Joseph Henry Green
Joseph Henry Green (1 November 1791 – 13 December 1863) (72 years) was an English surgeon who became the literary executor of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
On 1 December 1815 he received the diploma of the College of Surgeons, and set up in surgical practice in Lincoln's Inn Fields, where he remained until his retirement to the country.
In the autumn of 1817 he went to Berlin to take a private course of instruction in philosophy with Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand Solger, to whom he had been recommended by Ludwig Tieck in London.
A group calling themselves the "Friends of German Literature" invited Tieck, and they gathered at Green's house in Lincoln's Inn Fields.
In 1836 he gave up his private practice in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and lived for the rest of his life at Mount House, near Barnet.
He resigned also in 1837 his chair at King's College, but retained for seventeen years longer (until 1852) the surgeoncy to St. Thomas's Hospital, and a share of the lectures on surgery for part of that time.
With a view to a Coleridgean synthesis, he undertook a course of reading, revived his knowledge of Greek, learned Hebrew, and worked on Sanskrit.
Having suffered in his later years from inherited gout, he had an acute seizure on 1 November 1863, and died at his house 'The Mount' in Hadley on 13 December 1863.
Green's part in it was 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.
In 1832 he gave the opening address (published) of the winter session, taking as his subject the functions or duties of the professions of divinity, law, and medicine according to Coleridge.
As Hunterian orator at the college in 1841 he gave before a distinguished audience an obscure address on 'Vital Dynamics,' an attempt to connect science with the philosophy of Coleridge.
Re-appointed 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.'
He 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, under the title 'Spiritual Philosophy, founded on the teaching of S. T. Coleridge,' which was brought out, in two volumes (1865), with a memoir of Green, by his friend and former pupil Sir John Simon.
