Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Cheadle, Walter Butler
CHEADLE, WALTER BUTLER (1835–1910), physician, born at Colne on 15 Oct. 1835, was son of James Cheadle, thirteenth wrangler at Cambridge in 1831, who was vicar of Christ Church, Come, Lancashire. His mother was Eliza, daughter of John Butler of Ruddington, Nottinghamshire. Educated at the grammar school of Bingley, Yorkshire, of which town his father became vicar in 1837, he proceeded in 1855 to Cambridge as a scholar of Gonville and Caius College. In 1859, when a family bereavement prevented him from rowing in the university eight, he graduated B.A. In 1861 he took the M.B. degree, having studied medicine both at Cambridge and at St. George's Hospital, London. In June 1862 he started with William Fitzwilliam, Viscount Milton (1839-1877), to explore the then little known western parts of Canada. After their return in 1864 they published in their joint names a successful account of their travels as 'The North-West Passage by Land' (1865), which soon ran through eight editions. A ninth and last edition appeared in 1891. The book was written by Cheadle, and narrates a notable series of hardships faced with indomitable courage in mountainous and untracked country. The expedition conducted by Sir Sandford Fleming in 1892 through the Rocky mountains to plan the Canadian Pacific railway was guided largely by the track of Cheadle and his companion (cf. Sandford Fleming, Ocean to Ocean, p. 251 ).
In 1865 he proceeded M.A. and M.D. at Cambridge, and, becoming a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1865, was elected a fellow in 1870; he was subsequently councillor(1889-91), censor (1892-3) and senior censor in 1898; he acted as examiner in medicine in the college (1885-8). He delivered in 1900 the Lumleian lectures before the college 'On some Cirrhoses of the Liver.' Meanwhile elected physician to the Western General Dispensary in 1865, and assistant physician to St. Mary's Hospital in 1867, he was dean of the medical school of the hospital (1869-73). He held this last post at a critical period of the school's existence, but under his guidance the school more than doubled the number of its students. He became physician to in-patients in 1885, and remained on the active staff until 1904, when he was appointed honorary consulting physician. For sixteen years of his connection with the hospital he acted as dermatologist. He also acted as lecturer on materia medica and therapeutics for five years. on pathology for ten years, on medicine jointly with Sir William Broadbent [q. v. Suppl. II] and Dr. David Bridge Lees for ten years, and on clinical medicine for twelve years. For St. Mary's medical school he did much good service, helping to found scholarships and encouraging the athletic clubs. In 1898 he gave over 1000l. to endow a Cheadle prize (value 20l.) and a gold medal for an essay on clinical medicine. As a teacher he was best at the bedside with senior students and qualified men. In treatment he relied on experience and intuition, and while always careful to ease his patients in their suffering, put faith in nature and time as healing agents. In 1869 he had also been appointed assistant physician to the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, where his active work on the staff terminated in 1892, when he became honorary consulting physician. During his twenty-three years' service at the Children's Hospital he endowed the 'Cheadle' cot in memory of his first wife. It was among children that his private practice mainly lay, and his chief writings dealt with children's health and ailments.
Cheadle was the first (1877) to define the nature of a then mysterious disease in childhood characterised by pain and tenderness of the limbs, haemorrhages, and swelling of the gums. He ascribed the disease to artificial foods that possessed no anti-scorbutic properties, giving it the name of 'infantile scurvy.' The pathology of the disease was afterwards worked out by Sir Thomas Barlow (Lancet, 1878, ii.). A valuable series of lectures on the proper way to feed infants, in the post-graduate course at St. Mary's Hospital and at the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, were published under the title 'On the Principles and Exact Conditions to be observed in the Artificial Feeding of Infants; the Properties of Artificial Foods; and the Diseases which arise from Faults of Diet in Early Life' (1889; 5th edit., ed. by Dr. F. J. Poynton, 1902). Cheadle also published 'The Various Manifestations of the Rheumatic State as exemplified in Childhood and Early Life' (1889). It contained the Harveian lectures delivered before the Medical Society in 1888. Cheadle maintained that the true type of acute rheumatism is that which occurs with manifold and serious symptoms and complications in childhood, and not the less severe affection of adult life.
A radical in politics, Cheadle was one of the early supporters in face of much professional opposition of the claims of medical women, and was one of the first to lecture at the London School of Medicine for Women. He visited Canada with the British Association in 1884, and contracted dysentery which permanently injured his health. He died on 25 March 1910 at 19 Portman Square, London, and was buried in Ocklynge cemetery, Eastbourne. He was married twice: (1) on 31 Jan. 1866, to Anne, youngest daughter of William Murgatroyd of Bankfield, near Bingley, Yorkshire; and (2) on 4 Aug. 1892, to Emily, daughter of Robert Mansel, of Rothbury, Northumberland, inspector of Queen Victoria's Jubilee Institute for Nurses. Both wives predeceased him. Four sons by his first wife survive him. Tall and of heavy build, he was dignified and reserved in manner, but won the confidence of his many child patients. A portrait painted by George Henry, R.S.A., presented to Cheadle on his retiring from the active staff of St. Mary's Hospital, now hangs in the library of St. Mary's Hospital Medical School, to which it was bequeathed. There is also a portrait on china in the possession of Cheadle's son Walter.
[Information from Mr. Walter W. Cheadle; Lancet, 2 April 1910 (portrait); Brit. Med. Journal, 9 April 1910; St. Mary's Hosp. Gaz., Dec. 1904 (portrait) and Feb. 1907.]