Frederick Treve's first surgical operation for appendicitis

Abstract

Sir Frederick Treves, baronet (1853–1923), surgeon and author, was born at 108 Cornhill, Dorchester, Dorset, on 15 February 1853, the youngest son of William Treves, an upholsterer, and his wife, Jane (1814–1892). He attended Dorchester Grammar School and then Merchant Taylors' School in the City of London. He read medicine at the London Hospital, where, among others, John Hughlings Jackson and Jonathan Hutchinson taught him. In 1875 he qualified as a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons, having in the previous year become a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries. After a job as House Surgeon at the London Hospital, he became Resident Medical Officer at the Royal National Hospital for Scrofula (later the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital) at Margate in 1876, to which his brother William (Frederick's senior by 10 years) was Honorary Surgeon. His research on scrofula, the origin of which puzzled him, would be published as a book entitled Scrofula and its Gland Diseases in 1882, the very same year that Robert Koch demonstrated that it was due to a bacillus.