Background
Amyand was born around 1680, the son of Isaac Amyand and Anne Hottot in Mornac, Saintonge, France.
Amyand was born around 1680, the son of Isaac Amyand and Anne Hottot in Mornac, Saintonge, France.
Claudius was naturalised at Westminster on 9 September 1698. He became a surgeon, served with the army during the War of the Spanish Succession, and was appointed Serjeant Surgeon to George I in 1715. He would continue in this post under George II retaining it for the rest of his life.
He became first the Warden and later the Master of the Company of Barber-Surgeons.
On 5 April 1716 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society under the name Claude Amyand. In 1722, he inoculated three of the children of the Prince and Princess of Wales against smallpox, following the introduction of the process into the country from Turkey by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.
At Street George"s Hospital, on 6 December 1735, he performed the first recorded successful appendicectomy (which is the surgical removal of the vermiform appendix). The patient was an 11-year boy named Hanvil Anderson who had an inguinal hernia combined with an acutely inflamed appendix.
This situation, where the appendix is included in the hernial sac, is known as an Amyand"s hernia.
Amyand described the operation himself in a paper for the Royal Society. Amyand"s work soon sunk into obscurity, and various candidates were vying for the accolade of having performed the first appendicectomy in the 1880s, unaware that Amyand predated them by 150 years. lieutenant was only careful research by John Blair Deaver in the early Twentieth Century that restored Amyand the cr he deserved.
As biographer P. G. Creese put it: "Claudius Amyand was not a man of genius, but one of solid worth who merits a nod of recognition from medical history, too long denied to him."
Amyand died in London on 7 July 1740, after a fall in Greenwich Park.
Claudius Amyand (1718-1774)
Anne Amyand (1719-1766), married John Porter
Sir George Amyand (1720-1766)
Wilhelmina Amyand (1722-1744)
Mary Amyand (1723-1724)
Mary Catharine Amyand (1726-1771), married Sir Richard Adams, Baron of the Exchequer
Reverend Thomas Hans Amyand (1728-1762)
Rachel Maria Amyand (1730-1753)
Judith Amyand (b 1732), married Rev Doctor Thomas Ashton
The writer H. Rider Haggard was the great great grandson of Thomas Amyand.
Royal Society.