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
Bram Stoker years researching European folklore and mythological stories of vampires. The 1972 book "In Search of Dracula" by Radu Florescu and Raymond McNally claimed that the Count in Stoker's novel was based on Vlad III Dracula. At most however, Stoker borrowed only the name and "scraps of miscellaneous information" about Romanian history, according to one expert, Elizabeth Miller; further, there are no comments about Vlad III in the author's working notes. "Dracula" is an epistolary novel, written as a collection of realistic but completely fictional diary entries, telegrams, letters, ship's logs, and newspaper clippings, all of which added a level of