Career
In later years of his life he practised as a physician. In 1761, while still an apprentice surgeon, he made his discovery of the unique and bizarre cause—compression of the oesophagus by an aberrant right subclavian artery—of a fatal case of obstructed deglutition for which he coined the term dysphagia lusoria and for which he is eponymously remembered. This discovery remained unrecorded until 1787, when a paper describing the case was read on his behalf before the Medical Society of London.