Henry Cline

Henry Cline (1750 to 1827) was an English surgeon of the generation that followed John Hunter, remembered both for his teaching and for his leadership of the surgical profession in London. Born in London and schooled at Merchant Taylors', he was apprenticed at seventeen to Thomas Smith, a surgeon at St Thomas's Hospital, and lectured on anatomy there before succeeding Smith as surgeon to the hospital in 1784. He took the diploma of Surgeons' Hall in 1774 and was strongly influenced by Hunter's lectures. After the surgeons were incorporated by charter as the Royal College of Surgeons in 1800, he served the college as examiner, then master, and from 1823 as president. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1806 and was president of the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London in 1815. Outside medicine he was a political radical who admired the French Revolution, and a keen but unprofitable farmer.