John Obadiah Justamond

John Obadiah Justamond was an Anglo-French surgeon and writer who lived from 1737 to 1786. A Huguenot, he began in 1754 as a surgical pupil at the Middlesex Hospital and from 1770 served as surgeon to Westminster Hospital, where he had a reputation as a reformer and for palliation and cures of cancers. He also acted as surgeon to the 2nd Regiment of the Dragoon Guards and was a Fellow of the Royal Society. His medical writings included notes on chirurgical cases, published anonymously in 1773, and his case notes on cancer, which describe the use of arsenic internally and externally, passed into the later literature. He also worked as a translator, and as a deputy keeper at the British Museum, a post he lost in 1778 after falling into debt.