Edwin Robert Wheeler was a medical missionary in China, a professor of surgery at Shantung Christian University, Tsinan and superintendent of the University Hospital. He was born in 1878 in Preston, Sussex, the son of Robert Gidley Wheeler, a minister of the free church, and Rachel Wheeler née Rutty. The family settled at Calne in Wiltshire. Wheeler was educated as a boarder at Monkton Combe College, Somerset and went on to study medicine at King’s College Hospital from 1898. He qualified with the conjoint examination in 1903 and went on to gain his MB BS in 1905. He was an assistant house surgeon and house physician at the Evelina Hospital for Sick Children, Southwark and then a house surgeon at King’s College Hospital and Warneford Hospital, Leamington. He then went to China as a medical missionary with the Baptist Missionary Society. From 1907 to 1916 he was a surgeon to the Peking Union Medical College and Hospital. While he was in Peking, he met and married, in January 1910, Emily Gertrude Meech, the daughter of the Reverend Samuel Evans Meech, a missionary with the London Missionary Society, and Edith Elizabeth Bagge Meech née Trankard. From 1917, Wheeler was a professor of surgery in the school of medicine at Shantung Christian University, Tsinan and head of the department of surgery. He was superintendent of the hospital from 1921 and gained his fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1923. From 1918 to 1919 he served as a temporary captain in the RAMC in the No 3 Native Labour General Hospital (Chinese) for the British Expeditionary Force. He returned to England in the late 1920s, where he was in private practice in the High Street in Marlborough and as an honorary surgeon at Savernake Hospital, Marlborough. In December 1929, he was appointed by the Secretary of State for the Home Department as a medical referee under the Workmen’s Compensation Act 1925 for the districts of Bath, Calne, Chippenham, Devizes, Frome, Hungerford, Malmesbury, Marlborough, Melksham, Newbury, Swindon, Trowbridge and Warminster County Courts. Wheeler died at Savernake Hospital on 19 March 1965. His son, Robert Oliver Wheeler, born in 1915, also studied medicine at King’s, was a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England and became a medical officer at Savernake Hospital.