After his death ‘The Wharton Testimonial Fund’ was formed wherewith an addition was made to the value of the existing Beaufort prize for naval officers, the double award being entitled ‘The Beaufort Testimonial and the Wharton Memorial,’ and including a gold medal, bearing on its obverse Wharton's bust. Two posthumous portraits were also presented in 1908, one of which was accepted by the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery and hung there immediately; and the other was placed in the Painted Hall at Greenwich.
[The Times, 30 Sept. 1905; R. N. List; Geog. Journal, xxvi. 684.]
WHEELHOUSE, CLAUDIUS GALEN (1826–1909), surgeon, born at Snaith in Yorkshire on 29 Dec. 1826, was second son of James Wheelhouse, surgeon. At seven he left the grammar school at Snaith for Christ's Hospital preparatory school at Hertford, and entered Christ's Hospital in London in 1836. He was apprenticed at sixteen to R. C. Ward of Ollerton, Newark, and always strongly advocated the system of apprenticeship. He entered the Leeds school of medicine in October 1846, and was admitted M.R.C.S.England on 25 March 1849, and a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in 1850. He then went to the Mediterranean on a yachting cruise as surgeon to Lord Lincoln, afterwards fifth duke of Newcastle and secretary of state for war. He took with him one of the first photographic cameras which left England, and obtained many good photographs in spite of the cumbrous processes.
Wheelhouse returned to England in 1851, and entered into partnership with Joseph Prince Garlick of Park Row, Leeds, the senior surgeon to the dispensary and lecturer on surgery at the Leeds school of medicine. In the same year he was elected surgeon to the public dispensary and demonstrator of anatomy in the medical school, where he was successively lecturer on anatomy, physiology, and surgery. He was twice president of the school, and when the new university of Leeds was inaugurated in October 1904 Wheelhouse was made hon. D.Sc. He was surgeon to the Leeds infirmary from March 1884.
Elected F.R.C.S. England on 9 June 1864, he served on the college council from 1876 to 1881. President of the council of the British Medical Association 1881–4, he presided at the Leeds meeting in 1889. In 1897, when the association held its annual meeting at Montreal, McGill College made him hon. LL.D., and he received the gold medal of the association.
In 1886, when the Medical Act brought direct representatives of the profession on the general medical council, Wheelhouse headed the poll in England and Wales. Re-elected in 1891 at the end of his term, he did not seek re-election in 1897. From 1870 to 1895 he was first secretary and afterwards treasurer of the West Riding Medical Charity, and in 1902 he was presented by his fellow members with an address of thanks and testimonial.
On retiring from practice at Leeds in 1891 he settled at Filey, where he was active in local affairs. He died at Filey on 9 April 1909, and was buried there. He married in 1860 Agnes Caroline, daughter of Joseph Cowell, vicar of Todmorden, and had issue three daughters.
Wheelhouse filled the unusual position of a general practitioner who made a name in pure surgery. An admirable teacher, he did much to convert the Leeds medical school into a worthy integral part of the university. In 1876 he advocated that form of external urethrotomy for impermeable strictures to which his name is given; it has displaced all rival methods. The operation was first described in the ‘British Medical Journal,’ 1876, i. 779, in a paper entitled ‘Perineal section as performed at Leeds.’
[Brit. Med. Journal, 1909, i. 983 (with portrait); Lancet, 1909, i. 1145.]
WHISTLER, JAMES ABBOTT McNEILL (1834–1903), painter, was eldest son (in a family of seven sons and one daughter) of George Washington Whistler, an American artillery officer whose life was mostly spent as a civil engineer, by his second wife, Anna Mathilda McNeill of Wilmington, North Carolina, who was connected with the Winans family of Baltimore. His half-sister, Dasha Delano, married in 1847 (Sir) Francis Seymour Haden [q. v. Suppl. II]. He was born on 10 July 1834 at Lowell, Massachusetts, in a house which is now a Whistler Memorial Museum. Christened James Abbott, he afterwards added to his Christian names his mother's maiden surname of ‘McNeill,’ and finally was in the habit of signing himself ‘James McNeill Whistler,’ or ‘J. M. N. Whistler,’ except in official documents. His paternal descent was from an old English family which had branches in Sussex, Oxfordshire, and Ireland. He sprang from the Irish branch. Maternally, he threw back to the
