Joseph Wright

Wright, Joseph Jefferson Burr (1801-1878) U.S. army medical officer. Born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, attended the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. In 1833 he joined the army as as assistant surgeon, and served the next seven years at frontier outposts. During the second Seminole War he developed new techiques to use quinine to combat malaria. Wright skillfully administered hospitals for both Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott in Mexico, contributing significantly to American success there. During the first year of the Civil War, Wright served as the medical director for the Departments of the Ohio and of the Missouri, but he spent most of the conflict as the surgeon at Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania. After the war the post became a training center for the Army Hospital Corps, and he became one of its instructors. Wright retired as a colonel in 1876 and died in Carlisle.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

Wright, Joseph (1734-97). Painter, known as Wright of Derby, where he was born and spent most of his life. He earned a living as a portrait painter, while he experimented with the effects of light and industrial and scientific subjects, reflecting the interests of his day. Two of his best-known works come from this period, A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (1766, Derby) and An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768, Tate). Although in 1775 Wright failed to replace Gainsborough in Bath, some of his best portraits come from the early 1780s.

Born in poverty in Thackley, Yorkshire, Joseph Wright taught himself to read and write and educated himself to university level. He studied for a Ph.D. at Heidelberg, and served as Deputy Professor (1891-1901) and later Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford University (1901-25). Wright published numerous standard texts on the grammar of various languages, and an interest in English dialects resulted in his Windhill Dialect Grammar (1893), which was, he claimed, ‘The first grammar of its kind in England: as scientific study of a living dialect intended to be useful to philologists’ (Wright, 1932: 138). In 1887 Wright accepted the position of editor of the long-planned English Dialect Dictionary, which was finally published in six volumes between 1896 and 1905, mostly at Wright's own expense. He was also the instigator of the Yorkshire Dialect Society. Joseph Wright married Elizabeth Mary Lea (see E. M. Wright) in 1896.

Bibliography
The full bibliography list is available here.

• Elizabeth Mary Wright, The Life of Joseph Wright (1932)
• F. Austin Hyde, ‘Yorkshire Remembers Dr. Joseph Wright’, The Dalesman (Oct. 1955), 335-7; DNB