Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement/Ogle, John William

1542060Dictionary of National Biography, 1912 supplement, Volume 3 — Ogle, John William1912Humphry Davy Rolleston

OGLE, JOHN WILLIAM (1824–1905), physician, born at Leeds on 30 July 1824, was only child of Samuel Ogle, who was engaged in business in that town, and Sarah Rathmell. His father, who was first cousin to Admiral Thomas Ogle and second cousin to James Adey Ogle [q. v.], regius professor of medicine at Oxford was a member of an old Staffordshire and Shropshire family which originally came from Northumberland. John was educated at Wakefield school, from which he passed in 1844 to Trinity College, Oxford, where he graduated B.A. in 1847, and developed sympathy with the tractarian movement. He entered the medical school in Kinnerton Street attached to St. George's Hospital, and became in 1850 a licentiate (equivalent of present member) and in 1855 a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians. At Oxford he proceeded M.A. and B.M. in 1851 and D.M. in 1857. At St. George's Hospital he worked much at morbid anatomy, and was for years curator of the museum with Henry Grey, after whose death in 1861 he became lecturer on pathology. In 1857 he was elected assistant physician, and in 1866 he became full physician, but resigned owing to mental depression in 1876. Cured shortly afterwards by an attack of enteric fever, he returned to active practice, but not to his work at St. George's Hospital, where, however, he was elected consulting physician in 1877.

He was censor (1873, 1874, 1884) and vice-president (1886) of the Royal College of Physicians, and an associate fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Although he was an all-round scholarly physician, his main interest lay in nervous diseases. In a lecture on aphasia, or inability to translate thoughts into words, he made some interesting historical references to the cases of Dr. Johnson and Dean Swift. Always a strong churchman, he was on friendly terms with W. E. Gladstone, Newman, Church, Liddon, Temple, and Benson. He was elected F.S.A. on 7 March 1878.

After some years of increasing paralytic weakness, dating from 1899, he died at Highgate vicarage on 8 Aug. 1905, and was buried at Shelfanger near Diss in Norfolk. He married, on 31 May 1854, Elizabeth, daughter of Albert Smith of Ecclesall, near Sheffield, whose family subsequently took the name of Blakelock. He had five sons and one daughter.

Ogle was active in medical literature. Together with Timothy Holmes [q. v. Suppl. II] he founded the now extinct 'St. George's Hospital Reports’ (1866-79) and edited seven out of the ten volumes. He was also editor of the 'British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review.' He contributed widely to the medical papers and societies, making 160 communications to the 'Transactions of the Pathological Society of London' alone. His independently published works were the Harveian oration for 1880 at the Royal College of Physicians, which contains much scholarly information, and a small work On the Relief of Excessive and Dangerous Tympanites by Puncture of the Abdomen,' 1888. [British Medical Journal, 1905, ii. 416; private information.]

H. D. R.