John Taylor

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

Career

Taylor was born in Norwich, possibly in 1703.

While his practice grew, operating on celebrities of the time such as Edward Gibbon, making the acquaintance of Viennese courtier and patron of composers Gottfried van Swieten, and being appointed royal eye surgeon to King George II, his flair for self-promotion grew with it, then beyond it. Taylor later claimed that during his visit to Marseille in 1734 he stimulated Jacques Daviel (the initiator of cataract extraction as opposed to couching) to pursue ophthalmic practice, which seems to be supported by contemporaneous evidence. Taylor dubbed himself "Chevalier", though the source of his title (equivalent to "knight" in English) is questionable, and his claims to be from an aristocratic family were false. Taylor was not ennobled until 1755, by Pope Benedict XIV. In his expansive 1761 autobiography in two volumes, The Life and Extraordinary History of the Chevalier John Taylor, Taylor styled himself "Ophthalmiater (sic) Pontifical, Imperial, Royal."

Taylor's career was destructive. His general approach included bloodletting, laxatives, and eyedrops of blood from slaughtered pigeons, pulverized sugar, or baked salt. In late March 1750, during one of his European tours, Taylor operated on Bach's cataracts twice in Leipzig and reportedly blinded him. Bach fell ill with a fever and died less than four months later. There is some evidence that Taylor operated on Handel in August 1758, in Tunbridge Wells, after which Handel's health deteriorated until his death in April 1759. In both cases Taylor claimed complete success. Dutch ophthalmologist R. Zegers mentions that "after his training, Taylor started practicing in Switzerland, where he blinded hundreds of patients, he once confessed". Writer Samuel Johnson said of Taylor that his life showed "an instance of how far impudence may carry ignorance."

The time and place of Taylor's death are uncertain. He was also said to have died in Paris. In June and July 1772, newspapers in Germany and England reported that he recently died at a convent in Prague, completely blind, after having suffered from amaurosis. This version of the story was supported by Taylor's grandson John Taylor.