quently Professor of Anatomy and Surgery in the University of Altorf and Nuremberg.
William Cheselden, born in 1688, was of a Leicestershire family. A pupil of Cowper, he lectured on anatomy in London for twenty years, and was for a similar period one of the Surgeons of St. Thomas’s Hospital. His success and reputation as a lithotomist were unparalleled, and rendered his name famous throughout Europe. A deputy from the French Academy was sent expressly to witness his operation, and he had the honour to be enrolled the first on the list of its foreign members. Cheselden’s was the first operation for the congenital cataract, and his interesting observations on the accession of sight to a boy fourteen years of age are recorded in the Transactions of the Royal Society, of which he was early a distinguished member. He died at the age of sixty-four, of apoplexy; having enjoyed among other distinctions the intimacy of Alexander Pope:
- “Weak though I am of limb and short of sight,
- Far from a lynx, and not a giant quite,
- I'11 do what Mead and Cheselden advise,
- To keep these limbs and to preserve these eyes[1].”
Cheselden was a man of enviable simplicity and integrity of character, and of sterling sense, which his publications and his life equally exemplify.
Percival Pott, born in London in 1713, was the
- ↑ Epistle to Lord Bolingbroke.
