WELLS, WILLIAM CHARLES

(b. Charleston, South Carolina, 24 May 1757; d. London, England, 18 September 1817), meteorology, physiology, medicine, natural philosophy.

Wells was the son of Robert Wells, a printer, and Mary Wells, Scots recently settled in America. At the age of eleven he was sent to Dumfries, Scotland, for schooling; and in 1770 he entered the University of Edinburgh. From 1771 to 1774 he was apprenticed to Alexander Garden, a Charleston physician with an international reputation in botany. He subsequently studied medicine at Edinburgh (1775-1778) and then went to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, London. Wells wrote his thesis, “De frigore,” at Leiden and received the M.D. from the University of Edinburgh on 24 July 1780. After practicing at Charleston and at St. Augustine, Florida (1781-1784), he returned to London. He was licensed by the Royal College of Physicians in 1788 and was physician at St. Thomas’ Hospital from 1795 until his death. Wells’s practice was small, his life austere, and his circle of friends small but distinguished. He suffered from heart failure after 1812 and wrote a memoir on his life in what he correctly thought was his last year. It was published in 1818, together with a collection of his most important works and a violent criticism of the Royal College of Physicians.

Wells’s essay “Single Vision With Two Eyes” (1792) led to his becoming a fellow of the Royal Society (1793). In 1795 he published a confirmation of Galvani’s report (1791) that muscular contraction could be evoked by weak electrical currents. During the next two decades he wrote on the color of blood, conducted further studies on vision and optics, and provided accurate descriptions of rheumatic heart disease, of proteinuria, hematuria, and edema due to scarlet fever, and similar cases not due to scarlatina. The studies of albuminuria, promptly translated into French and published at Geneva in 1814, prepared the way for the definitive observations of Richard Bright (1827).

Wells’s most important contribution was his meticulous study of the formation of dew and the correct interpretation of his data. He proved that dew is neither invisible rain, falling from heaven, nor “sweat” from plants, but is due to condensation from air in contact with objects that have been cooled by radiating their heat into the cloudless night sky. He showed that a dark substance, charcoal, accumulated more dew than pale material, such as chalk, and that poor conductors of heat, such as plants, were covered with more dew than good conductors, such as metal objects. He also noted that windless nights favored dew formation, because they allowed the air to remain in contact with the cooled objects long enough to deposit its moisture. Although criticized by such eminent men as Thomas Young, the “Essay on Dew” (1814) led to Wells’s being awarded the Royal Society’s Rumford Medal. This complete and original theory was not generally accepted until its confirmation and extension by John Aitken in 1885.

Charles Darwin considered Wells to have been the first to state the theory of evolution by natural selection of those best fitted to survive in a given environment. His “Observations on the Causes of the Differences in Colour and Form Between the White and Negro Races of Men” was appended to a case report of a white woman with patchy brown discoloration of the skin. He noted how man improves domestic beasts by selection and drew an analogy to the way in which nature effects a similar development of varieties of men best suited to various climates.

Because he pioneered in the study of disease and of the physiology of vision, as well as in natural science, Wells has been claimed as an early American scientist. He was born and remained a loyal British subject, and chose to study, work, and practice at Edinburgh and London. Nevertheless, most articles dealing with his life and work have been written by American physicians, and the New York Academy of Medicine files his publications in its collection of rare Americana.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. At Wells’s request the works he considered most important were republished in one volume with an autobiographical memoir as Two Essays:Upon Single Vision With Two Eyes. On Dew …(London, 1818) (the other titles follow). Most of his papers on medical topics, heart and kidney disease, and so on are in Transactions of the Society for Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge,2 (1808) and 3 (1812).

II. Secondary Literature. Wells’s life is reviewed in Dictionary of National Biography and by E. Bartlett, in Western Journal of Medicine and Surgery, 3rd ser., 5 (1850), 22–44; W. Dock. in California and Western Medicine, 31 (1929), 340–341; and F. S. Pleadwell, in Annals of Medical History, n.s. 6 (1934), 128–142.

William Dock