William Gull (31 December 1816-29 January 1890) was an English physician who served as a physician-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria.
Biography[]
William Witney Gull was born in Colchester, Essex in 1816, the son of a barge owner. He was raised in Thorpe-le-Soken, and he became a botanist and biologist while attending school in Lewes. In 1837, he found employment at Guy's Hospital in London, and he taught materia medica at the hospital from 1842 and came to make significal contributions to medical science, including advancing the understanding of myxoedema, Bright's disease, paraplegia and anorexia nervosa (coining the name). In 1871, he successfully treated the future King Edward VII during a life-threatening attack of typhoid fever, for which he was created a Baronet and appointed to be a physician-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria. During the 1880s, he advocated for the involvement of women in medicine, creating a scholarship for women in 1886.
In 1887, he suffered the first of many strokes. While, in the 1890s, American newspapers would accuse him of being "Jack the Ripper" and of having committed the Whitechapel murders to cover up Prince Albert Victor's secret marriage to a Catholic prostitute and production of an heir, Gull's many strokes in the late 1880s make this theory improbable. He died in 1890.