| Authorised form of name | Travers; Benjamin (1783 - 1858); surgeon |
| Dates | 1783 - 1858 |
| Nationality | British |
| Date of birth | 03 April 1783 |
| Place of death | Green Street, Grosvenor Square, London |
| Date of death | 06 March 1858 |
| Dates and places | Burial:
Hendon, Middlesex |
| Occupation | Surgeon |
| Activity | Education:
Cheshunt Grammar School, Hertfordshire; apprenticed to surgeon Sir Astley Cooper FRS (1800-1806); Edinburgh (1807)
Career:
Worked in his father's counting house (c1799); demonstrator, later lecturer, of anatomy, Guy's Hospital, London (1807-1819) with Astley Cooper; Surgeon to the East India Company's warehouses and brigade (1809-1814); Surgeon, London Infirmary for Diseases of the Eye (1810-1816) developing it as a teaching institution and playing an important roll in professionalising optical surgery and opthalmology; Surgeon, St Thomas's Hospital, London (1815-1841); moved into Sir Astley Cooper's former house in Old Broad Street and built up a lucrative medical practice; lecturer in anatomy, with Frederick Tyell, St Thomas's Hospital (1834); Surgeon Extraordinary to Queen Victoria (1837); Surgeon in Ordinary to Prince Albert (1840); held numerous office in the Royal College of Surgeons; died of heart disease
Memberships:
Royal Medico-Chirurgical Society (President 1833); FRCP (President 1856); Hunterian Society (President 1827); FRCS (President 1847, 1856) |
| Membership category | Fellow |
| Date of election | 16/11/1815 |
| Relationships | Son of Benjamin Travers, sugar refiner and Mary Spilsbury, daughter of Reverend Francis Spilsbury
Married (1) Sarah Morgan, daughter of William (1807), (2) Caroline Millet daughter of and East India Compant Director (1813), (3) Mary Poulett daughter of Colonel Stevens of Somerset (1831); brother-in-law of Arthur Morgan (FRS 1835) |
| Published works | Synopsis of the Diseases of the Eye and their Treatment (1820) |
| General context | Awarded part of the compensation for the enslaved people of the Marble Hill estate on Antigua, likely as a trustee of his sister Caroline Ottley nee Travers |
| Sources | Sources:
Bulloch's Roll; DNB; Ancestry; UCL LBS
References:
'Benjamin Travers', Legacies of British Slavery database, http://wwwdepts-live.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/person/view/773 [accessed 9th June 2020].
Obituaries:
Proc Roy Soc 1857-1859 vol 9 pp 551-555 |
| Virtual International Authority File | http://viaf.org/viaf/74635248 |
| Royal Society code | NA1502 |
Archives associated with this Fellow
| Reference number | Title | Date |
| IM/004638 | Travers, Benjamin | nd |
| NLB/57/887 | Copy letter from Sir James Hopwood Jeans, Secretary of the Royal Society; to Dr Morris W [William] Travers, FRS | 27 February 1920 |
| EC/1815/07 | Travers, Benjamin: certificate of election to the Royal Society | |
| AP/8A/18 | Unpublished paper, 'Observations on the mechanism by which the eyes adapted to the vision of objects at different distances' by Benj [Benjamin] Travers | [1815] |
| RR/1/83 | Referee's reports by Benjamin Travers and John Forbes Royle, on a paper 'Observations on the blood-corpuscles of certain species of the genus cervus' by George Gulliver | [1837] |