Edmund King (physician)

He used to keep dried specimens, such as the ileocecal valve, pressed in a large paper book, and he dissected animals as well as the human subject.

[2] Around 1665 King took a house in Hatton Garden, London and was married at St. Andrew's Church, Holborn, on 20 June 1666, to Rebecca Polsted of the adjoining parish of St. Sepulchre.

Gilbert Sheldon, the archbishop of Canterbury, created him M.D., a Lambeth degree; he was incorporated at Cambridge in 1671, and in 1677, on bringing a commendatory letter from the king, was admitted an honorary fellow of the College of Physicians of London.

His own loss of strength compelled him in 1701 to give up attending the aged poet Charles Sedley, whose death he had foretold at his first visit; and he handed on the patient to Sir Hans Sloane.

[2] In 1666 King published in the Philosophical Transactions a paper on the parenchymatous parts of the body, and maintained, from microscopic observation, that they contained enormous numbers of minute blood-vessels.

In a noted xenotransfusion experiment of November 1667, King with Richard Lower transfused sheep's blood into a man, a direction of research they abandoned in 1668 after reports from France of a death.

[2] In the Philosophical Transactions for 1686 King published an account of the autopsy of Robert Bacon, a "demented person", who had a calcified pineal gland in his brain, renal and vesical calculi and gallstones.