42
The surgeons of Vanity Fair
Oscar Clayton: surgeon and socialite (1816-1892) Knight Bachelor. C.B. C.M.G. LSA FRCS M.D.(Erlangen) institution’, he said in a later address. In 1842, Clayton had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, and the following year read a paper before that Society, an account of several cases of a hysterical affection of the vocal apparatus. This was to be his only recorded publication. In 1841 and 1842, a considerable number of the institute children were afflicted with, as he told the Society, ‘a short almost hacking constant cough altered to shrill screaming expiration followed by a quick catching inspiratory effort.’ Following the failure of treatment with expectorants and sedatives and with ‘the uproar in the building becoming alarming to the neighbourhood’, Clayton assembled the children and informed them, ‘I must apply a red-hot iron to the throats of all who were not quite well on the following morning.’ Oscar Clayton was featured in Vanity Fair on 12 September 1874 and caricatured by Carlo Pellegrini ‘Ape’ with the caption, ‘Fashionable Surgery’. The National Portrait Gallery, London holds the original Pellegrini watercolour and the published lithograph created from it. Vanity Fair noted, ‘the son of a surgeon, Oscar Clayton was from his youth up destined to be a Doctor. By dint of hard labour made himself master of all that was known and of even more than was practised in his profession’. Clayton qualified via University College London and the Middlesex Hospital and first practised from his father’s address until in 1853 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. He spent his later years in practice at Number 5 Harley Street: Clayton was essentially a fashionable general practitioner. From 1841, Clayton was ‘surgeon’ to the St Pancras Charity School for Female Children, aged between nine and 14, where children were ‘treated with the strictness so difficult to accomplish, except within the walls of a public
Any failures were to be treated by a spatula covered with a silk handkerchief and heated in boiling water. Treatment was successful with no remissions! Vanity Fair observed, ‘He was early made Surgeon to the London Police and acquired such experience that he has now grown to be the favourite medical authority consulted by young men of fashion.’ On 10 February 1840, the cousins Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were married in London: they had no less than nine children, five daughters and four sons. Their eldest son, Albert Edward, known as ‘Bertie’ to his family, was Prince of Wales, and heir to the throne. Tragically, Albert, the Prince Consort, died at Windsor Castle on 14 December 1861, following chronic and debilitating medical episodes, and finally typhoid fever. At this time there were 120,000 cases of typhoid each year in England, and of these, one in six died.
In 1868, Clayton was appointed as Extra Surgeon-in-Ordinary to the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, and as Surgeon-in-Ordinary to his brother, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh. In November 1871 ‘Bertie’, the Prince of Wales, became gravely ill: at the time he was at Sandringham, where he was seen by Dr John Lowe MD FLS, a physician and naturalist medical attendant to the Royal Family at Sandringham. Dr Lowe diagnosed typhoid and sent for Clayton, who agreed with Lowe’s opinion. There was grave concern that the Prince of Wales would succumb to typhoid, just as his father had, on the 10th anniversary of his father’s death. The Archbishop of Canterbury issued a form of prayer to invoke his recovery and a slightly altered version was used in Catholic churches and synagogues. The bellringers were summoned to St Paul’s Cathedral to prepare to toll out the Prince’s death: miraculously, over a weekend he began to improve and thereafter made slow and continuous progress towards recovery.
