He published some medical papers, including one advocating the use of paste board as a material for splinting fractured limbs,[3][5] and another concerning a stone removed from the bladder of "the Rev.

[7] He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in April 1769 [8] Alexander Chalmers's A General Biographical Dictionary says of him that he was "...many years an eminent surgeon in London".

In a catalogue of Zoffany's works it is reported that Sharp declined a baronetcy, which was offered as a reward for his successful attendance on Princess Amelia.

[10] In 1769, Sharp had a house in London's Old Jewry,[11] but at that time for most of the year he and his wife lived on a barge moored in the River Thames.

The man was called Jonathan Strong and he had been so badly beaten that he was nearly blind and required four months of treatment at St Bartholomew's Hospital.

However, two years later, while Strong was serving as a footman on the pharmacist's coach, he was seen by his owner, David Lisle, who sold him to a Jamaican planter and had him kidnapped.

"[12] The English courts ultimately sided with the Sharp brothers, denying an application that they should pay Lisle two hundred pounds in damages for taking another man's property.

[2] From this encounter, Sharp's younger brother Granville went on to become an early advocate for the abolition of slavery and remained so for fifty years.

[21] Zoffany composed the painting in a series of sittings with each of the subjects, to take their separate portraits, but none of his sketches or compositional studies views are known to survive.

The epitaph on their shared tomb reads "Endeared to their family connections and society by an amiableness of Character, which has seldom been equalled, and to each other, by a degree of mutual attachment, which has never been surpassed.