10 minute read
Blood Brothers
from 2025 RCSI Alumni Magazine
by RCSI
Surgeon William Thornley Stoker (1845-1912) was licensed by RCSI in 1867, later becoming Professor of Anatomy and eventually, President. Not only did the brilliant and innovative Stoker have a glittering career pioneering groundbreaking surgeries, as Antonia Hart found out, he also provided his brother, writer Bram Stoker, with inspiration and information for his most famous novel, Dracula.
William Thornley Stoker, the eldest of seven children of civil servant Abraham Stoker and his wife Matilda, grew up in Clontarf, north Dublin, an old fishing village long since absorbed into the city. The pretty 18th-century terrace of Marino Crescent curved gently, as the name suggests, around the railings of a park. Number 15, where the Stokers lived, was an attractive and spacious family home, within sight of the sea and easy reach of the city centre. The park is now public and has been renamed Bram Stoker Park, after Thornley’s younger brother, but it was originally private, accessible only to the Crescent residents. It was a comfortable and privileged life compared to many, but with no financial cushion. The Stoker children knew that like their father, who spent his whole life in the civil service, they would have to earn their livings, and after school in Norfolk, Thornley studied medicine, first at RCSI and then Queen’s College Galway, now the University of Galway.
In 1867 he was licensed by RCSI, and in 1872 by the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI). That year he was tipped by the British Medical Journal to become surgeon to the Royal City of Dublin Hospital on Baggot Street: ‘Dr Thornley Stoker, whose claims as demonstrator and also a successful teacher are known, is at present the favourite’. He did get the job, but resigned shortly afterwards to become surgeon to the Richmond. This unexpected move was less rapturously reported, causing ‘considerable dissatisfaction among the medical profession in Dublin’ because of the greater experience of the other candidates. However, Stoker stayed on for the next 37 years, through a professional life studded with plaudits and honours. He became President of RCSI, President of the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland, examiner in surgery for the Royal University of Ireland, and visiting surgeon at Swift’s (St Patrick’s) Hospital, a post he held from 1878 until his death in 1912.
Stoker married Emily Stewart in 1875, and they soon moved in to Ely House on Ely Place, no ordinary townhouse, but a beautiful 36-roomed mansion. Thornley filled the house with exquisite treasures: glossy Chippendale chairs upholstered with red leather, old silver candelabra, Siena marble mantels. He was reputed to buy a ‘museum piece’ after every significant operation. “A cancer, Sir Thornley, or a gallstone?”, Oliver St John Gogarty has George Moore remark in As I was Going Down Sackville Street. In Gogarty’s memorable summing-up: ‘Sir Thornley Stoker, the famous surgeon, lives on Ely Place, and in the Eighteenth Century, which he never really leaves.’ He depicts Stoker as a collector and a connoisseur to the point of snobbery, irritated by the tasteless who ‘restored’ good furniture or preferred Hepplewhite to Chippendale. Perhaps the fact that Thornley’s early life had not been characterised by mansion living nor dining rooms too fine for Hepplewhite made him long to fill his house with the finest items, along with a good-sized domestic staff. He seems to have been status-conscious, reportedly holding out in 1895 for a baronetcy, but in the end accepting a knighthood. He was proud enough of the knighthood to squeeze it in beside ‘surgeon’ in his 1901 census form. The Stokers’ servants included a housekeeper, a parlourmaid, two housemaids, a footman, and a cook. Today, this seems like a ridiculous amount of human labour to meet the domestic needs of two capable adults, though clearly a different set of standards was in play. Mrs Beeton, after all, noted that it was only ‘the humbler house’ which had a single footman. If Thornley had come across this observation he might well have made it his business to recruit a second.
Perhaps the brilliant and innovative surgeon did have a few human weaknesses and complexities. He was a shining star in Irish medical circles though, with a wide and varied practice, and specialisations in abdominal diseases and neurosurgery. He also maintained an active interest in the arts, particularly in the intersection between art and medicine. He consistently appeared in the newspapers, and not just for his medical work: making a gift of a cockatoo to the Royal Zoological Society in 1899; fundraising for two sisters “who are in great poverty and in want of the common necessaries of life”; striking a blow for equality in 1877 by proposing a motion to the Convocation of the Queen’s University in Ireland that ‘no obstacle should be placed in the way of women availing themselves of the privilege of being admitted to degrees in medicine’, in circumstances where women had been refused access to lectures.
