Sampson Gamgee

Joseph Sampson Gamgee (1828 to 1886), known as Sampson Gamgee, was a surgeon at the Queen's Hospital, later the General Hospital, in Birmingham, England. Born in Livorno in the Grand Duchy of Tuscany to a veterinary surgeon father, he studied at the Royal Veterinary College in London and then at University College Hospital, where his classmate and lodging companion was Joseph Lister. After serving as a surgeon in the British-Italian Legion during the Crimean War he took up his Birmingham post in 1857. He pioneered aseptic surgery and in 1880 invented Gamgee Tissue, an absorbent cotton wool and gauze surgical dressing. In 1873 he founded the Birmingham Hospital Saturday Fund, the first fund to raise money this way for several hospitals at once, and he was the first president of the Birmingham Medical Institute. He retired from hospital life in 1881 and died of Bright's disease in Birmingham in 1886.