A BLUE plaque was due to be unveiled on Saturday (March 21, 2015) to commemorate the life of Sir Anthony Carlisle, a County Durham farmer’s son who became Surgeon Extraordinary to the king. Extraordinary this surgeon certainly was...

Sir Anthony discovered electrolysis. He was the real Mr Frankenstein. He was an expert on the anatomy of oysters and sloths, and he specialised in the bones of the human inner ear. His medical lectures in London involved handing round real human organs and were so exciting that police had to keep order. He was the first man to send up a hot air balloon in Durham. His patients included King George IV, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the artist JMW Turner, and his admirers ranged from Karl Marx to Mrs Beeton.

It is going to have to be a very large blue plaque.

It is being installed in Stillington, which is north of Stockton, south of Sedgefield, west of Aycliffe and was formerly part of County Durham although now it is probably on the brink of the Tees Valley. However, in Sir Anthony’s day, this mid-Victorian industrial village which we know as Stillington did not exist, and he came into this world a mile down the road in an agricultural hamlet that is now called Old Stillington.

Even today, the original Stillington consists of little more than three farms: Town Farm, East Farm and West Farm. Since the 13th Century, their lands had been leased from Merton College in Oxford University, and it would appear that the Carlisles were renting West Farm.

There, on February 15, 1768, Anthony was born, but, sadly, his mother Barbara, from Cowpen Bewley, died during the procedure.

Little is known of Anthony’s childhood, except that he started his medical training with his maternal uncle, Anthony Hubback, in York, and in 1784, went to Durham City to train with a surgeon, William Green, in Durham City.

“During this apprenticeship he showed a taste for philosophical and mechanical studies, and after reading a description of Montgolfier’s balloon, he amused himself with making a fire balloon, the first ever seen in the county of Durham,” recalled his half-brother, Nicholas.

This was indicative of his enquiring mind.

Within a decade, Anthony was in London, working as a surgeon in Westminster Hospital and studying an eclectic range of subjects – from the inner ear to the spleen, the effects of inbreeding to the extent of polydactyly in families (extra fingers and toes) – and he was dissecting whatever strange animals, like lemurs and sloths, he could get his hands on to see how they worked.

He was one of the first doctors to see the importance of studying medical statistics which tied into his research on the spread of cholera. He was one of the first scientists to conclude that bats avoided flying into objects in the dark “owing to extreme acuteness of hearing” – an idea ridiculed at the time but proven 100 years later.

In 1800, he toyed with Alessandro Volta’s invention of the electric battery and, with a friend, he passed a voltaic current through water, causing it to break into its constituent gases of hydrogen and oxygen - electrolysis. With so many other avenues of investigation open to him, he did not pursue it, although in 1807, Humphrey Davy modified Anthony’s apparatus for his experiments in which he discovered sodium and potassium.

In his early career, Anthony raised money for his research by publishing gory gothic novels, the most famous of which was The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey. It was about a young girl who stumbled into a secret world of Burke-and-Hare-style body-snatchers and dissectionists. He published it under the nom de plume of “Mrs Carver” – a pun on his knife-wielding job as a surgeon – and included gruesomely accurate anatomical detail. The book appears to be littered with clues to the author’s real identity, including that two of the main characters are called Thornaby and Carlton, both of which are close to Stillington.

Anthony’s biographer, Don Shelton, says that The Horrors of Oakendale Abbey inspired Mary Shelley and that Anthony is “the real Mr Frankenstein”.

However, Anthony had to stop the anonymous potboilers as his serious medical reputation grew. In 1808, he became professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy, then surgeon to the Duke of Gloucester and then Surgeon Extraordinary to the Prince Regent. This was during “the madness of George III”, and perhaps it was his observations of the king at close quarters that led Anthony to his advanced conclusion that madness was a medical condition rather than possession by an evil spirit, as other doctors argued.

The Prince Regent became king following the death of George III in 1820, and he knighted his Surgeon Extraordinary soon after.

But Anthony continued to tell his stories. His anatomy lectures became the hottest ticket in town, drawing “such crowds that people fought to get in, and officers from Bow Street had to be stationed at the door to keep out the disorderly element”.

This was because he illustrated his talks in novel ways. “Once, to display the muscles in action, he had a squad of eight nude Life Guardsmen going through the sword exercise, and again a troupe of Chinese jugglers displaying their agility,” says a contemporary report. He revelled in horrifying his audience “with pitiful remnants of humanity handed round on dinner plates”.

It doesn’t bear thinking about how he came by the human organs that sloshed around on pieces of china in his lecture hall. However, the members of his audience who didn’t pass out must surely have had their interest in science fired in the way that Professor Brian Cox inspires in the televisual age.

Anthony’s age, though, was a very different age. When Francis Douce, the Keeper of Manuscripts in the British Museum, died in 1834, the first clause in his will read: "I give to Sir Anthony Carlisle £200 requesting him either to sever my head or extract the heart from my body so as to prevent any possibility of the return of vitality." There was a fear at the time that apparently dead people could wake up days later and find themselves in a coffin six feet under with no way out. To ensure this didn’t happen to him, Mr Douce was asking one of the most eminent surgeons of the day to finish him off.

Others also regarded him highly. Karl Marx mentioned him as one of the good guys in his 1860s books Capital because Anthony had advocated the adoption of the 1833 Factory Act which prevented very young children from working in cramped conditions – Anthony argued that such conditions hampered their anatomical development.

And Mrs Beeton used his treatment for lumbago – a gently heated flat iron – in her famous 1861 Book of Household Management.

However, when he died in his home in London on November 2, 1840, he was principally remembered for raising funds for the new Westminster Hospital, for his advances in surgery, for his entertaining lectures, for his work with the king and for discovering electrolysis.

In Stillington, they’ll just remember him for being extraordinary.

The Northern Echo:

The remains of Stillington Ironworks in May 1936, when questions were asked about the works in the House of Commons

THE CLARENCE RAILWAY came clattering across the Carlisles’ farmland in 1833 and forever changed the agricultural nature of Sir Anthony’s backyard. In 1865, the first blast furnace for the Carlton Iron Works was built beside the line. Terraces were hurriedly thrown up for the ironworkers and by 1881, 611 ironworkers lived in the new industrial village of Stillington.

By 1888, there were two 80ft blast furnaces and 40 coke ovens, and the 1921 census recorded 1,315 people living in the village with 460 – including 50 females – employed at the works.

It was, though, a short-lived boom. Bust set in when the last blast furnace blew out in 1930 and Dorman Long shut the plant.

In May 1936, the Sedgefield MP John Leslie asked if the idle plant might be used for defence purposes. Lord Runciman, the President of the Board of Trade, replied that too much of it had been demolished, which was borne out by this picture that The Northern Echo took to illustrate the article.

The Northern Echo:

The Northern Echo took this picture of the bridge in the centre of Stillington on August 16, 1962. We think it shows the old Clarence Railway running through the centre of the village. The Echo said that it was regarded as "one of the most dangerous spots in County Durham" but there hadn't been an accident there in eight years because it was so dangerous that motorists took extra care. It was soon widened

THE blue plaque in Stillington has been funded by the Society of Biology. It was unveiled by Alex Cunningham, the MP for Stockton North, and Dr Richard Spencer, the head of science at Middlesbrough College. Dr Spencer is distantly related to Sir Anthony - they are third cousins five times removed - and he has clearly inherited some of Sir Anthony's unusual lecturing skills: he has recently been named as the only European teacher in the Top 10 Teachers in the World by the Varkey Foundations. We are very grateful for his help with this article, along with the assistance of Alan Pearce and Gwynn Dunn.