William Cheselden

In the late seventeenth century, when William Cheselden was born, life expectancy was around thirty-nine years, infant mortality high and medical treatment variable. The wealthy would employ Physicians, proficient in Latin and accredited by Oxford or Cambridge Universities with the Royal College of Physicians later founded in 1518. Surgeons and Barbers attended to the afflictions of the masses and learned their skills through apprenticeships. Surgeons addressed a wide variety of issues from lacerations to setting fractured bones with the most skilled performing amputations, trepanations (drilling into the skull) and delivering babies. Barbers usually worked alongside monks who were prohibited from ‘spilling blood’ and preformed minor procedures such as lancing and leeching in addition to shaving and cutting hair and nails. In 1540 Henry VIII merged the Fellowship of Surgeons and Guild of Barbers into the Company of Barber-Surgeons; from that time Barbers could not perform surgery as the case in some countries and Surgeons could not cut hair although both could extract teeth.

As a teenager Cheselden was apprenticed to a local Leicestershire surgeon and then at fifteen apprenticed to one at St. Thomas’s Hospital at a point when the institution was known as ‘a hotbed of corruption’. By the age of twenty-two, he established a course of thirty five lectures in anatomy, comparative anatomy and physiology; the following year he published his first medical treatise in English and in 1719 was elected a principal surgeon. An immensely talented and careful surgeon with a relatively low mortality rate at less than 10%, he earned fame at home and abroad and in 1727 was appointed surgeon to Queen Caroline.

 

In 1733 Cheselden published his most celebrated work Osteographia, Or The Anatomy Of The Bones, an atlas of the bones that was the most significant, accurate and beautiful depiction of the human skeleton of its time. The majority of the etchings were expertly engraved by the London engraver Gerard Vandergucht but cost an extraordinary £1000 to produce and less than 100 of 300 printed were initially sold. Eventually Osteographia would become an essential work for surgical study running to some 39 editions.

 

In his later years, Cheselden focused on reforming surgical practise particularly as regarded the Barber-Surgeons and in 1744 the company separated. During his time with the new Company of Surgeons, he improved the practice of surgery, the education of surgeons and care of patients in hospitals but it would not be until almost a half century after his death that the Royal College of Surgeons was created. Through his extraordinary talent and individual endeavour Cheselden was one of the first ‘modern’ surgical pioneers and his Osteographia a testament to both the Art and Science of his time.