William Cheselden

  William Cheselden (October 19, 1688 - April 10, 1752) was an English surgeon and teacher of anatomy and surgery, who was influential in establishing surgery as a scientific medical profession.

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Life

Cheselden was born at Somerby, Leicestershire. He studied anatomy in London under William Cowper (1666-1709), and began lecturing anatomy in 1710. In 1713 he published his Anatomy of the Human Body, which achieved great popularity and went through thirteen editions, mainly because it was written in English instead of Latin as it was customary. In 1718 he was appointed an assistant surgeon at St Thomas' Hospital, (London), becoming full surgeon in the following year, and he was also chosen one of the surgeons to St George's Hospital on its foundation in 1733. In 1710 he was admitted to the London Company of Barber-Surgeons and he was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1712.   In 1733 he published Osteographia or the Anatomy of Bones, the first full and accurate description of the anatomy of human skeletal system.

Cheselden retired from St Thomas' in 1738 and moved to the Chelsea Hospital. His abode is listed as "Chelsea College" on the 1739 Royal Charter for the Foundling Hospital, a charity for which he was a founding governor. In 1744 he was elected to the position of Warden of the Company of Barber-Surgeons, and had a role in the separation of the surgeons from the barbers and to the creation of the independent Company of Surgeons in 1745, an organisation that would become later the famous Royal College of Surgeons of England.

He died at Bath in 1752.

Works

Cheselden is famous for the invention of the lateral lithotomy approach to remove bladder stones, which he first performed in 1727 and which had a short duration (minutes instead of hours) and a low mortality rate (less than 10%). Cheselden had already developed in 1723 the suprapubic approach, which he published in 'A Treatise on the High Operation for the Stone.

He also effected a great advance in ophthalmic surgery by his operation of iridectomy, described in 1728, for the treatment of certain forms of blindness by the production of an artificial pupil. Cheselden also described the role of saliva in digestion.

He attended Sir Isaac Newton in his last illness, and was an intimate friend of Alexander Pope and of Sir Hans Sloane.

Source

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
• R.H. Nichols and F A. Wray, The History of the Foundling Hospital (London: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 353.