Wheelton Hind

Wheelton Hind (1860, Roxeth–1920) was an English surgeon and geologist.

Education and career
Wheelton Hind studied medicine at Guy's Hospital Medical School. He qualified MRCS in 1882. He graduated MB BS Lond in 1883. He was a house surgeon and resident obstetric physician at Guy's Hospital. He received his medical research MD in 1884.

"At the London University he won the Gold Medal and Scholarship in organic chemistry and gained 1st class honours in physiology. He then settled in practice at Stoke-on-Trent, was Surgeon to the North Stafford Infirmary and Eye Institution, Consulting Medical Officer to the Union Infirmary, Medical Officer to the North Stafford Deaf and Blind School, and Surgeon to the North Stafford Railway."

Throughout his medical practice his chief recreation was field work in geology. Following Charles Lapworth's pioneering method of studying index fossils, Hind applied the method to the stratigraphy of Carboniferous rocks in Suffolk.

"His success in discovering the regular order in which the different assemblages of fossils occurred in Staffordshire and Derbyshire gradually led him further afield. He co-operated with members of the Geological Survey, and after extended researches in Lancashire and Yorkshire he joined Mr. J. Allen Howe in 1901 in contributing to the Geological Society of London a fundamentally important memoir on the classification of the Lower Carboniferous rocks of north-central England."

Wheelton Hind published numerous articles in the Transactions of the North Staffordshire Naturalists' Field Club. His monograph On the Lamellibranch and Gasteropod Fauna found in the Millstone Grit of Scotland was a revision of the stratigraphy of Carboniferous Mollusca and won him the honour of the Keith Medal.

In 1914 he rapidly recruited men to form a battery of Garrison Artillery, and led them to the Western Front. The battery fought in some important engagements. He was soon transferred as Temporary Lieutenant-Colonel RAMC and returned to England at the end of WWI.

Family
Wheelton Hind was the third son of the botanist, Reverend William Marsden Hind. He was rector of Honington, Suffolk (near Ixworth), and author of The Flora of Suffolk. Wheelton Hind married Wilhelmina Maria Manfield (b. 1859) in 1884. His mother was Rev. Hind's second wife, Anne Wheelton, the daughter of John Wheelton, who had married in 1856.

Honours and awards


In 1897, he was awarded the North Staffordshire Field Club's Garner Medal "for his researches into the geology and palæontology of the carboniferous period, and especially for his monographs on the Carbonicola, Anthracomya, and Naiadites, published by the Palæontographical Society".