Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 10.djvu/200

 Copland is prefixed, in which Chertsey is stated to have translated many other books

in volumes large and fayre From French in prose of goostly exemplayre.

Two of these volumes Copland describes as dealing with 'The Sevyn Sacraments,' another was entitled 'Of Christen men the ordinary,' and a fourth 'The craft to lyve well and to dye.' Of this last work alone is anything now known. Caxton printed a book with the same title about 1491, consisting of translated extracts from a French work, and this translation was due to Caxton himself. But in 1506 Wynkyn de Worde published a complete translation of the same French work, and for this Chertsey was doubtless responsible. Warton states that George Ashby (d. 1475) [q. v.] was probably the author of some of the books ascribed by Copland to Chertsey, but decisive evidence is altogether wanting.

[Tanner's Bibl. Brit. p. 175; Warton's Hist. of English Poetry, iv. 756; Bullen's Brit. Mus. Cat. of books before 1640.]  CHESELDEN, WILLIAM (1688–1752), surgeon and anatomist, was born on 19 Oct. 1688 at Somerby, near Burrow-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire. It is conjectured by Nichols (Lit. Anecd. viii. 414) that he was apprenticed to a Mr. Wilkes, surgeon, of Leicester, but he was certainly in 1703 a pupil in London of William Cowper, the ceibbrated anatomist. Either then or soon after he was apprenticed to Mr. Ferne, surgeon to St. Thomas’s Hospital. Cheselden’s progress as an anatomist was rapid, for in 711 (two years after Cowper’s death) we find from his printed syllabus that he was already a lecturer on anatomy. His course consisted of thirty-five lectures, and was repeated four times in the year. In 1714 he was called to account by the Company of Barber-Surgeons for dissecting the bodies of malefactors in his own house without permission of the company, but on making his submission was excused. The lectures were accordingly continued, first in Cheselden's own house, and afterwards at St. Thomas’s Ilospital, for twenty years.

Cheselden was a candidate for the post of surgeon to St. Thomas’s on two occasions, in 1714-15, before he was successful; but on 9 July 1718 he was appointed assistant- surgeon, and on 8 April 1719 was elected without opposition one of the principal surgeons in place of William Dickenson, deceased. The newly appointed surgeon continued lecturing on anatomy, and also applied himself to operative surgery. He was perhaps led particularly to pay attention to the operation for the stone because his master, Ferne, was one of the surgeons specially licensed to perform this operation in the hospital ; this license being not granted, as a matter of course, to all the surgeons.

In 1723 Cheselden published a ‘Treatise on the High Operation for the Stone,’ in which, after describing his own method, he reprints the accounts of the operation written by several of his predecessors. Notwithstanding these candid acknowle ents, the book drew upon Cheselden a violent attack in a pamphlet entitled ‘Lithotomus Castratus’ (London, 1723, 8vo), anonvmous, but believed to have been written by John Douglas, a surgeon and rival anatomical teacher, formerly a pupil at St. Thomas’s, who had just before written a work on the same operation and performed it with success ‘Lithotomia Douglassiana, a New Method of Cutting for the Stone,’ London, 1723, 4to). The complaint was that Cheselden had plagiarised from Douglas, but the latter’s merits were so fully acknowledged in Cheselden’s preface that the attack seems uncalled for, and was probably due to some personal pique. The dispute was of the less consequence as Cheselden shortly afterwards gave up this operation, and adopted that by which he is best known. A great surgical operation is seldom the invention of one mind only. That which made Chewlden famous was based upon one invented and practised (with terrible want of success) by a friar, Frere Jacques, in Paris, and afterwards improved by Rau, a professor at Leyden, but as modified by Cheseden into his so-called ‘lateral operation for the stone’ was virtually a new invention. It was brought by him to such perfection of detail as has hardly been improved upon up to the present day, and to have invented this alone would be enough to make the name of Cheselden a landmark in the history of surgery. He executed it with extraordinary skill and brilliancy, and with a degree of success which, even with the aid of modern improvements, has hardly been surpassed. This classical operation was first performed on 27 March 1727. It soon became famous throughout Europe, and distinguished surgeons, from Paris among other places, came over (either of their own accord or in commission from some learned body) to become acquainted with Cheselden’s method. A full account of it is given in Dr. James Douglas’s ‘Appendix to the Ilistory of the Lateral Operation for the Stone, containing Mr. Cheselden's Method' (London. 1731).

In 1712 Cheselden sent a short note to the Royal Society (xxvii. 436) giving an account of some human bones of an extraordinary size contained in a Roman urn dug up at St.