William Sharpey

William Sharpey (1 April 1802 – 11 April 1880) was a Scottish anatomist and physiologist.

The posthumous son of Henry Sharpy (as he spelt the name) and Mary Balfour, his wife, he was born on 1 April 1802 at Arbroath in Forfarshire; his father, a shipowner, was originally from Folkestone in Kent. He was educated at the public school in Arbroath and entered the University of Edinburgh, in November 1817, to study the humanities and to attend the class of natural philosophy. He began medical studies in 1818, learning anatomy from John Barclay, who then was lecturing in the extra-academical school.

Sharpey was admitted a member of the Edinburgh College of Surgeons in 1821, and he came to London to continue his anatomical work in the private school of Joshua Brookes in Blenheim Street. He went to Paris in the autumn, and remained there for nearly a year, learning clinical surgery from Guillaume Dupuytren in the wards of the Hôtel Dieu, and operative surgery from Jacques Lisfranc de St. Martin. Here he made the acquaintance of James Syme, with whom he kept up a correspondence until Syme's death in 1870.

In August 1823 Sharpey graduated M.D. at Edinburgh with the inaugural thesis De Ventriculi Carcinomate, and then returned to Paris, where he spent most of 1824. He then appears to have settled for a time in Arbroath, where he began to practise under his step-father, Dr. Arrott; but he then set out on a long hike in Europe, by foot through France to Switzerland, and on to Italy. In 1828 he stayed at Padua to work under Bartolomeo Panizza. He was then in Berlin for nine months working under Karl Rudolphi, and after that was at Heidelberg under Friedrich Tiedemann, and at Vienna.

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