Claudius Amyand (surgeon)

Claudius Amyand (c. 1660 – 6 July 1740) was a French born surgeon who performed the first recorded successful appendectomy.

Amyand was born around 1660, the son of Isaac Amyand and Anne Hottot in Mornac, Saintonge, France. As huguenots, the Amyands fled to England following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 and settled in London.

Claudius was naturalised at Westminster on 9 September 1698. He became a surgeon, served with the army during the War of the Spanish Succession, and was appointed Serjeant Surgeon to George I in 1715. He would continue in this post under George II retaining it for the rest of his life. He became first the Warden and later the Master of the Company of Barber-Surgeons. He was first Principal Surgeon to the Westminster Hospital, and founder and first Principal Surgeon to St George's Hospital. On 5 April 1716 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society under the name Claude Amyand.

In 1722, he inoculated three of the children of the Prince and Princess of Wales against smallpox, following the introduction of the process into the country from Turkey by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

At St George's Hospital, on 6 December 1735, he performed the first recorded successful appendicectomy (which is the surgical removal of the vermiform appendix). The patient was an 11-year boy named Hanvil Anderson who had an inguinal hernia combined with an acutely inflamed appendix. This situation, where the appendix is included in the hernial sac, is known as an Amyand's hernia. Amyand described the operation himself in a paper for the Royal Society.

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