William Cheselden

William Cheselden

William Cheselden (1688 - 1752) Famous English surgeon and anatomist, responsible for establishing surgery as a separate profession from the former barber-surgeons. He played an important role in the creation of the Company of Surgeons, which was to later become the Royal College of Surgeons of England. As an anatomist, Cheseldon wrote two highly acclaimed and popular books on human anatomy and osteology. He performed the first known surgical cure for blindness. He also created the lateral lithotomy procedure for bladder stone extraction, for which he was very famous, taking only 30-90 seconds to perform the entire removal operation. Cheselden is also credited with the first iridectomy operation, which he used to cure certain forms of blindness by creating an artificial pupil. He also described the role of saliva in digestion, and held that digestion was not a mere mechanical process of grinding, but also of chemical reactions. Cheselden attended Sir Issac Newton on his last illness and was a friend of the famous poet Alexander Pope and Sir Hans Sloane, physician and collector, whose collections were to later become the British Museum.