Frederick Treves

Sir Frederick Treves, 1st Baronet, GCVO, CH, CB (15 February 1853 – 7 December 1923) was a prominent British surgeon of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, now most famous for his friendship with Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man.

Life
Treves was the son of an upholsterer in Dorchester, Dorset. As a small boy, he attended the school run by the Dorset dialect poet, William Barnes. He became a surgeon, specialising in abdominal surgery, at the London Hospital in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Treves performed the first appendectomy in England, on 29 June 1888.

He married Ann Elizabeth Mason in 1877.

Around 1886 Treves brought Joseph Carey Merrick, also known as the Elephant Man, to the London Hospital where Merrick lived until his death in April 1890. Treves' reminiscences mistakenly names Joseph Merrick as John Merrick, an error widely recirculated by other biographers of Joseph Merrick.

During the Second Boer War (1899-1902), Treves volunteered to work at a field hospital in South Africa treating the wounded. He later published works of his experiences in The Tale of a Field Hospital, as the basis of articles written at the time for the British Medical Journal.

In May 1901, Treves was appointed Serjeant Surgeon to King Edward VII. The coronation of the new king was scheduled for 26 June, but on 24 June, Edward was diagnosed with appendicitis. Treves, with the support of Lord Lister, performed a then-radical operation of draining the infected appendix through a small incision. This was at a time when appendicitis was generally not treated operatively and carried a high mortality rate. The King had opposed surgery for this reason but Treves insisted, stating that if he was not permitted to operate, there would instead be a funeral. The next day, Edward was sitting up in bed, smoking a cigar.

Treves was honoured with a baronetcy (which Edward had arranged before the operation) and appendix surgery entered the medical mainstream. He was granted the use of Thatched House Lodge in Richmond Park and was subsequently able to take early retirement.

Treves was also the author of many books, including The Elephant Man and other reminiscences (1923), Surgically Applied Anatomy (1883), The Highways and Byways of Dorset (the area of Britain in which he was born), A Students Handbook of Surgical Operations (1892), Uganda for a Holiday, The Land That is Desolate, and The Cradle of the Deep (1908). This last volume is an account of his travels in and among the West Indies interspersed with portions of their histories; describing (among other things) the death of Blackbeard the pirate, an eruption of Mount Pelée (which destroyed the city of St. Pierre, Martinique), and a powerful earthquake at Kingston, Jamaica, at which he landed shortly after the event. From 1902 to 1910 he was Serjeant Surgeon to the Royal Household. He was also a founder of the British Red Cross, and was the first president of the Society of Dorset Men.

Around 1920 Sir Frederick went to live in Switzerland where he died in Lausanne on 7 December 1923 at the age of 70. He died from peritonitis, which, ironically, in the days before antibiotics commonly resulted from a ruptured appendix. His funeral took place at St Peter's church, Dorchester on 2 January 1924 and the king and queen were represented by Lord Dawson. His lifelong friend Thomas Hardy attended and chose the hymns. Hardy also wrote a poem for the occasion and had it published in The Times. It started with the words: “In the evening, when the world knew he was dead”. His ashes were buried in Dorchester (Fordington) cemetery.

In the David Lynch film The Elephant Man, Treves is played by Sir Anthony Hopkins. The English actor Frederick Treves, Sir Frederick Treves' great-nephew, plays the character of Alderman.