H08 Post vacancy: Dublin’s first dermatologist

Abstract William Wallace (1791–1837), later known internationally as ‘Wallace of Dublin’, was Dublin’s first dermatologist. Born in County Down, he studied at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI) from 1810 to 1813. During his time at RCSI, he was apprenticed to Charles Hawkes Todd, lecturer and surgeon in the Richmond and Lock Hospitals, both institutions experiencing high volumes of venereal and skin disease. Following receipt of his licence from RCSI in June 1813, Wallace travelled to London. Here he studied under established dermatologist Thomas Bateman (himself a pupil of Robert Willan), surgeon John Pearson, and expert venereal disease physician Joseph Adams, among others. Gaining significant experience in cutaneous and venereal disease during this time, he returned to Dublin in 1817 with the intention of utilizing this knowledge to establish a hospital. In his own words, the hospital’s mission was to ‘at once afford relief to the poor; supply the means of extending our knowledge of cutaneous diseases, by accurate clinical investigation and extensive observation; and establish a school for the instruction of medical students’. The following year, he personally founded and funded the Dublin Infirmary for Diseases of the Skin at 20 Moore Street, the first hospital in Europe or the British Empire exclusively devoted to skin disease. By 1837, an estimated 25 000 cases had been treated in the Dublin Skin Infirmary. Wallace made two internationally recognized contributions to medicine: introducing potassium iodide to the materia medica for treatment of syphilitic lesions and demonstrating the infectivity of secondary syphilis. The latter he proved unethically by the inoculation of ‘secretions from exanthematic sores’ into healthy individuals, demonstrating its transmissibility and incubation period. His publications include Observations on Sulphurious Fumigations as a Remedy in Rheumatism and Diseases of the Skin (1820) and A Treatise on the Venereal Disease and its Varieties (1833). During this time he was also appointed surgeon at Jervis Street Hospital, where he does not appear to have been an easy colleague; there were public rows with fellow surgeon James O’Beirne, complaints about the hospital’s cleanliness, and an increase in skin-related admissions while Wallace was on service, with a colleague commenting ‘certainly not one case of diseases of the skin was fit for an hospital’. While his ethics and behaviour as a colleague are at times questionable, his contribution to modern dermatology is undeniable. His sudden and untimely death in 1837 from typhus brought an end to the Dublin Skin Infirmary as his post lay vacant, owing to his habit of independence.