S. O. Habershon

Samuel Osbourne Habershon (1825 - August 22, 1889) was an English physician. Habershon was born in Rotherham in 1825 and studied medicine (since 1842) at the Guy Hospital in London. He received numerous scholarships at the University of London, where he graduated from MB in 1848 and M.D. in 1851. After he was successively appointed as a demonstrator of anatomy and pathological anatomy and a lecturer in pathology, he became an assistant to the doctor in 1854, and in 1866 - the full doctor of Guy. He lectured there on Materia Medica from 1856 to 1873 and on medicine from 1873 to 1877. A member of the Royal College of Physicians in London since 1851 and a research fellow since 1856, he was successively an examiner, adviser and censor, and in 1876 he was a Lumlean lecturer, in 1883 a Harveyan orator, and in 1887 a vice president of the college . He was president of the Medical Society of London in 1873. In November 1880, being then senior physician to Guy's, he resigned his post, together with John Cooper Forster, the senior surgeon. Habershon died on 22 August 1889 from gastric ulcer, leaving one son and three daughters; his wife had died in April of the same year. As a physician Habershon had a high reputation, especially in abdominal diseases, which he did much to elucidate. He was the first in England to propose the operation of gastrostomy for stricture of the œsophagus, which Cooper Forster performed on a patient of Habershon's in 1858. He was one of the founders of the Christian Medical Association.