Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 51.djvu/426

 honorary member of the Imperial Academy at Vienna and of the Royal Academy at Munich.

In his younger days Sharp was a republican and a friend of Thomas Paine and Horne Tooke. He became a member of the Society for Constitutional Information, and in consequence was involved in the proceedings taken against Horne Tooke. He was examined on treasonable charges before the privy council, but dismissed without punishment as a harmless enthusiast. After becoming a convert to the views of Mesmer and Swedenborg, the religious opinions of Jacob Bryan and Richard Brothers engaged his attention, and he engraved Brothers as ‘Prince of the Hebrews,’ with rays of light descending on his head. When Brothers was confined at Islington as a lunatic, Sharp became a staunch adherent of Joanna Southcott, whom he brought from Exeter to London and maintained at his own expense for a considerable time. He was the last of her followers to admit the reality of her death, and he never lost faith in her divine mission nor expectation of her reappearance. Sharp died at Chiswick on 25 July 1824, and was buried in the parish churchyard. His portrait was painted by George Francis Joseph, and engraved by himself. Another portrait, engraved by Thomson, is prefixed to his memoir in the ‘European Magazine.’

Sharp was the author of ‘An Answer to the World for putting in print a book called Copies and Parts of Copies of Letters and Communications written from Joanna Southcote,’ London, 1806, 8vo. There is a large collection of his engravings in the British Museum.

A three-quarter length portrait, in oils, by [q. v.], is in the National Portrait Gallery, London.



SHARP, WILLIAM (1805–1896), physician, third son and fifth child of Richard Sharp, merchant, and Mary Turton, his wife, was born at Armley, near Leeds, on 21 Jan. 1805. His family had lived in that neighbourhood and at Horton, near Bradford, for several generations. One member of it was [q. v.], the archbishop of York; another was [q. v.], the astronomer and mathematician. William Sharp was educated at Wakefield grammar school from 1813 to 1816, under the supervision of his uncle, Samuel Sharp, vicar of the parish, and he was afterwards sent to Westminster school, where he remained from 1817 to 1820. He was articled in 1821 to his uncle, William Sharp, a leading surgeon at Bradford, and he subsequently served a part of his apprenticeship to his uncle's cousin, the second William Hey of Leeds. He went to London on the completion of his indentures to attend the lectures and the practice at the united borough hospitals. In 1826 he obtained the license of the Society of Apothecaries, and in 1827 he was admitted a member of the College of Surgeons of England. He proceeded to Paris, as was then the fashion for the better class of newly qualified medical men. After a year he returned to Bradford to assist his uncle, the surgeon, to whose practice he succeeded in 1833. He was elected a surgeon to the Bradford infirmary in 1829, and became its senior surgeon in 1837; at the same time he conducted for many years the largest general practice in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

A natural bent for science, fostered by his education at the Sorbonne, led him to establish the Bradford Philosophical Society, of which he was the first president. In 1839 he read an important paper at the Birmingham meeting of the British Association, in which he advocated the formation of local museums, each collection being limited to objects of interest belonging to the town in which it was formed. This paper led to his election as fellow of the Royal Society on 7 May 1840.

He left Bradford in 1843 and lived at Hull for the succeeding four years, practising his profession, and giving two winter courses of lectures on chemistry at the Hull and East Riding school of medicine. After spending some time in travel, he removed to Rugby, so that his sons might attend the school there. Dr. Tait was then headmaster. At Rugby Sharp's energy in the promotion of science led to the establishment of science teaching as an integral part of the curriculum of the Rugby school, and Sharp was appointed in 1849 its ‘reader in natural philosophy.’ He resigned the post in 1850, to devote himself more exclusively to medical investigations. At the suggestion of his friend, Dr. Ramsbotham of Leeds, he studied homœopathy, and two years later adopted the methods of homœopathists. He acted in 1873 as president of the British homœopathic congress at Leamington, but further experimental researches carried him to a point of view accepted by few of Hahneman's disciples. In his discovery at last of the opposite actions of large and small doses of the same drug, he