Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Sanders, William Rutherford
SANDERS, WILLIAM RUTHERFORD (1828–1881), physician, and professor of pathology in the university of Edinburgh, born in 1828, was son of Dr. James Sanders, author of a work on digitalis, which in some respects anticipated the modern doctrine of the use of that remedy. The elder Dr. Sanders went with his whole family to the south of France in 1842, and died at Montpellier in 1843. Young Sanders's school education, which was begun in the high school of Edinburgh, was completed at Montpellier, where he took with distinction the degree of bachelier-ès-lettres in April 1844. He returned to Scotland in June of the same year. In the following winter he studied medicine in Edinburgh University, and proceeded M.D. in 1849, obtaining a gold medal for his thesis ‘On the Anatomy of the Spleen.’ This served as an important basis for some of his later pathological studies.
After two years spent in Paris and Heidelberg, Sanders returned to Edinburgh, and while occupying the interim position of pathologist in the Royal Infirmary in 1852, he was able to apply himself to the close study of certain degenerations (afterwards called ‘amyloid’), particularly as affecting the liver and spleen. He also acted as tutorial assistant to the clinical professors (an office then for the first time instituted), and contributed numerous papers to the medical journals. In 1853 he succeeded the Goodsirs (John and Harry) as conservator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and delivered lectures, at the request of the college, in sequence to a course of Saturday demonstrations intended to introduce the rich stores contained in the museum to the notice of students of medicine. From 1855 onwards he also delivered in the extra-academical school of Edinburgh a six months' course on the institutes of medicine, including physiology and histology, with outlines of pathology. In 1861 he was appointed physician to the Royal Infirmary, and very soon attained a considerable and well-founded reputation as a clinical teacher, accurate and luminous in diagnosis, and with great power of lucid exposition.
His first positive literary communications to clinical medicine proper were a ‘Case of an unusual form of Nervous Disease, Dystaxid, or Pseudo-Paralysis Agitans, with remarks’ (‘Edinburgh Medical Journal,’ 1865), and in the same year two other papers on ‘Paralysis of the Palate in Facial Palsy,’ and on ‘Facial Hemiplegia and Paralysis of the Facial Nerve.’ Later, he took up the subject of aphasia, in connection with Broca's researches, and that of ‘the variation or vanishing of cardiac organic murmurs,’ and furnished articles to Reynolds's ‘System of Medicine’ on some subjects connected with nervous disease. Although he never gave to the public any independent volume of medical memoirs, his reputation was so thoroughly established in 1869, when the chair of pathology in the university became vacant by the death of Professor Henderson, that he was chosen to fill it with general approval. He at once introduced into the teaching of his subject many of the new methods which have since been largely developed. His assistant in this work was for some years Professor Hamilton of Aberdeen, in conjunction with whom he published a paper on ‘Lipæmia and Fat Embolism in the Fatal Dyspnœa of Diabetes’ (‘Edinburgh Medical Journal,’ July 1879).
At the same time Sanders built up a reputation as a consulting physician in Edinburgh. ‘He was known among us,’ writes one of the most distinguished of his associates (Dr. Matthews Duncan), ‘as an unassuming, genuine man, on whom we could rely for a sound diagnosis and candid opinion; and, even before he rose into prominence with the public as a consultant, he was one to whom his professional brethren, when suspecting that all was not right with themselves, would prefer to go for an opinion.’
A chronic abscess, not involving much danger at the time, which formed in January 1874, compelled him next year to abandon temporarily his professorial work and private practice. Although he resumed both, his health was not restored. In September 1880 he had an attack of right hemiplegia or palsy, together with aphasia or wordlessness so complete as to amount to almost absolute disability of verbal communications either by speech or by writing; while there was reason to believe that intelligence and all the natural emotions were largely preserved, if not quite intact. His biographer in the ‘Edinburgh Medical Journal,’ writing from the point of view of an intimate friend as well as a medical colleague, remarks upon the touching coincidence that one who had so largely and intelligently occupied himself with this very disease should have become, more than five months before his death, an example of that curious and probably impenetrable mystery, a living, breathing, and in many respects normal and intelligent man, absolutely cut off, by physical disease of one portion of the cerebral hemisphere, from communication with his kind. He died in February 1881 after a sudden attack of an apoplectic character, attended with complete loss of consciousness.
Sanders married, in December 1861, Miss Georgiana Woodrow of Norwich, and left five children; his eldest son followed his father's profession.
[Obituary notice in Edinburgh Medical Journal, April 1881, p. 939; personal information.]