into the frontispiece. Sharp rapidly acquired an extensive practice. In 1746 want of leisure, probably combined with frequent attacks of asthma, led him to resign to William Hunter the ‘course of anatomical lectures, to which were added the operations of surgery, with the application of bandages.’ He had been in the habit of delivering the lectures in Covent Garden on winter afternoons to a society of navy surgeons. Out of these lectures grew Hunter's Great Windmill Street school of medicine, which laid the foundations of modern medical teaching. Sharp paid a second visit to Paris in 1749, and was elected a member of the Paris Royal Society, having been made a fellow of the Royal Society of London on 13 April 1749. The direct outcome of this journey was ‘A Critical Enquiry into the Present State of Surgery,’ published in 1754, a work which gives an interesting account of the contemporary practice of surgery, especially in French schools.
Sharp resigned his appointment at Guy's Hospital on 23 Sept. 1757 on the ground of ill-health; but he continued to practise until 1765, when he set out on a winter tour through Italy. The results were published in his plain-speaking ‘Letters from Italy,’ which appeared in August 1766. Dr. Johnson thought ‘there was a great deal of matter in them.’ The publication of a second edition in 1767 called forth Baretti's ‘Account of the Manners and Customs of Italy,’ an acrid criticism of Sharp's views. It was answered by Sharp in ‘A View of the Customs, Manners, Drama, &c., of Italy, as they are described in the “Frusta Litteraria,”’ London, 8vo, 1768. Sharp died on 24 March 1778.
‘Sharp,’ says Sir James Paget, ‘was a thoroughly informed surgeon, well read, observant, judicious, a lover of simplicity, wisely doubtful. I think, too, he must have been an eminently safe man, who might be relied on for knowing or doing whatever, in his time, could be known or done for the good of his patients. In this view, I believe he was as good a surgeon as Hunter; but there is nothing in his books that can justly be called pathology, nor any sign of a really scientific method of study. They contain the practice, not the principles, of surgery.’ Sharp's work attracted much notice upon the continent, and he is interesting as the immediate link connecting the old with modern surgery. Cheselden was his master; Hunter, if not actually his pupil, learnt from him by tradition. Among other improvements in surgical instruments introduced by Sharp, he is said to have been the first to suggest that the barrel of a trephine should be conical.
Besides the ‘Letters from Italy,’ Sharp published: 1. ‘A Treatise on the Operations of Surgery,’ London, 1739; 2nd edit. 1739; 3rd edit. 1740; 4th edit. 1743; 6th edit. 1751; 8th edit. 1761; 10th edit. 1782; French translation by A. F. Jault, Paris, 1741. 2. ‘A Critical Enquiry into the Present State of Surgery,’ London, 8vo, 1750; 2nd edit. 1750; 3rd edit. 1754; 4th edit. 1761; translated into French 1751, into Spanish 1753, into German 1756, and Italian 1774. This book, written clearly and in good English, contains thirteen short chapters upon hernia, lithotomy, amputations, concussion of the brain, tumours of the gall-bladder, extirpation of the tonsils, hydrocele, and a few other matters. To the ‘Philosophical Transactions’ Sharp contributed two papers in 1753 on ‘A New Method of Opening the Cornea in order to Extract the Crystalline Humour,’ and in 1754 a paper ‘On the Styptic Powers of Agaric.’
[The manuscript records at the Barber-Surgeons' Hall, by the kind permission of the master, Sidney Young, esq., F.S.A.; Wilks and Bettany's Biographical Dictionary of Guy's Hospital; Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill; additional facts kindly given to the author by Dr. Wilks, F.R.S.; Paget's Hunterian Oration, 1877; Hutchinson's Address in Surgery in the British Medical Journal, 1895, ii. 273.]
SHARP, SAMUEL (1814–1882), geologist and antiquary, son of Stephen Sharp and Anna Maria Bloor of Uppingham, was born on 18 July 1814 at Romsey in Hampshire. While still young he lost his father; his mother then removed to Stamford in Lincolnshire, and married the proprietor and editor of the ‘Stamford Mercury.’ Sharp, who for a considerable time aided his stepfather in conducting this newspaper, soon began to study geology. In 1857 he went to live near Northampton, where he continued his scientific work and increased his collection of fossils. He published two very valuable papers on the Northamptonshire oolites in the ‘Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society’ (xxvi. 354, xxix. 225), besides a few of minor interest, and a useful textbook, ‘Rudiments of Geology’ (1875), a second and enlarged edition being published in the following year. He was also a diligent student of local antiquities, formed a valuable collection of the coins minted at Stamford, and described them in the ‘Journal of the Numismatic Society.’ He was a fellow of that society, of the Society of Antiquaries, and from 1862 of the Geological Society. He married, in 1846, Caroline Ann Weldon, and died without issue on 28 Jan.
