# Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Gowers, William Richard

​GOWERS, Sir WILLIAM RICHARD (1845–1915), physician, born in London 20 March 1845, was the only son of William Gowers, of Hackney, by his wife, Ann Venables. He began his education at Christ Church School, Oxford, and was apprenticed at the age of sixteen to Dr. Simpson at Coggeshall in Essex. Thence he went to complete his medical training at University College, London, where he was a pupil of Sir William Jenner [q.v.]. After qualification as M.R.C.S. in 1867, he became house-physician, and subsequently private secretary to Jenner—‘the daily intercourse with that mind was a privilege inestimable’. At the age of twenty-five he was fortunate in being appointed medical registrar, and, three years later (1873), assistant-physician to the hospital for the paralysed and epileptic, Queen Square, London, where as a senior colleague he had Hughlings Jackson [q.v.], thinker and physician, under whose inspiration the research of the period was rapidly advancing. In these early years at Queen Square Gowers accumulated the great mass of material which he used ultimately in his books. In 1872 he had also been appointed assistant-physician at University College Hospital; in 1883 he became physician and, later, professor of clinical medicine there. In 1887 he was elected fellow of the Royal Society. In 1888, when pressure of work led to his retirement from University College, he was appointed consulting physician.
Gowers was interested from the outset in diseases of the nervous system, and his earliest contributions to medical literature dealt with the closely related blood-vascular system. He invented a form of haemoglobinometer, an instrument for measuring the percentage of haemoglobin in the blood, and he also improved the haemocytometer, or instrument for counting the blood corpuscles. His first important book was Medical Ophthalmology (1879), in which he discussed the subject more fully than previous writers and emphasized the use in medical diagnosis of the ophthalmoscope, which ‘gives information not often otherwise obtainable regarding the existence and nature of ​disease elsewhere than in the eye’. The accuracy and clearness of the illustrations, from the author’s own pen, made them for long the standard illustrations in the subject, and the book became an influential work and was translated into Italian and German. In 1880 Gowers published the revision of a previous lecture, Diagnosis of Diseases of the Spinal Cord, in which was described for the first time the tract of nerve-fibres in the spinal cord, subsequently known as ‘Gowers’s tract’, a name which he always deprecated. The book was an illuminating contribution to the literature of a then obscure subject, and showed the author as an investigator who could relate clinical data with pathological facts, and develop a scheme of precise regional diagnosis. His greatest book, A Manual of Diseases of the Nervous System (1886), became a work of international repute. Gowers was prolific as a lecturer, and as a writer careful of fact and lucid in style. There were few neurological problems on which his published opinion was not forthcoming. The condition of epilepsy deeply interested him, and to it he gave long and close attention. His Epilepsy (1881) was still the standard authority at the time of his death.
Gowers made daily use of his skill in stenography and urged pupils and house-physicians to do the same, for the purpose of taking notes of cases and lectures. He founded the society of medical phonographers and was its first president. He was able to etch and draw general subjects as easily as medical, and his etchings made during holidays in East Anglia were often exhibited, once at the Royal Academy. In the ’eighties the National Hospital in Queen Square was Gowers’s teaching centre, and partly through him came to have an international reputation. He was a careful observer and, thanks to his combination of knowledge from the laboratory and the hospital wards, a bold and incisive teacher. But, at most times strained and tired by overwork, he might appear to some dogmatic and impatient of criticism in his discussion of a case. The writing of the Manual had cost him much effort and had a lasting effect on his mental vigour. If not a neurologist with the originality and inspiration of Hughlings Jackson, Gowers was nevertheless a great clinician and by his writings made it possible for the medical world of his time to understand scientific neurology. He was knighted in 1897. Gowers married in 1875 Mary (died 1913), daughter of Frederick Baines, of Leeds, and had two sons and two daughters. He died in London 4 May 1915.
[British Medical Journal, 1915, vol. i, p. 1055; Lancet, 1915, vol. i, p. 828; private information.]
E. G. T. L.