William, an eminent surgeon and anatomist, was born at Barrow-on-the-Hill, Leicestershire, in 1688. He studied surgery under Mr Ferne of St Thomas's Hospital, whom he afterwards succeeded as head surgeon of that institution. Having devoted a large share of attention to the subject of lithotomy, he published a work on the high Operation for the Stone; and his skill as an operator in this department soon placed him at the head of his profession. He added greatly to his reputation by a successful couching operation performed on a youth of fourteen who had been blind from infancy. The details of the operation are given in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1828, and are valuable in a metaphysical point of view, as throwing considerable light on the doctrine of perception. Cheselden published also a Text-Book of Anatomy, a work on Osteography or Anatomy of the Bones, and a series of twenty-one plates, with descriptive letter-press appended to Gataker's Translation of Le Dran's Operations of Surgery. In 1737, disheartened by the frequent attacks to which his success exposed him, he retired from practice, and accepted the office of honorary surgeon to Chelsea Hospital. He died suddenly at Bath, of an attack of apoplexy, April 11, 1752.