William Walker belonged to a notable Dumfries family whose members included a member of Parliament. His father, also William, had made a fortune in Jamaica, probably in the sugar trade, and returned to Dumfries where he died at the age of 60. His wife, Margaret Burnside, was the daughter of Reverend William Burnside DD, a friend of the poet Robert Burns. He was over 50 years old when his eldest son William was born. When William’s schooling was completed, his mother took the family to Edinburgh where they lived in Northumberland Street in the New Town.
William studied medicine, taking the Licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh qualification at the age of 22 in 1836. The notes which he made on lectures in surgery and the practice of physic in January and February of that year are in the Library of the College1 providing interesting details of the teaching curriculum of the day. Doubtless he attended the clinics conducted by John Argyll Robertson at the Edinburgh Eye Dispensary, the charitable institution at 405 Lawnmarket, but he left no record of what further training he received in the subject of diseases of the eye, his chosen specialty. He became associated with the Eye Dispensary where he practised and, by 1842, was giving a course of twenty lectures on diseases of the eye. These lectures are recorded in manuscript, carefully corrected in red ink. He revised the text every year and the scripts of these lectures are also in the College Library.
General anaesthesia was introduced in the 1840s and in 1851 ophthalmic examinations were revolutionised by Helmholtz’s invention of the ophthalmoscope which Walker described in a lecture at the College ten years later: “Helmholtz’s instrument consisted of a mirror of superimposed oblong plates of glass, packed in a copper frame, which was fixed at one end of a short blackened copper tube, at an angle of 30o to the axis of the tube, the other end of which had a contrivance for holding a concave lens. This end the observer applied to his own eye, a lamp was so placed that its rays fell at a convenient angle upon the mirror, which threw these back upon the fundus of the eye where they underwent a second reflection and returned to the mirror”.
When John Argyll Robertson retired, Walker became the senior surgeon at the Eye Dispensary and in 1855 he was the first surgeon to be appointed to the ophthalmic surgery department of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in Infirmary Street. Until that time several surgeons, including James Syme, had undertaken ophthalmic operations as there was no specialist department of ophthalmology.
In 1862 the Eye Dispensary, of which he was a Trustee, moved from the Lawnmarket, where the building had become unsafe, to purpose- built accommodation at 54 Lord Cockburn Street. This had been constructed through the riggs to the north of the High Street to give access from the south to the Waverley Station. In the same year, Douglas Argyll Robertson was appointed as a colleague at the Royal Infirmary at the age of 25, so it can be surmised that Walker was his mentor.
Having taken the Fellowship of the College in 1851, he was elected President for the years 1871-1872. During his term of office, there was a proposal that the four Scottish Universities, the two Edinburgh Colleges and the Glasgow Faculty should offer a basic medical qualification, and while this proposal was not developed, it was revived in modified form some years later as the Triple Qualification.
During his Presidency he had to adjudicate on an act of dishonesty. A Fellow of the College wrote to admit that he had told a lie by saying he was 25 years of age when elected. When it was revealed that he was only in his 24th year, and as he had not been truthful in his dealings with the College, his name was ordered to be erased, his Diploma recalled and his fee of £25 returned.
Walker described two cases of subluxated lenses, one in a “tall, thin and delicate looking “ man of twenty, probably with Marfan’s syndrome, the other “a stout, healthy young woman” of twenty five, possibly a case of Weill-Marchesani syndrome. Unfortunately no more details about their habitus are given. In another paper he describes treating a case of granular conjunctivitis by inoculating the conjunctivae with gonorrhoeal discharge, following a method he had gleaned during a visit to Moorfield’s Hospital. The outcome was apparently successful.
In 1870 after the death of William Mackenzie, he was appointed surgeon oculist to Queen Victoria and when the Ophthalmological Society of the United Kingdom was founded by Sir William Bowman in 1880 he was a Vice President.
He collected many textbooks and journals which now enrich the College Library. His career bridged the period which saw remarkable changes in surgery from therapeutic bleeding to antisepsis and then asepsis.
He died at home in 47 Northumberland Street of a complication of bronchitis to which he was subject and was buried alongside his parents in his home town of Dumfries. One of his obituaries described him as “a gentleman who took a most sympathetic interest in the welfare of all classes of the community”. He is described further as capable of sharp repartee. “Unobtrusive, and never courting recognition or applause, he conferred many benefits on the city and in his memoirs and consultations he was distinguished by his robust common sense. He was a cool and dextrous operator who dispensed his services with unvarying liberality, often supplementing from his purse the wants of the poor who consulted him”.
