Wikipedia gf handel biography pdf

British eye surgeon and medical charlatan

John Taylor (c. 1703 – 1770 or 1772) was an early British eye surgeon, self-promoter and medical charlatan of 18th-century Europe.

He was noted by Samuel Johnson, and associated with the surgical mistreatment of George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, and perhaps hundreds of others. Both Handel and Bach died shortly after the botched surgery performed by Taylor.^[1]

Career

Taylor was born in Norwich, possibly in 1703.^[2] He was the son of a surgeon named John Taylor, who died in 1709.^[2] He studied in London under the pioneering British surgeon William Cheselden at St Thomas' Hospital,^[2] and by 1727 had produced a book, An Account of the Mechanism of the Eye, dedicated to Cheselden.^[3]

While his practice grew, operating on celebrities of the time such as Edward Gibbon, making the acquaintance of Viennese courtier and patron of composers Gottfr