Born on September 30th, 1805, the eldest son and second child of Jonathan William Crompton, a merchant living in Edgbaston, by his wife Martha Webster, of Penns. He was sent at an early age as a pupil to G E Male, Physician to the General Hospital at Birmingham from 1805-1816. He was afterwards apprenticed to Richard Wood, who was Surgeon to the hospital from 1808-1852. He went to Paris at the end of his apprenticeship in 1829 and studied under Dupuytren, and travelled afterwards to Bonn. In 1834 he won the Jacksonian Prize with an essay on "Injuries and Diseases of the Nose and Nasal Sinuses", the other prizeman being Thomas Blizard Curling (qv), who submitted a dissertation on "Tetanus". Crompton was elected Surgeon to the General Hospital, Birmingham, in succession to Bowyer Vaux (qv) in September, 1843, and resigned after twenty-five years' service. He lived at 59 Harborne Road, Birmingham, and practised at 17 Temple Row. He married in 1833 Catherine Elizabeth Woolley (d.1864), daughter of the Rector of Middleton, Warwickshire, by whom he had one son. He died at 40 Harborne Road on March 31st, 1894, and was buried in Witton Cemetery, Birmingham. An oil painting of Crompton dated March, 1872, hangs in the Hall of the Birmingham General Hospital, and there is also an expressive photograph in the Fellows'Album. He contributed the following "Reminiscences of Provincial Surgery" to the *Guy's Hospital Reports* (1887, xliv, 137), at the request of Thomas Bryant: "You ask me to give some account of myself. I was apprenticed to the late Mr Richard Wood, himself an old Guy's man and personal friend of Sir A Cooper, in 1823. He was Senior Surgeon at the Birmingham General Hospital, and a noted operator, especially for stone. Joseph Hodgson was much his junior, and, some would say, a superior man, but certainly not in operations. I dressed at the General Hospital during four whole years as Mr Wood's dresser, living in his house and going with him to nearly all his private operations. I entered Guy's in 1828, and lived in the house with Mr Dodd, then Demonstrator of Anatomy; Dr William Guy, still I think alive, being also house pupil at Mr Dodd's. "After one year spent there my relative, Mr John Morgan [qv], late Surgeon to Guy's Hospital, took me into his house in New Broad Street, where I was treated as a friend and became as intimate as a boy could be with Drs Addison and Hodgkin, Thomas Bell, and other naturalists, Morgan being himself a good naturalist, as perhaps you may remember. "I passed one summer in Paris, the year after Dr Blundell removed the uterus through the vagina. I must tell you this story. One day I was standing at the lecture-room door at La Pitié, when Dr Blundell, not recognizing me, though I was very regular at his lectures, gave me his card to give to Lisfranc who was lecturing; on receiving it Lisfranc turned, bowed, and rushed at Blundell, kissing him on both cheeks! Then, turning to the class, Lisfranc introduced Blundell as the distinguished Englishman who had immortalized himself by that operation. A patient was brought in and laid on the table to have a large fungoid-looking os uteri removed, an operation which Lisfranc was then doing freely and fond of. While the woman's uterus was being pulled down by large hooked forceps, Lisfranc kissed her on her cheek, upon which little Blundell thought he ought to do likewise. There were at least half a dozen English pupils in the room, and you may imagine Blundell's face when we simultaneously clapped our hands, and cried, 'Well done, Blundell!' The story fled to Guy's in a very short time. Nevertheless, we were proud of him, for he gave the class, at Lisfranc's request, an excellent lecture in the French language. "When I had passed the college I came to Birmingham and began practice soon, and first as a dispensary surgeon, whose chief duties were attending operation cases of midwifery. On the retirement of Hodgson from the Eye Infirmary he had founded here I succeeded him, and my first surgical operation on a living person was for cataract in both eyes by the lower section, using both hands, of an old woman of eighty, who recovered with good sight, to my intense delight. "After eight years of this practice I became (1843) Surgeon to the Birmingham General Hospital, as colleague with Mr Wood and Hodgson among others, giving up the Eye Hospital because according to hospital laws I could not hold both; and here I am now, in my eighty-second year, and expecting to be operated on for cataract myself; retributive justice, I suppose! "I think this is quite enough about myself. I never had any ambition for notoriety, but only to be as good a surgeon as my wits and naturally great talent for idleness could make me. "I cannot think the notes I send with this or those you already have can be worth being placed in our dear old Guy's *Reports*." Dickinson Crompton's charming autobiography prefaces his vivid account of his surgical practice on many difficult occasions. The writing of this long paper extending over nearly twenty pages was undertaken despite his total blindness. "I send you the accompanying 'Surgical Reminiscences'", he says, addressing Mr Thomas Bryant, "under rather unusual circumstances, and I write them under peculiar circumstances, for I am now getting cataracts in my eyes, and at the present moment do not see what my hand writes, but hope it forms the words my mind would dictate. It is a curious sensation, and is new to me within the present year. As I cannot read I suppose my mind goes back more easily and perhaps more clearly into the past than it has had time to do before. This must be my excuse for writing, and it is a pleasant occupation. I have depended upon a friend for corrections necessary, for if I take my pen from the paper I do not know what or where I have written."