Thornley was also a governor of the National Gallery of Ireland, and as Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) he combined his twin passions of art and science. Both doctors and artists want to open the human body to understand how it is made, how it moves, and how it functions. In the 15th century, Antonio Pollaiuolo flayed bodies to reveal musculature, and in his Battle of Naked Men the skin of the ten men, posed in various attitudes of action, seems transparent, so visible are their flexed muscles. Da Vinci and Michelangelo went further and engaged in full dissections. By the 18th century, the Royal Academy of Arts included ‘a Professor of Anatomy, who shall read annually six public lectures in the Schools, adapted to the Arts of Design’. The current holder of the RHA professorship, Professor Clive Lee, is also, as Stoker was, Professor of Anatomy at RCSI. In a piece for the Irish Arts Review he quoted his RHA predecessor Cecil Erskine as saying ‘in medicine anatomy is applied; in art it is transformed’. Exploration and discussion of this idea fascinated Stoker, too. In 1875 the RHA announced that Professor Stoker would be delivering a course of lectures on Artistic Anatomy, to be held on successive Saturday evenings; the following year the course was On the Anatomy of Expression, described by one newspaper as ‘in one sense popular, yet of course somewhat technical, [it] was very ably handled by the learned lecturer, and was listened to with great interest’. Stoker was not just an outstanding scientist and doctor, but also an outstanding communicator.
Thornley Stoker’s relationship with his brother Bram has always fascinated people, particularly when it comes to tracing any influence he might have had on Bram’s impossibly successful Dracula. Was Dr Seward, ‘the lunatic-asylum man’, based on Thornley and his role at Swift’s hospital? Did Thornley brief Bram on the characteristics of the blood disorder porphyria and its related sensitivity to sunlight? In 1868, a piece in the Medical Press and Circular included a description of Dr Robert McDonnell’s treatment of a tetanus patient in Jervis Street Hospital: ‘in the endeavour of sustaining the patient’s strength he transfused blood from his own arm to that of the patient to the amount of ten or twelve ounces’. In these few words this description seems to prefigure Dr Van Helsing’s explanation to Dr Seward of how he intends to revive Lucy Westenra: ‘we are about to perform what we call transfusion of blood – to transfer from full veins of one to the empty veins which pine for him’. Lucy of course is sporting two ragged holes in her neck, near the jugular, covered up by a black velvet band with a diamond buckle. It is no wonder she needs blood.
Blood transfusions were very much in the news, so it need not have been this specific piece that Thornley Stoker read. In 1868, when it came out, he was recently qualified and working as a junior doctor, a likely reader of the Medical Press. In later years he became a contributor. Meanwhile, Bram had followed his father’s footsteps to Dublin Castle, where he was clerk of Petty Sessions, simultaneously studying at Trinity. The two brothers were starting out on their working lives, figuring out where their real interests lay. Thornley’s absorbed fascination with the boundaries of medicine must have soaked through the conversations he had with Bram. Even after Bram moved to London, he came home often, always keeping contact with Thornley. The two brothers got on well and had a shared interest in medical advances. It seems impossible that they would not have discussed the kinds of breakthroughs which were making the news.
We know that Thornley contributed to the novel with more than conversation. Specifically, he made a diagram and notes for Bram on the trephining procedure in the Renfield surgery scene, where Van Helsing notes a ‘depressed fracture of the skull’ and operates ‘just above the ear’ to ‘most quickly and perfectly remove the blood clot’. Thornley had carried out and written up a similar operation at the Richmond Hospital in 1887. Lucky Bram, to have ready access to someone who understood the minutiae of the procedure, had personally undertaken it, and was delighted to discuss it.
Thornley was not only useful to Bram, but a pioneer in his fields. His work filled his head constantly as he read, researched, thought and wrote about new methods and procedures. In the Richmond Hospital he completed Ireland’s first abdominal hysterectomy, on a patient who had a large uterine tumour. He removed the uterus, and one ovary, leaving the second, healthy ovary in place. In the first Irish brain surgeries, again at the Richmond, he removed in the first case a tumour on the right side of the brain, giving temporary relief to the patient, and in the second case an abscess, effecting a complete cure. When dentist and doctor Truman William Brophy carried out three successful cleft palate closures in Chicago, Stoker wrote a paper on the operation and read it to the Royal Academy of Medicine in Ireland, taking questions afterwards from the assembled audience and supporting Brophy in advocating for such operations in newborns.
Blood transfusions, hysterectomies, even brain surgery, are everyday components of modern medicine, but it is worth remembering what dramatic advances these were in the 19th century. Perhaps today those outside medical spheres may think of Thornley Stoker as brother of the more famous Bram, but during his lifetime it was his own brilliance that caused the general and medical press alike to follow his career so closely, and his medical reputation that made him well-known enough around Dublin for his home to make a cameo appearance in Joyce’s Ulysses.
Emily Stoker died in 1910, and Thornley put the contents of Ely House up for auction. Copies of the catalogue survive, and sure enough the house was full not just of Chippendale and Sheraton, but of 16th-century Italian cabinetry, enormous Persian rugs, all of his collected treasures itemised room by room. He moved to Hatch Street, and in 1911 was given his longed-for baronetcy. He died in 1912. In 1899, RCSI commissioned Louis Werner, painter and ophthalmic surgeon, to paint Stoker’s portrait to mark the end of his RCSI Presidency, and it hangs in the College today, a fitting final coalition of art and science. ■
