He was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1712 and the following year saw the publishing of his Anatomy of the Human Body, which achieved great popularity becoming an essential study source for students, lasting through thirteen editions,[1] mainly because it was written in English instead of Latin as was customary.

His abode is listed as "Chelsea College" on the 1739 royal charter for the Foundling Hospital, a charity for which he was a founding governor.

[2] Cheselden presented the celebrated case of a boy of thirteen who gained his sight after removal of the lenses rendered opaque by cataract from birth.

Described by Cheselden: When he first saw, he was so far from making any judgment of distances, that he thought all object whatever touched his eyes (as he expressed it) as what he felt did his skin, and thought no object so agreeable as those which were smooth and regular, though he could form no judgment of their shape, or guess what it was in any object that was pleasing to him: he knew not the shape of anything, nor any one thing from another, however different in shape or magnitude; but upon being told what things were, whose form he knew before from feeling, he would carefully observe, that he might know them again;[3] Philosopher George Berkeley claimed that his visual theories were “vindicated” by Cheselden's 1728 report on this congenital cataract patient.

[4] Cheselden is famous for the invention of the lateral lithotomy approach to removing bladder stones, which he first performed in 1727.

He also effected a great advance in ophthalmic surgery by his operation, iridectomy, described in 1728, to treat certain forms of blindness by producing an artificial pupil.