Frank Nicholls

Frank Nicholls (1699 – 7 January 1778) was a physician. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1728. He was made reader of anatomy at Oxford University when young and moved to London in the 1730s.

The second son of John Nicholls (d. 1714) of Trereife, Cornwall, a barrister, he was born in London. He was educated at Westminster School, and went to Exeter College, Oxford, where he entered 4 March 1714, his tutor being John Haviland. Besides the classics, he studied physics; he graduated B.A. 14 November 1718, M.A. 12 June 1721, M.B. 16 February 1724, M.D. 16 March 1729.

He lectured at Oxford on anatomy, as a reader in the university, before he graduated in medicine. His lectures were well attended, and were mostly devoted to minute anatomy, then seldom taught. He demonstrated the minute structure of blood vessels, showed before the Royal Society experiments proving that the inner and middle coat of an artery could be ruptured while the outer remained entire, and thus made clear the method of formation of chronic aneurysm, which had not before been understood. He noticed that the arteries were supplied with nerves, and pointed out that these probably regulated blood pressure. He was the first to make corroded preparations, in which a particular part of an organ is left prominent after an injection, the surrounding structures being removed piecemeal.

After a short period of practice as a physician in Cornwall, he settled in London. He was elected F.R.S. 1728, and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians 1732. He attended some of Winslow's lectures in France, and saw Giovanni Battista Morgagni and Santorinus in Italy; and on his return began to give anatomical lectures in London. In 1734 he gave the Gulstonian lectures at the College of Physicians, ‘On the Structure of the Heart and the Circulation of the Blood;’ and again in 1736 ‘On the Urinary Organs, with the Causes, Symptoms, and Cure of Stone.’ He delivered the Harveian oration in 1739, and the Lumleian lectures 1748–9, of which the inaugural lecture, ‘De Anima Medica,’ was given 16 December 1748, and was published in 1750 (2nd edit. 1771; 3rd edit. 1773).

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