Frank Nicholls

He was educated at Westminster School, and went to Exeter College, Oxford, where he entered 4 March 1714, his tutor being John Haviland.

He demonstrated the minute structure of blood vessels, showed before the Royal Society experiments proving that the inner and middle coat of an artery could be ruptured while the outer remained entire, and thus made clear the method of formation of chronic aneurysm, which had not before been understood.

He was the first to make corroded preparations, in which a particular part of an organ is left prominent after an injection, the surrounding structures being removed piecemeal.

He examined the body of the king after death, and discovered a rupture of the right ventricle, which he described in a letter to George Parker, 2nd Earl of Macclesfield, President of the Royal Society, and this is printed in the Philosophical Transactions for 1760.

Similar summaries on a smaller scale existed, by William Harvey and Christopher Terne; those of Nicholls may have been suggested by the printed anatomical tables of Sir Charles Scarburgh.

[1] An anonymous pamphlet, ‘The Petition of the Unborn Babes to the Censors of the Royal College of Physicians of London,’ published in 1751, is attributed to him.

Pocus in the work represented, it is said, Dr. Robert Nesbit; Maulus, Dr. Maule; and Barebone, Dr. William Barrowby.