John Gay (surgeon)


John Gay was an English surgeon.

Life

Gay was born at Wellington, Somerset. After a successful studentship at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, London, he became a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1834, and in 1836 was appointed surgeon to the newly established Royal Free Hospital, with which he was connected for 18 years. In 1856 he became surgeon of the Great Northern Hospital, of which he was senior surgeon at the time of his death in 1885, after two years' partial paralysis. He left a widow, one daughter, and two sons.

Works

Gay wrote some substantive practical memoirs:
The 1848 work on femoral rupture described a new mode of operating, modified from that of John Luke. He also advocated and successfully practised the free incision of acutely suppurating joints, which came into general use. He contributed many papers to the medical journals and transactions of societies, wrote for the medical press, and was author of a detailed article on "Cleft Palate" in William Birmingham Costello's Cyclopædia of Surgery.