been in his grave. Nowadays Sir William is generally remembered, when he is, because he happened to be Oscar's father, or because he was, as an outraged Victorian put it, a "pithecoid person of extraordinary sensuality." Victorian Doctor attempts to give him his due as a medical man and to show the sort of person he actually was, scandal aside. T. G. Wilson, himself a prominent Dublin doctor, tells the story well, in reasonably dispassionate if sometimes long-winded detail.

Wilde, he declares, was a great doctor, although his detractors have put him down as a mere provincial medico. He was certainly no saint, and his quick temper and generally unwashed appearance made him act and look like even less of one. "Why are Dr. Wilde's nails black?" asked Dublin wags. "Because he scratches himself." But his Aural Surgery (1853) was the "first textbook of importance" on the subject. He was Ireland's first Surgeon Oculist in Ordinary to the Queen. The eye-&-ear hospital he established in Dublin in 1844 was for years the only one of its kind in the British Isles.

Medicine, moreover, was only one of his interests. He wrote a series of books on Irish ethnology and archaeology, some of which, according to Dr. Wilson, still stand as the best works of their kind. He was elected a member of the Royal Irish Academy as a young man, and some years before his death won, for his historical researches, the highest award the Academy could bestow. He was Ireland's Medical Census Commissioner. The Wilde home was a center of the city's scientific and literary life, and the Wildes themselves were one of the sights of Dublin. As a small boy, George Bernard Shaw saw them at a concert: Sir William, small,--"dressed in snuffy brown [with] the sort of skin that never looks clean"; Lady Wilde, tall and stately, garbed in flowing robes, hung with chains and brooches, and also in obvious need of soap & water.

Sir William's whole life fell apart after the trial. Lady Wilde stood by him, but he lost interest in his profession, "became dirtier, uglier, more abrupt" as time went on. He still saw occasional patients: once, unable to find an eye dropper when he was ready to put some lotion in a child's eye, he angrily grabbed a pen from his desk, flicked the lotion in, permanently scarring the eyeball. Dr. Wilson notes that his decline was probably hastened by physical causes as well as mental anguish. It was a steady decline; the end came in 1876.

"My mother," said Oscar Wilde later, "loved him very much, and [he] died with his heart full of gratitude and affection." Says Dr. Wilson: he had "only two faults--his bad temper and his mistresses."

* He was sentenced to two years' hard labor in Wandsworth and Reading Gaol for homosexuality.

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