For the Irish Surgeon, see William Stokes (surgeon)

William Stokes (1 October 1804 - 10 January 1878) was an Irish physician, who was Regius Professor of Physic at the University of Dublin. Educated in medicine at the Meath Hospital in Dublin, he went on to create two important works on cardiac and pulmonary diseases, A Treatise on the Diagnosis and Treatment of Diseases of the Chest (1837), and The Diseases of the Heart and Aorta (1854), as well as one of the first treatises on the use of the stethoscope. He emphasised the importance of clinical examination in forming diagnoses, and of ward-based learning for students of medicine.

Both Cheyne-Stokes breathing (the alternation of apnea with tachypnea) and Stokes-Adams disease 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". ^[1]

His son, Whitley Stokes, was a notable lawyer and Celtic scholar, his daughter Margaret Stokes an archaeologist and writer.