Joseph Henry Green

Joseph Henry Green plaque at St Mary the Virgin church, Monken Hadley. Joseph Henry Green FRCS (1 November 1791 – 13 December 1863) was an English surgeon who also became the literary executor for Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Green was the nephew of another eminent surgeon, Henry Cline. After studying in Germany, he apprenticed at the College of Surgeons under his uncle's tutelage. Green went on to practise as a surgeon at St. Thomas's Hospital. He was also a professor of anatomy and surgery at St Thomas's, professor of anatomy to the Royal Academy, and chair of surgery at King's College, London. Green and Coleridge became friends about 1817. When Coleridge died in 1834, he named Green his literary executor with instructions to compile and publish Coleridge's system of philosophy and dispose of his manuscripts and books for the benefit of his family. Green served twice as president of the Royal College of Surgeons and, in 1859, became the second president of the newly-established Council of Medical Education and Registration of the United Kingdom. While Green undertook a course of study, in order to publish the Coleridgean system, he made little progress other than to publish two volumes of Smith’s notes, fragments, and oral recollections in the Spiritual Philosophy, founded on the teaching of S. T. Coleridge (1865). Green suffered a seizure in early November 1863 and died the next month. He was 72.

Early life Green was born on 1 November 1791, the only son of Joseph Green, a prosperous merchant, and Frances (née Cline). His mother's brother was the surgeon, Henry Cline.

Over the years, Green and Coleridge conversed often. According to his friend Sir John Simon, his last words - referring to his own pulse - were "stopped".

Green was survived by his wife; they had no children. on the left hand side of the main path between Comfort's Corner and the Egyptian Avenue.

Green's house in Hadley is now home to Mount House School.

Works

Green published 'Outlines of a Course of Dissections' anonymously in 1820. The same year, he also enlarged the book into his 'Dissector's Manual,' with plates, said to have been the first work of the same kind or scope yet published. He wrote no original memoirs except a minor piece in Med.-Chir. Trans. xii. 46. A memoir of Green's was published in the Medical Times and Gazette a week after his death. Two of his Royal Academy lectures, on 'Beauty' and on 'Expression', were published in the Athenæum 16 and 23 December 1843. When the claims made by the Cooper family led to a quarrel, Green's part in it was published in a long pamphlet ('Letter to Sir Astley Cooper on the Establishment of an Anatomical and Surgical School at Guy's Hospital,' London, 1825), which stated the legal case. Green published, chiefly in The Lancet, a large number of lectures, clinical comments, and cases. In 1832 Green gave the opening address of the winter session, which was published taking as his subject the functions or duties of the professions of divinity, law, and medicine according to Coleridge. Green published two pamphlets on medical education and reform: 'Distinction without Separation: a Letter on the Present State of the Profession' (1831), and 'Suggestions respecting Medical Reform,' 1834. In 1841, he published his advocated reforms in a pamphlet 'The Touchstone of Medical Reform'. Changes to the College of Surgeons' constitution in 1843, providing for a new class of fellows and the election of the council by the fellows, was in accord with his views. As Hunterian orator at the College of Surgeons in 1840, he gave an obscure address on 'Vital Dynamics', being an attempt to connect science with the philosophy of Coleridge, before a distinguished audience. As the Hunterian orator in 1847, he supplemented his former Coleridgean exposition with another in the same vein on 'Mental Dynamics or, Groundwork of a Professional Education.' Green made little definite progress with the Coleridgean system but before he died he compiled a work from Coleridge's marginalia, fragments, and recollected oral teaching in two volumes under the title Spiritual Philosophy, founded on the teaching of S. T. Coleridge (1865). It included a memoir of Green by his friend and former pupil Sir John Simon. The first chapter of the first volume had been dictated to Green by Coleridge himself and concerns a groundwork of principles. The second volume is theological.