88 Facts About William Gull

Sir William Withey Gull, 1st Baronet was an English physician.

Scholars have dismissed the idea, since William Gull was 71 years old and in ill health when the murders were committed.

William Withey Gull was born on 31 December 1816 in Colchester, Essex.

William Gull's father, John Gull, was a barge owner and wharfinger and was thirty-eight years old at the time of his son's birth.

William Gull was born aboard his barge The Dove, then moored at St Osyth Mill in the parish of Saint Leonards, Shoreditch.

William Gull was the youngest of eight children, two of whom died in infancy.

When William Gull was about four years old the family moved to Thorpe-le-Soken, Essex.

William Gull's father died of cholera in London in 1827, when William was ten years old, and was buried at Thorpe-le-Soken.

William Gull was a day-boy at this school until he was fifteen, at which age he became a boarder for two years.

The clergyman's teaching seems to have been very limited; and at seventeen William Gull announced that he would not go any longer.

William Gull now became a pupil-teacher in a school kept by a Mr Abbott at Lewes, Sussex.

William Gull lived with the schoolmaster and his family, studying and teaching Latin and Greek.

The local rector took an interest in William Gull and proposed that he should resume his classical and other studies on alternate days at the rectory.

William Gull agreed, and would continue this routine for a year.

At about this time the local rector's uncle, Benjamin Harrison, the Treasurer of Guy's Hospital, was introduced to William Gull and was impressed by his ability.

William Gull invited him to go to Guy's Hospital under his patronage and, in September 1837, the autumn before he was twenty-one, Gull left home and entered on his life's work.

William Gull, encouraged by Harrison, determined to make the most of his opportunity, and resolved to try for every prize for which he could compete in the hospital in the course of that year.

William Gull held at this time the post of Medical Tutor at Guy's and, in the absence of the staff, shared with Mr Stocker the care of the patients in the hospital.

William Gull spent much of his life within the wards of the hospital, at all hours of the day and often at night.

From 1846 to 1856, William Gull held the post of Lecturer on Physiology and Comparative Anatomy at Guy's.

In 1847, William Gull was elected Fullerian Professor of Physiology at the Royal Institution of Great Britain, a post which he held for two years, during which time he formed a close friendship with Michael Faraday, at that time Fullerian Professor of Chemistry.

Dr William Gull became a DCL of Oxford in 1868, a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1869, LL.

William Gull was a Crown member of the General Medical Council from 1871 to 1883, and representative of the University of London in the Council from 1886.

On 18 May 1848, Gull married Susan Ann Lacy, daughter of Colonel J Dacre Lacy, of Carlisle.

Cameron William Gull was born about 1858 in Buckhold, Pangbourne, Berkshire and died in infancy.

William Cameron Gull was born on 6 January 1860 in Finsbury, Middlesex and died in 1922.

William Gull was educated at Eton College, inherited his father's title as 2nd Baronet of Brook Street, and later served as the Liberal Unionist Member of Parliament for Barnstaple from July 1895 to September 1900.

In 1871, as Physician in Ordinary to the Prince of Wales, William Gull took the chief direction of the treatment of the Prince during an attack of typhoid fever.

In recognition of his service, on 8 February 1872 William Gull was created the 1st Baronet of the Baronetcy of Brook Street.

Sir William Gull was initially against women becoming medics but later stated that he had changed his mind and spoke out against this bias and led efforts to improve the prospects of women who wished to pursue careers in medicine.

William Gull was reported as saying that her academic achievements answered any objections to the involvement of women in medicine; and expressed the hope that the scholarship would lead to a liberalisation of attitudes and greater recognition of women across the profession.

In 1887, Sir William Gull suffered the first of several strokes at his Scottish home at Urrard House, Killiecrankie.

William Gull recovered after a few weeks and returned to London, but was under no illusions about the danger to his health, remarking "One arrow had missed its mark, but there are more in the quiver".

We regret to announce that Sir William Gull died at half-past 12 yesterday at his residence, 74, Brook-street, London, from paralysis.

Sir William Gull was seized with a severe attack of paralysis just over two years ago while staying at Urrard, Killiecrankie, and never sufficiently recovered to resume his practice.

The news of William Gull's death was reported around the world.

William Gull nursed the Prince of Wales back to life in '71 and apparently it was for this that Mr Gull was granted Knighthood, that doormat at the threshold of nobility.

Sir William Gull was buried on Monday 3 February 1890 next to the grave of his father and mother in the churchyard of his childhood home at Thorpe-le-Soken, near Colchester, Essex.

William Gull kept up the honourable standard of generosity to poor patients.

William Gull observed that the cause of the condition could not be determined, but that cases seemed mainly to occur in young women between the ages of sixteen and twenty-three.

Five years later, in 1873, William Gull published his work Anorexia Nervosa, in which he describes the three cases of Miss A, Miss B, and a third unnamed case.

William Gull was aged 17 and was greatly emaciated, having lost 33 pounds.

William Gull prescribed remedies including preparations of cinchona, biochloride of mercury, syrup of iodide of iron, syrup of phosphate of iron, citrate of quinine and variations in diet without noticeable success.

William Gull observed occasional voracious appetite for very brief periods, but states that these were very rare and exceptional.

William Gull records that she was frequently restless and active and notes that this was a "striking expression of the nervous state, for it seemed hardly possible that a body so wasted could undergo the exercise which seemed agreeable".

