Researching William Stokes

Both Cheyne–Stokes breathing (the alternation of apnoea with tachypnoea) and Stokes–Adams syndrome are named after him. Stokes' sign is a severe throbbing in the abdomen, at the right of the umbilicus, in acute enteritis. Stokes law is that a muscle situated above an inflamed membrane is often affected with paralysis.

In 1858 he was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In June 1861 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society as: "The Author of A work on the Diseases of the Lungs, and of a work on the Diseases of the Heart and Aorta – and of other contributions to Pathological Science. Eminent as a Physician". He was elected President of the Royal Irish Academy for 1874–76.

His son Sir William Stokes published a biography of William Stokes in 1898. Another son, Whitley Stokes, was a notable lawyer and Celtic scholar, his daughter Margaret Stokes an archaeologist and writer and his father Whitley (senior) also a noted physician.

The son of William Stokes, he was born in Dublin, studied medicine there (M.D., 1863) and at Berlin, London, Paris, and Vienna. In 1864 he settled in practice in Clare St., Dublin until 1878 when he moved to his father's house in Merrion Square. In 1864 he was elected surgeon to the Meath Hospital. He resigned this post in 1868 upon his appointment as surgeon to the House of Industry Hospitals (which included the Richmond Hospital).

In 1871 he became Professor of Surgery at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI). He served as President of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland in 1886–1887 and was knighted in 1886. In 1888 he returned to the Meath Hospital as surgeon, and was appointed surgeon in ordinary to Queen Victoria in 1892. He was a governor of the Westmoreland Lock Hospital in Dublin.

In 1900 he went to South Africa as consulting surgeon to the British forces in the war against the Boers. While there he was attacked with pleurisy, and he died in Pietermaritzburg. He was buried in the military cemetery at Fort Napier, Natal.

In 1869 he married Elizabeth Moore by whom he had one son and two daughters. He wrote, amongst other works, Contributions to Practical Surgery (1865, et seq) and Selected Papers on Operative and Clinical Surgery (1902), edited by William Taylor.