Medical Registrar at the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Queen Square, a position he held from 1870–1872. He was then promoted to Assistant Physician at Queen Square, and spent the rest of his career at the hospital, retiring in 1910. In 1875, he married Mary Baines, a relative by marriage of Reynolds. Her family were proprietors of the Leeds Mercury, a prominent Nonconformist newspaper promulgating liberal reforms. They had two sons, Sir William Frederick Gowers and Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers, who went to school at Rugby and then read Classics at Cambridge. In due course both joined the recently formed Administrative Class of the civil service: William Frederick went into the Colonial Civil Service, ending his career as Governor of Uganda. Ernest joined the Home Civil Service. He had an eminent career, after which he made his name as author of Plain Words, a book originally written as a civil service training pamphlet, and finally, undertaking the first revision of Fowler's Modern English Language. Their two sisters, Edith and Evelyn, developed retinitis pigmentosa in early adult life. Ernest was grandfather of the composer Patrick Gowers and great-grandfather of the mathematician Sir Timothy Gowers. Gowers produced the majority of his major works, including the two-volume Manual of Diseases of the Nervous System, in the years between 1870 and 1890. The book is still used today by medical professionals as a primary reference for this disease. A master of diagnosis, his clinical teaching at Queen Square earned him an international reputation. He was appointed Professor of Clinical Medicine at University College London in 1887. He was a self-taught artist, and skilled etcher, an accomplishment he enjoyed both as a hobby and in his work. One of his holiday etchings was exhibited at the Royal Academy, much to his great pride. Overwork caused his health to deteriorate rapidly from the 1890s onwards. Both he and his wife succumbed to pneumonia in 1913, from which Mary died. Gowers died two years later, in 1915. He was 70. Dr. William Gowers was knighted in 1897 after which he became known as Sir William Gowers. Research methods Gowers was an early convert to statistical collection, and based his research on his own case records rather than secondary sources. Working in an era before the development of computers or recording devices, he used his shorthand as a tool for collecting comprehensive records of his cases.