In William Gull's published medical papers, images of Miss A are shown that depict her appearance before and after treatment.

William Gull was referred to Gull on 8 October 1868, aged 18, by her family who suspected tuberculosis and wished to take her to the south of Europe for the coming winter.

William Gull noted that her emaciated appearance was more extreme than normally occurs in tubercular cases.

William Gull was struck by the similarity of the case to that of Miss A, even to the detail of the pulse and respiration observations.

William Gull admits in his medical papers that the medical treatment probably did not contribute much to the recovery, consisting, as in the former case, of various tonics and a nourishing diet.

William Gull was the third child in a family of six, one of whom died in infancy.

William Gull's father had died, aged 68, of pneumonic phthisis.

William Gull's mother was living and in good health; she had a sister who displayed multiple nervous symptoms and an epileptic nephew.

William Gull was referred to Gull and began to visit him of 20 April 1887; in his notes, he remarks that she persisted in walking through the streets to his house despite being an object of attention to passers-by.

William Gull arranged for a nurse from Guy's to supervise her diet, ordering light food every few hours.

William Gull observed that slow pulse and respiration seemed to be common factors in all the cases he had observed.

William Gull observed that this resulted in below-normal body temperature and proposed the application of external heat as a possible treatment.

William Gull recommended that food should be administered at intervals varying inversely with the periods of exhaustion and emaciation.

The symptoms of Bright's Disease had been described in 1827 by the English physician Richard Bright who, like William Gull, was based at Guy's Hospital.

In 1873, Sir William Gull delivered a paper alongside his Anorexia nervosa work in which he demonstrated that the cause of myxoedema is atrophy of the thyroid gland.

The background to William Gull's work was research performed by Claude Bernard in 1855 around the concept of the Milieu interieur and subsequently by Moritz Schiff in Bern in 1859, and who showed that thyroidectomy in dogs invariably proved fatal; Schiff later showed that grafts or injections of thyroid reversed the symptoms in both thyroidectomised animals and humans.

William Gull thought the thyroid liberated some important substance into the blood.

William Gull's paper related the symptoms and changed appearance of a Miss B:.

William Gull presented a series of 32 cases, including autopsies in 29 instances, to correlate the clinical and pathological features.

William Gull acknowledged that nothing was more difficult than "the determination at the bedside, of the causes".

William Gull described two types of partial lesions, one confined to a segment of the spinal cord, the other extending longitudinally in one of its columns.

William Gull noticed and was puzzled by degenerations of the posterior columns that could cause an 'inability to regulate motor power'.

William Gull recognised girdle pain as seldom absent from extrinsic compression, often signifying meningeal involvement.

William Gull recorded one instance in a 33-year-old woman of a thoracic disk prolapse compressing the cord, without evident trauma.

William Gull conveyed her suspicions to some of her husband's medical colleagues who, after interviewing him and searching the house, "found ample proofs of murder" and committed him to an asylum.

William Gull persuaded police to enter the house, the home of a distinguished physician, who was allegedly removed to a private insane asylum in Islington under the name of Thomas Mason.

William Gull alleges that one of Gull's patients was the Whitechapel murderer.

William Gull refers to the killer as "S" throughout the article without ever identifying him, but the identity of "S" is widely presumed to be Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, Queen Victoria's grandson and heir presumptive to the throne.

William Gull's father, to whose title he was the heir, was a gay cosmopolitan and did much to improve the status of England internationally.

William Gull resigned his commission shortly after the raiding of some premises in Cleveland Street, which were frequented by aristocrats and well-to-do homosexuals.

William Gull supposedly left papers showing that "S" had not died of pneumonia, as had been reported, but of tertiary syphilis.

William Gull goes on to allege that "S" was certified insane by Gull and placed in a private mental home, from which he escaped and committed the last, and most brutal, murder of Mary Jane Kelly in November 1888.

William Gull then recovered sufficiently to take a five-month cruise before his relapse and death "in his father's country house" of "bronchopneumonia".

William Gull was provided with access to Home Office files, from which a number of contemporary police reports were made public for the first time.

Knight's claim that Sir William Gull, along with various others, was a high-ranking Freemason, is disputed.

The Stephen Knight thesis is based upon the claim that the main protagonists, the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, Sir Charles Warren, Sir James Anderson and Sir William Gull were all high-ranking Freemasons.

Sir Thomas Spivey, a Royal physician whose character is based on Sir William Gull, is revealed as the murderer in a plotline based on Stephen Knight's Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution.

Sir William Gull is portrayed by Ray McAnally in 1988 in a TV dramatisation of the murders, starring Michael Caine and Jane Seymour.

From 1991 to 1996, a fictionalised Sir William Gull is featured in the graphic novel From Hell by writer Alan Moore and artist Eddie Campbell.

I've always liked to imagine that our William Gull is a fiction who just happens to share a name with a real one who existed once.

The story "Royal Blood" told in John Constantine, Hellblazer mentions Jack the Ripper being Sir William Gull possessed by a demon called Calibraxis.

The fictional character "Sir Nigel William Gull" appears in the 1993 novel The List of Seven by Mark Frost.

William Gull appears as a character in Brian Catling's 2012 novel, The Vorrh, where accounts of his relationship with Eadweard Muybridge and work on anorexia are blended into the fantasy narrative.