Joseph Wiglesworth

1854-1919

Vol IV

Pg 408

b.1854 d.16 May 1919

MD Lond MRCS FRCP(1898)

This biography is part of a series of historical obituaries, originally published in print. As products of their time periods, some biographies contain language which is inappropriate and offensive and present biased accounts of physicians’ lives and work that do not disclose unethical and discriminatory behaviour. As an establishment organisation, the RCP, its members, and the way they are written about, have often reflected societal power structures that favour dominant groups. We aim to redress these biases through ongoing work.

Below is the biography as originally published in 1955.

Joseph Wiglesworth received his medical training at Liverpool and St. Thomas’s Hospital, London, and qualified in the year 1876. He filled resident posts in the Liverpool Royal Infirmary and St. George’s Hospital for Skin Diseases, Liverpool, before being appointed assistant medical officer at the County Asylum, Rainhill. With this institution he remained connected for the rest of his career, succeeding to the office of medical superintendent after a few years. He was lecturer on mental diseases at Liverpool University and in 1903 president of the Medico-Psychological Association. His early retirement was occasioned by a murderous assault by one of his patients which nearly cost him his life. Thereafter he lived at Winscombe in Somerset, devoting himself to the study of birds. He was the author of a book on St. Kilda and its Birds. He was married and had one son.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1919; B.M.J., 1919]

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