At the hospital he gave lectures on anatomy and physiology, along with Barnes, and began the pathological museum, the catalogue of which occupied much of his leisure.

He became a town councillor of Exeter in 1820, sheriff in 1826, and mayor in 1828, retiring from municipal business when the old corporation was dissolved in 1835.

He was a man of great vigour, bodily and mental, dressed in the old fashion, and professed tory and staunch church principles.

In professional matters he was cautious, opinionative, and conservative, a careful, although not an artistic, operator, a most assiduous note-taker (he left eleven manuscript folio volumes of cases written by himself), and gifted with a good memory, which made his large experience available.

In 1858 he resigned the surgeoncy of the Devon and Exeter Hospital (his son succeeding him), but retained until 1868 his favourite duty of curator of the museum, for which he had a house built in the grounds by private subscription in 1853.

He constantly quoted John Hunter and Xavier Bichat, distinguished between the reparative and other effects of inflammation, and maintained that the extent of the process was limited by the quantity of plastic lymph effused.

He published a number of other papers, ‘On the Results of Amputation,’ ‘On Hernia,’ ‘On the Scars after Burns,’ &c. (for complete list see Brit.