Joseph Henry Green

Joseph Henry Green (1 November 1791 – 13 December 1863) was an English surgeon who became the literary executor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Green was the only son of Joseph Green, a prosperous merchant, and was born at the house over his father's office in London Wall. His mother was Frances Cline, sister of Henry Cline, the surgeon. At the age of fifteen he went to Germany and studied for three years, his mother accompanying him. He was then apprenticed at the College of Surgeons to his uncle, Henry Cline, and followed the practice at St. Thomas's Hospital. While still a pupil he married, on 25 May 1813, Anne Eliza Hammond, daughter of a surgeon, and sister of a class-fellow.

On 1 December 1815 he received the diploma of the College of Surgeons, and set up in surgical practice in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where he remained until his retirement to the country. In 1813 he had been appointed demonstrator of anatomy (unpaid) at St. Thomas's Hospital. In the autumn of 1817 he went to Berlin to take a private course of instruction in philosophy with Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, to whom he had been recommended by Ludwig Tieck in London. He had already met Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who came to meet Tieck more than once at Green's house.

In 1820 he was elected surgeon to St. Thomas's Hospital, on the death of his cousin, Henry Cline the younger. In 1824 he became professor of anatomy at the College of Surgeons, delivering four annual courses of twelve lectures on comparative anatomy, using the textbook of Carl Gustav Carus. In 1825 he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. In the same year he became professor of anatomy to the Royal Academy, then located at Somerset House, where he lectured a year on anatomy in its relation to the fine arts. He retired from this post in 1852. From 1818 he had shared the lectureship first on anatomy and then on surgery at St. Thomas's with Sir Astley Cooper, who retired in 1825, and wished to assign his share of the lectures to his two nephews, Bransby Cooper and Charles Aston Key. Green, who had paid Cooper £1,000 for his own half share, acquiesced, but the hospital authorities did not, whereupon Sir Astley started lectures in connection with Guy's Hospital, which had up to that time sent its pupils to the medical school of St. Thomas's.

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