William Charles Wells was born in Charleston, S. C. , the second son and fourth child of Robert and Mary Wells. His father was a bookbinder of Dumfries, Scotland, who emigrated to Charleston in 1753 and became a successful printer and bookseller.
William grew up near the city waterfront, where he acquired a vocabulary he later regretted, and was sent back to Dumfries to school when ten years of age. Here he remained more than two years, later attended the University of Edinburgh, and finally returned to Charleston in 1771. Displaying an interest in science, he was apprenticed to Alexander Garden, c. 1730-1791, and remained with him until 1775. Both he and his father were staunch Loyalists, and upon the outbreak of the Revolution both fled to Great Britain, where Wells attended lectures for three years at the medical school of the University of Edinburgh. He studied for three months at the University of Leyden. He received the M. D. degree at Edinburgh in 1780.
He followed the common procedure of going to London, where he did some work under William Hunter and went the rounds at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. In 1779 he served as a surgeon in a Scottish regiment in Dutch service on the Continent. The following year, taking advantage of the British capture of Charleston, he returned to America to look after his father's property; but fled to Florida upon the return of the patriot forces to Charleston. He took a printing press with him and claimed to have founded the first weekly newspaper in that colony. In 1784, Wells once more established himself in London, and continued to practise medicine there for the rest of his life. In 1788 he was made a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians. He had the advantage of hospital connections, and the support of such influential friends as David Hume and Matthew Baillie. On the other hand, he was handicapped by a disdain for the practising apothecaries (who might have aided him), and by a temperament which made it difficult for people to approach him. He was also hindered by a debt of £600 incurred in his education. Only after ten years of practice did his income equal his expenditures. Once he had a living income, he began serious investigations in physics and in medicine. He became a member of the Royal Society in 1793, and several of his more significant experiments in physics were published in the Philosophical Transactions of that body. In his studies of vision, he claimed to have been the first to experiment with the use of belladonna in the eyes, and refuted the view that the distance vision of near-sighted persons improved with age. Between 1790 and 1810, he wrote about twelve papers of minor importance on various disease conditions, which were published in The Transactions of a Society for the Promotion of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge. Charles Darwin was not familiar with Wells's essay when he first published his Origin of Species; but sometime between 1861 and 1866 it was called to his attention by Charles L. Brace. In the fourth edition (1866) of his great work Darwin inserted into the historical introduction the statement: "In this paper he [Wells] distinctly recognizes the principle of natural selection, and this is the first recognition which has been indicated. " Darwin added that Wells applied the principle only to the races of men and not to the animal world in general. A critical reading of the original paper, however, gives the impression that Wells saw its applicability to zoology, but stressed only its ethnological implications because this was the matter in hand. In a word, he understood the principle of natural selection as a mechanism of evolution in animal life, but did not realize the whole significance of the theory. Wells suffered a stroke of apoplexy in 1800, but continued to work strenuously for some years. In the spring of 1817 he began to suffer seriously from a disease of the heart, which caused his death. He appears to have had no active religious connections, but was buried in the parish church of St. Brides' in London beside the graves of his parents.
His most significant contribution to science was contained in a paper read before the Royal Society in 1813 and published, along with several other papers, in 1818: Two Essays: One Upon Single Vision with Two Eyes; The Other on Dew and An Account of a Female of the White Race. Part of Whose Skin Resembles That of a Negro. By the Late W. C. Wells . With a Memoir of His Life, Written by Himself. In this paper, Wells not only assumed that there had been a biological evolution of human species, but clearly explained the principle of a natural selection in the course of a struggle for existence and a consequent survival of the fittest.
He was never married.
