Hidden away in a distant branch of my family tree I came across a character called Benjamin Travers whose life story became so fascinating as I delved a little deeper.
This intimate portrait shows the gentleman in question, a highly respected surgeon in middle age, at the height of his pioneering work in the field of ophthalmology — intelligent, composed, and very much the cultivated gentleman of early Victorian London.
Benjamin Travers was born on 3 April 1783 in Cheapside, London, the eldest of ten children of Benjamin Travers senior, a prominent London sugar refiner and merchant.
His Illustrious Medical Career
In 1800, at the age of seventeen, Travers was articled to the celebrated surgeon Astley Cooper at Guy’s Hospital. He subsequently set up his own medical practice in late 1807, aged just 24. What followed was an illustrious career that would see him become one of the most respected surgeons of his generation—one whose story is vividly preserved in his detailed biography in Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows at the Royal College of Surgeons.
Travers specialised in ophthalmic surgery at a time when eye diseases were still often left to quacks and charlatans. In 1810 he succeeded John Cunningham Saunders as Surgeon to the London Infirmary for Diseases of the Eye (today’s Moorfields Eye Hospital), running the institution single-handed for four years and transforming it into a respected teaching centre. He was, in fact, the first general hospital surgeon in England to devote himself specially to diseases of the eye. He later became Surgeon to St Thomas’s Hospital (1815–1841) and lectured there on surgery, jointly with his old master Astley Cooper for a time.
His published works were influential: An Inquiry into the Process of Nature in Repairing Injuries of the Intestine (1812), the pioneering A Synopsis of the Diseases of the Eye and their Treatment (1820, with later editions and even a New York printing), and important texts on “constitutional irritation” and the physiology of inflammation. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1813, he served as President of both the Hunterian Society and the Royal Medico-Chirurgical Society, and held high office at the Royal College of Surgeons—including two terms as President (1847 and 1856).
By Royal Appointment to the Queen
He was appointed to Queen Victoria’s Medical Household early in her reign, later becoming Surgeon in Ordinary to Prince Albert. In 1857, just months before his death, he was elevated to the most senior position in the Medical Household: Serjeant Surgeon.
Travers the Family Man
Travers married three times and had a large family—twelve children in all. His first wife was Sarah, daughter of the actuary William Morgan FRS; his second, Caroline (daughter of East India Company director G. Millet); and his third, Mary Poulett, youngest daughter of Colonel Stevens of Somerset. His eldest son, Benjamin Travers junior, followed him into surgery and was appointed Assistant Surgeon at St Thomas’s on the very day his father retired in 1841.
The family lived in fashionable Mayfair, most notably at 12 Bruton Street, next to Berkeley Square. (A curious footnote: Queen Elizabeth II was born many years later at 17 Bruton Street, in the same street but at the home of her maternal grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne.)
The Moral Dilemma
The Travers family’s story is also inextricably linked to the great moral and economic shifts of the early nineteenth century. Benjamin Travers senior’s sugar-refining business was deeply tied to the West Indies trade. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 and the changing attitudes of the British public—symbolised by the sugar boycott—hit hard. Sugar was Britain’s single largest import at the time, yet sales of West Indies sugar plummeted. Travers senior had to adapt with the times; he became an early promoter of what we would now call “fair trade” products, advertising thus:
“Benjamin Travers, Sugar Refiner, acquaints the Publick that he has now an assortment of Loaves, Lumps, Powder Sugar and Syrup ready for sale…..produced by the labour of FREEMEN.”
Yet the family’s connection to the former slave economy did not end cleanly. Benjamin Travers the surgeon himself was awarded part of the compensation paid by the British government for the 199 enslaved people on the Marble Hill estate in Antigua. He received the money as trustee for his sister Caroline Ottley (née Travers), wife of the Rev. John Bridges Ottley. The award—£2,482 16s 2d—is recorded in the Legacies of British Slavery database and stands as a stark reminder of how even prominent medical families of the era were entangled in the economic legacies of slavery.
HIs Death and Legacy
A severe attack of palpitations in 1819 interrupted his lecturing for a time, but Travers otherwise enjoyed a long and active life. He died at his home in Green Street, Grosvenor Square, on 6 March 1858, aged 74, and was buried at Hendon, Middlesex. Portraits and a bust by William Behnes survive, but the sensitive 1824 drawing by D. Maclise offers one of the most personal glimpses of the man.
Benjamin Travers was very much a man of his times—brilliant, ambitious, and shaped by the social and economic currents swirling around him. His pioneering work in eye surgery helped professionalise a neglected branch of medicine, while his royal appointments placed him at the heart of Victorian Britain. Yet his family’s story also reflects the complex moral compromises of the age. In an era of rapid change, Travers combined scientific excellence with the pragmatism (and, at times, the contradictions) of a London elite family navigating abolition, empire, and reform.
References:
Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows, The Royal College of Surgeons of England,