Thornley Stoker Thornley Stoker Sir William Thornley Stoker, 1st Baronet (6 March 1845 – July 1912) was an eminent Irish medical writer, anatomist and surgeon. His parents were Abraham Stoker (1799–1876), from Dublin, and the feminist Charlotte Mathilda Blake Thornley (1818–1901), who came from Ballyshannon, County Donegal. Stoker was the eldest of seven children and the brother of the writer Bram Stoker. He was educated at a private school in England and at the Royal College of Surgeons, Dublin, and Queen's College, Galway, where he obtained his M. D. degree in 1866. During the later part of his life he lived at
Dracula (1924 play) Van Helsing addresses the audience with a warning that "there are such things". The Irish author Bram Stoker wrote the novel "Dracula" while working as a manager for Henry Irving's Lyceum Theatre in London; he continued to work for Irving after it was published in May 1897. Stoker secured his theatrical rights to the story that same month by holding a staged reading at the Lyceum; this hasty adaptation was never performed again. In 1899, Hamilton Deane, a young Irish actor whose family owned an estate next to one belonging to Stoker's father, joined Irving's company. In the early 1920s,