Conan Doyle’s ‘challenger’ unchampioned: William Rutherford, F. R. S. (1839-99), and the origins of practical physiology in Britain

Abstract If, as Hazlitt put it, prejudice is the child of ignorance, then it was perhaps Ainevitable that William Rutherford the man of science should have fallen victim to William Rutherford the man. During his own lifetime, as well as since his death, only a genuinely dispassionate appraisal of his contributions to physiology might have guaranteed the survival of his early reputation, despite the burden of Victorian censure that fell so heavily upon his later career. Where Rutherford doubted not his work but himself, many of his scientific peers, and indeed successors, found it convenient to ignore his physiology for reasons that tell us less about its intrinsic merit than about his critics’ perception of socially acceptable behaviour. Thus was it possible that ‘one of the most considerable of the younger school of physiologists’ could, a generation later, die ‘ misunderstood and misjudged by many... lamented only by the few’ (1).