Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/Read, John
READ, JOHN (fl. 1588), surgeon, probably belonged to a family settled at Tewkesbury. While living in Gloucester in 1587 he was instrumental in causing a quack to be prosecuted. He came to London in 1588, and was admitted a foreign brother of the company of Barber-Surgeons—that is to say, a surgeon who practised his profession under licence from the company and yet had never been apprenticed to a freeman. He belonged to that band of surgeons, including Clowes, Gale, Halle, and Banester, who in the later years of Elizabeth's reign set themselves to improve the position of English surgery. Like them, Read wrote in English, and sought to free his art from the quackery which then formed an abundant leaven in it. Read even went so far as ‘to affirme that all chirurgians ought to be seene in physicke, and that the Barbers craft ought to be a distinct mistery from chirurgery,’ a desire which was not accomplished until 1745 as regards the separation nor until 1868 as regards the combination of medicine and surgery. Read was in personal relations with the surgical reformers. He dedicated his book to Banester, Clowes, and Pickering, and married, on 24 June 1588, Banester's daughter Cicily. In the same year he published ‘A most Excellent and Compendious Method of curing Woundes in the Head and in other Partes of the Body with other Precepts of the same Arte, practised and written by that famous man Franciscus Arceus … whereunto is added the exact Cure of the Caruncle … with a Treatise of the Fistulæ in the Fundament and other places of the Body; translated out of Johannes Ardern; and also the Description of the Emplaister called Dia Chalciteos, with his Use and Vertues. … Lond., by Th. East,’ 4to (Hazlitt, Collections, 3rd ser. Suppl. p. 4). Prefixed to the translation is ‘A Complaint of the Abuses of the Noble Art of Chirurgerie,’ written in metre by Read (Ritson, Bibliogr. Poet. p. 310).
[Read's Method of Curing; Marriage Licences of the Bishop of London, Harleian Soc. Publications.]