Benjamin Bell

Benjamin Bell of Hunthill was a Scottish surgeon, born at Dumfries in 1749 and dead in 1806, who is considered the first Scottish scientific surgeon and is commonly described as the father of the Edinburgh school of surgery. The eldest surviving of fifteen children of a Dumfriesshire farmer, he was apprenticed to a surgeon in Dumfries, studied at Edinburgh from 1766 under teachers including Alexander Monro secundus and Joseph Black, and visited London and Paris. He was elected one of the attendant surgeons of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in his early twenties and remained one for eighteen years. His textbook A System of Surgery became a best seller across Europe and America, his treatise on venereal disease was an early work suggesting that syphilis and gonorrhea were different diseases, and his adage of saving skin improved wound healing in mastectomy and amputation. He was also an early advocate of routine pain relief in surgery.