Samuel Sharp (surgeon)

Samuel Sharp FRS (1709–1778) was an English surgeon and author. As a surgeon at Guy's Hospital, from 1733 to 1757, was internationally famous. His A Treatise on the Operations of Surgery (1st ed., 1739), was the first British study focuses exclusively on operative technique.

He was born about 1709. He was bound apprentice for seven years to William Cheselden, surgeon at St. Thomas's Hospital, on 2 March 1724. He paid £300. when his indentures were signed, the money being found by Elizabeth Sale, a widow living at Hertford. Sharp appears to have spent a part of his apprenticeship in France, where he made the acquaintance of Voltaire, and acquired a knowledge of French surgery which afterwards stood him in good stead. He was admitted a freeman of the Barber-Surgeons' Company on 7 March 1731, obtained his diploma on 4 April 1732, and on 6 June, when he was living in Ingram Court, Fenchurch Street, he was admitted to the Company.

He was elected surgeon to Guy's Hospital on 9 August 1733, the year in which Cheselden published his ‘Osteographia,’ (or anatomy of bones). Sharp is said to have assisted his former master in the preparation of this great work, and Cheselden introduced a portrait of Belchier and Sharp into the frontispiece. Sharp rapidly acquired an extensive practice. In 1746 want of leisure, probably combined with frequent attacks of asthma, led him to resign to William Hunter the ‘course of anatomical lectures, to which were added the operations of surgery, with the application of bandages.’ He had been in the habit of delivering the lectures in Covent Garden on winter afternoons to a society of navy surgeons. Out of these lectures grew Hunter's Great Windmill Street school of medicine, which laid the foundations of modern medical teaching.

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