Luther Holden

Luther Holden (11 December 1816 – 1905) was an English surgeon.

Biography

Holden was born on 11 December 1816, in his grandfather's house at Birmingham, was second son of the Rev. Henry Augustus Holden (1785–1870), who married his cousin Mary Willetts, daughter of Hyla Holden of Wednesbury in Staffordshire. His father, on retiring from the army with the rank of lieutenant, matriculated at Worcester College, Oxford, in 1814 (B.A. 1817), and held the curacies of Wolstanton in Shropshire and of Warmington near Banbury, where he took pupils, but on being left a small fortune gave up his curacy and lived at Brighton and afterwards in London. His eldest son was Henry Holden (1814–1909). His fourth son, Philip Melanchthon Holden (1823–1904), was for forty-two years rector of Upminster in Essex.

Luther, after successive education at home with his father's pupils, at a private school in Birmingham, and at Havre in 1827, where he made rapid progress in French, entered St. Bartholomew's Hospital in 1831. Apprenticed for five years to Edward Stanley, he was admitted M.R.C.S. England in 1838, and then studied for one year in Berlin and another in Paris, where an Italian student taught him to speak and to read Italian. He was surgeon to the Metropolitan Dispensary, Fore Street, from 1843, living in the Old Jewry and teaching anatomy to private pupils, among whom was William Palmer, the poisoner. Holden was one of the twenty-four successful candidates at the first examination for the newly established order of fellows of the College of Surgeons (24 December 1844).