Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Freyer, Peter Johnston
FREYER, Sir PETER JOHNSTON (1851–1921), surgeon, the eldest son of Samuel Freyer, farmer, of Sellerna, a village eight miles from Clifden, Connemara, by his wife, Celia Burke, also of Sellerna, was born there 21 July 1851. He received his early education at Erasmus Smith’s College, Galway, and at Queen’s College, Galway, then one of the constituent colleges of the Queen’s University of Ireland. In 1872 he graduated in arts, with first-class honours and the gold medal, and then went to Dublin to study medicine at Steevens’s Hospital, where he was a resident pupil of Robert McDonnell [q.v.]. He spent a short time in Paris and in 1874 he took the degrees of M.D. and M.S. of the Queen’s University, again winning the gold medal. In 1886 he was awarded the degree of M.A., honoris causa, by the Royal University of Ireland which had succeeded the Queen’s University.
Freyer gained first place in the examination for the Indian medical service in 1875, becoming surgeon-major in 1887, lieutenant-colonel in 1895, and retiring from the service in 1896. Being in the Bengal army he served chiefly in the North-Western (afterwards the United) Provinces of India, and was for a time surgeon to the Prince of Wales’s Hospital at Benares. Here he gained much experience in operating for cataract and in crushing stones in the bladder by the method of litholapaxy which was introduced in 1878 by Henry Jacob Bigelow, of Boston, Massachusetts.
Returning to England in 1897 Freyer was appointed surgeon to St. Peter’s Hospital for Stone, Henrietta Street, London, and originated the operation of total and complete removal of the prostate gland through a suprapubic incision of the bladder. He published his first four cases in 1901 (British Medical Journal, ii, 125, 1901) and the results of his first thousand cases in 1912 (ibid., p, 869, 1912). He was awarded the Arnott memorial medal in 1904 for his work in this branch of surgery, and in 1920 was elected the first president of the newly constituted section of urology at the Royal Society of Medicine. Freyer rejoined the Indian medical service on the outbreak of the European War in 1914, but was employed. in England as consulting surgeon to Queen Alexandra’s military hospital at Millbank, London, and to the Eastern command. He received the C.B. in January 1917 and was promoted K.C.B. in the following June. He was placed on the retired list with the rank of colonel, I.M.S., in 1919, He died in London 9 September 1921, and was buried in the protestant cemetery at Clifden, county Galway. He had married in 1876 Isabella (died 1914), daughter of Robert McVittie, of Dublin, and by her had two children, a son and a daughter (married to Lieutenant-Colonel John Duncan Grant, V.C,). A three-quarter length portrait of Freyer hangs in the board room of St. Peter’s Hospital, Henrietta Street, London.
Freyer was the author of the following works: The Modern Treatment of Stone in the Bladder by Litholapaxy (1886, second edition 1896), Stricture of the Urethra and Prostatic Enlargement (1901, third edition 1906), Surgical Diseases of the Urinary Organs (1908).
[The Times, 10 September 1921; The Lancet, 1921, vol. ii, p. 677; The British Medical Journal, 1921, vol. ii, p. 464; private information; personal knowledge.]