James Earle

Sir James Earle (1755-1817) was a British surgeon celebrated for his skill in lithotomy, the operation for removing a stone from the bladder. He was born in London and studied medicine at St Bartholomew's Hospital, where he became assistant surgeon in 1770. When one of the hospital's surgeons was temporarily incapacitated, Earle carried out about a third of its operations between 1776 and 1784, and he was then elected a full surgeon on 22 May 1784, a post he held until 1815. In 1817 he was appointed surgeon-extraordinary to George III. He became a fellow of the Royal Society in March 1794 and was knighted in 1807. He married a daughter of Percivall Pott, the hospital's senior surgeon, and their son Henry Earle also became a surgeon at St Bartholomew's. Earle wrote a memoir of Pott that was attached to Pott's collected works of 1790 and a biography of William Austin, and he published medical works on the hydrocele (1791), on the operation for stone (1793), on a new method of operating for cataract (1801) and on fractures of the lower limbs (1807).