Record

Authorised form of nameTravers; Benjamin (1783 - 1858); surgeon
Dates1783 - 1858
NationalityBritish
Date of birth03 April 1783
Place of deathGreen Street, Grosvenor Square, London
Date of death06 March 1858
Dates and placesBurial:
Hendon, Middlesex
OccupationSurgeon
ActivityEducation:
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 categoryFellow
Date of election16/11/1815
RelationshipsSon 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 worksSynopsis of the Diseases of the Eye and their Treatment (1820)
General contextAwarded 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
SourcesSources:
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 Filehttp://viaf.org/viaf/74635248
Royal Society codeNA1502
Archives associated with this Fellow
Reference numberTitleDate
IM/004638Travers, Benjaminnd
NLB/57/887Copy letter from Sir James Hopwood Jeans, Secretary of the Royal Society; to Dr Morris W [William] Travers, FRS27 February 1920
EC/1815/07Travers, Benjamin: certificate of election to the Royal Society
AP/8A/18Unpublished paper, 'Observations on the mechanism by which the eyes adapted to the vision of objects at different distances' by Benj [Benjamin] Travers[1815]
RR/1/83Referee'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]
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