The life of a surgeon in the 1800s was a busy one, filled with challenges. Brothers Francis, William and Philip Toms trained and worked in different spheres of the medical profession from the 1820s.

Francis, the eldest of the brothers, worked as a chemist and druggist until his death in Cornwall at the age of 41. Youngest brother Philip became an apothecary and surgeon. He joined the Royal Navy and travelled the world, becoming amongst other things Surgeon Superintendent on convict ships including the Maitland, Prince Regent (II), and Waverley. In his mid-forties he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England (FRCS), just a couple of years after this qualification was first created. He retired in his late seventies.

William, my 4x great-grandfather, was admitted as a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries (LSA) in 1819 and as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh (MRCSE) in 1820. He tended to patients from his practice in Fore Street, Kingsbridge, in his home county of Devon. One of the apprentices taken under his wing was his nephew, Francis junior, who went on to become a surgeon in the Royal Navy, and later the Deputy Inspector General of Hospitals and Fleets. As was the norm for surgeons at the time, William dealt with a broad range of conditions and situations.

Newspapers reported medical cases of interest, particularly where there was a sensational element. One such case William attended was a a 17-year-old girl, pregnant and unmarried, who attempted suicide by arsenic poisoning. William administered a strong antidote, but it’s unknown whether or not the girl survived.

Another serious situation was an 1835 quarry accident in which a man’s foot and leg were crushed and broken by a huge stone described as weighing almost a ton. William performed an amputation of the leg from below the knee, in an attempt to save the man’s life. A week afterwards the newspaper said the man was “doing perfectly well”.

Ether wasn’t available for that amputation, but William was an early proponent of it as an anaesthetic, using it during extraction of “an enormous tooth” in February 1847. This was reported as the “first operation with sulphuric ether, which has been tried in Kingsbridge”. It was only a couple of months after the first use of ether in Britain.

The attitude to mental health was extremely different in the nineteenth century, and circumstances often saw people admitted to hospital. A case study from the Devon County Mental Hospital describes William examining and providing a medical certificate for admission of a female patient. What’s of particular interest to me is not just the social and medical circumstances of the case, but also seeing his signature.

What must surely have been his most unusual and difficult case occurred in 1824, in the early years of his career. William and another surgeon attended the birth near Kingsbridge of conjoined twin boys, born to the Masters family. Although the babies didn’t survive, the mother did. A difficult and extraordinary experience for a doctor even today.

William Toms spent more than thirty years working as a surgeon in his local community. He died of pleurisy at Barnfield, his home in Kingsbridge, at the age of 55.

Selected references

Royal College of Surgeons of England, ‘Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows’, https://livesonline.rcseng.ac.uk/client/en_GB/lives, accessed 7 January 2024.

‘Determined Attempt at Self-Destruction’, Yorkshire Gazette, 21 August 1847, p. 4, FindMyPast.co.uk, accessed 24 February 2021.

‘Melancholy Accident’, Bolton Chronicle, 15 August 1835, p. 2, FindMyPast.co.uk, accessed 24 February 2021.

‘Inhalation of Ether’, Western Times, 27 February 1847, p.5, FindMyPast.co.uk, accessed 24 February 2021.

‘Extraordinary Birth’, Stamford Mercury, 20 February 1824, p. 4, FindMyPast.co.uk, accessed 30 July 2019.

Devon County Mental Hospital, ‘Case Study I (1845-1889)’, https://dcmh.exeter.ac.uk/case-studies/case-study-i-1845-1889/, accessed 26 February 2021.

Royal College of Anaesthetists, ‘The History of Anaesthesia’, https://www.rcoa.ac.uk/about-college/heritage/history-anaesthesia, accessed 8 January 2024.

Royal College of Surgeons England, ‘History of the RCS’, https://www.rcseng.ac.uk/about-the-rcs/history-of-the-rcs/, accessed 8 January 2024.

‘Deputy Inspector-General Francis Yeates Toms’, British Medical Journal, vol. 2 (3230), 25 November 1922, p. 1051, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2417158/.