Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 61.djvu/39

  a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of England on 2 Sept. 1803. He was elected an assistant-surgeon to the Westminster Hospital on 24 July 1806, surgeon on 24 April 1823, and consulting surgeon on 23 Dec. 1846. At the College of Surgeons he was elected a member of the council on 6 Sept. 1827, and two years later, 10 Sept. 1829, he was appointed a member of the court of examiners in succession to William Wadd [q. v.] In 1831 he delivered the Hunterian oration (unpublished), and he became vice-president in 1832 and again in 1840, serving the office of president in 1834 and 1842. He also filled the office of surgeon to the Royal Society of Musicians.

White suffered severely from gout in his later years, and died at his house in Parliament Street on 9 March 1849. As a surgeon he is remarkable because he was the first to excise the head of the femur for disease of the hip-joint, a proceeding then considered to be so heroic that Sir Anthony Carlisle and Sir William Blizard threatened to report him to the College of Surgeons. He performed the operation with complete success, and sent the patient to call upon his opponents. His besetting sin was unpunctuality, and he often entirely forgot his appointments, yet he early acquired a large and lucrative practice.

White published: 1. ‘Treatise on the Plague,’ &c., London, 1846, 8vo. 2. ‘An Enquiry into the Proximate Cause of Gout, and its Rational Treatment,’ London, 1848, 8vo; 2nd edit. 1848; American edit. New York, 1852, 8vo.

A three-quarter-length portrait in oils by T. F. Dicksee, engraved by W. Walker, was published on 20 Aug. 1852. A likeness by Simpson is in the board-room of the Westminster Hospital.

 WHITE, BLANCO (1775-1841), divine and author. [See .]

WHITE, CHARLES (1728–1813), surgeon, only son of Thomas White (1696–1776), a physician, and Rosamond his wife, was born at Manchester on 4 Oct. 1728 and educated there by the Rev. Radcliffe Russel. At an early age he was taken under his father's tuition, and subsequently studied medicine in London, where he had John Hunter as a fellow-student and friend, and afterwards in Edinburgh. Returning to Manchester, he joined his father, and in 1752 was instrumental, along with Joseph Bancroft, merchant, in founding the Manchester Infirmary, in which hospital he gave his services as surgeon for thirty-eight years. On 18 Feb. 1762 he was admitted fellow of the Royal Society and member of the Corporation (now the Royal College) of Surgeons. In 1781 he took an active part in the foundation of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and was one of its first vice-presidents. In 1783 he shared in the formation of a college of science, literature, and art, in which he and his son, Thomas White, lectured on anatomy. These were the first of such lectures in Manchester, and, it is believed, in the provinces. In conjunction with his son, and with the assistance of Edward and Richard Hall, he founded in 1790 the Manchester Lying-in Hospital, now St. Mary's Hospital, and was consulting surgeon there for twenty-one years.

White was equally accomplished in the three departments of medicine, surgery, and midwifery, and was the first to introduce what is known as ‘conservative’ surgery. In 1768 he removed the head of the humerus for caries; in 1769 he first proposed excision of the hip, and was one of the first to practise excision of the shoulder-joint. He was also the first to describe accurately ‘white leg’ in lying-in women. He was widely known for his successful operations in lithotomy, but especially for the revolution he effected in the practice of midwifery, which he rescued from semi-barbarism and placed on a rational and humane basis.

De Quincey, in his ‘Autobiography’ (ed. Masson, i. 383), has an interesting personal sketch of White, whom he styles ‘the most eminent surgeon by much in the north of England,’ and gives a description of his museum of three hundred anatomical preparations, the greater part of which he presented to St. Mary's Hospital, Manchester, in 1808. A large portion was destroyed at a fire there in February 1847.

White had an attack of epidemic ophthalmia in 1803, which ended in blindness in 1812. He died at his country house at Sale in the parish of Ashton-on-Mersey, Cheshire, on 20 Feb. 1813. In the church of Ashton-on-Mersey a monument to him and several members of his family was afterwards erected.

He married, on 22 Nov. 1757, Ann, daughter of John Bradshaw, and had eight children. His second son, Thomas, who died in 1793, was a physician, and appears as one of the characters in Thomas Wilson's ‘Lancashire Bouquet’ (Chetham Soc. vol. xiv.). Thomas's son John was high sheriff of Cheshire in 1823, and was famous for his fox-hunting and equestrian exploits.

A good portrait of White was painted by J. Allen and engraved by William Ward. 