William Stokes

William Stokes (born Oct. 1, 1804, Dublin—died Jan. 10, 1878, Howth, near Dublin) was a physician and the leading representative of the Irish, or Dublin, school of anatomical diagnosis, which emphasized clinical examination of patients in forming a diagnosis. He was also the author of two important works in the emerging field of cardiac and pulmonary diseases.

Son of Whitley Stokes, regius professor of medicine at Dublin University, William Stokes received his medical degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1825. Upon his return to Dublin he became a clinical instructor, then physician to the Meath Hospital, succeeding his father in this position. Stokes encouraged students to gain clinical experience by working, under faculty supervision, in hospital wards; he also urged them to acquire a general as well as a medical education to provide a basis for independent judgment. Stokes was a pioneer in the new methods of clinical diagnosis popularized by the Parisian school of anatomical diagnosis. Upon the death of his father in 1845, he was confirmed as regius professor of medicine at Dublin University.

Stokes’s two most important works were A Treatise on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Diseases of the Chest, published in 1837, and The Diseases of the Heart and Aorta, published in 1854. He was also the author of one of the first works in English on the use of the stethoscope. Stokes also gave his name to a type of breathing characteristic of advanced myocardial degeneration, called Cheyne-Stokes respiration (Cheyne, a Scottish physician practicing in Dublin, had published observations on rhythmic respiration), and to a combination of slow pulse and cerebral attacks known as the Stokes-Adams syndrome (described earlier by Robert Adams, a regius professor of surgery at the University of Dublin).