Educated at St Thomas's Hospital and at the Hotel-Dieu and La Charité, Paris. He settled in practice in Hobart Town, Tasmania, and was Surgeon to HM General Hospital from 1860-1869. Towards the close of his life he devoted himself to politics and was a well-known public man, being a member of the Legislative Council and of the Tasmanian Court of Medical Examiners, and twice a Minister without a portfolio. He was also Surgeon Major in the South Tasmanian Volunteer Artillery. About the year 1868 or 1869 he sent a valuable Tasmanian Collection to the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, and for this service received the signal honour of the Honorary (Gold) Medal (1869), of which the previous recipients had been very few - viz, James Parkinson in 1822, Joseph Swan (qv) in 1825, and George Bennett (qv) in 1834. Subsequent recipients have been men of the highest distinction, such as Owen, Erasmus Wilson, Paget, and Lister. The Library contains a "List of Specimens presented to the Museum...by W L Crowther...Hobart Town" in Sir William Flower's handwriting. The Hon Mr Crowther died of peritonitis at his residence in Hobart on April 12th, 1885, being then one of the oldest practitioners in the Colony. Publications: "On the Median Operation for Stone, with Section of the Urethra only, and Dilatation of the Prostate." - *Lancet*, 1867, ii, 126. "Urethrotomy or Lithotrity in Aged and Debilitated Subjects." - *Ibid.*, 1873, ii, 624. **See below for an expanded version of the original obituary which was printed in volume 1 of Plarr’s Lives of the Fellows. Please contact the library if you would like more information lives@rcseng.ac.uk** William Lodewyck Crowther was a surgeon, naturalist and politician who served as premier of Tasmania from 20 December 1878 to 29 October 1879. He is known to have collected and dissected the bodies of Aboriginal Tasmanians; in 1869 he was suspended from his post as an honorary medical officer at Hobart General Hospital after being charged with mutilating the body of William Lanne, then considered the ‘last’ male Aboriginal Tasmanian. Crowther was born on 15 April 1817 at Haarlem in the Netherlands, the son of William Crowther, a doctor, and Sarah Crowther née Pearson, the daughter of George Pearson, a former mayor of Macclesfield, Cheshire. The family emigrated to Hobart in what was then known as Van Diemen’s Land in 1825. Crowther became a boarder at Claiborne’s Academy, Longford in around 1828, and it was while he was at school that he developed an interest in natural history. In 1832 he was apprenticed to his father for five years and then became a partner as a surgeon apothecary and accoucheur. In February 1839 he sailed on the *Emu* to England, arriving in June. He sold a natural history collection of Tasmanian animals to the Earl of Derby and used the money to pay for his living costs and fees at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School and for another year of study in Paris. He gained his conjoint examination in 1841. On 12 November 1841 he married his cousin Sarah Victoria Marie Louise Muller, the daughter of Colonel A B Muller, equerry to the Duke of Kent. They had 11 children. In 1842 Crowther returned to Hobart and took over his father’s practice. His focus was on surgery, particularly of the bladder for stone and he rose rapidly in his profession. He wrote two papers for *The Lancet* (‘A few remarks on the safety of the median operation for the removal of stone from the bladder, the section being limited to the membranous urethra, with simple dilation of the prostate gland’ *Lancet* 1867 ii 126 and ‘Urethrotomy or lithotrity in aged and debilitated people’ *Lancet* 1873 ii 624). In 1860 he was appointed as an honorary medical officer at Hobert General Hospital. He continued collecting and was elected as a corresponding member of the Royal Zoological Society. Between April 1840 and 1868 he donated a large number of specimens to William Flower, the curator of the museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. The collection included the complete skeleton of a sperm whale, Tasmanian fish and a dolphin, together with ‘the bones of an Australian male’. In March 1869 he was awarded the gold medal of the College. In the same month he was suspended from his post at Hobart General Hospital after being charged with mutilating the body of William Lanne, a whaler, and reputedly the last ‘full-bloodied’ male Aboriginal Tasmanian. Lanne died in early March 1869 in Hobart from cholera and dysentery aged just 34. His body was taken to the morgue at the General Hospital and, as *The Times* reported on 29 May 1869, there followed an ‘unseemly struggle’ for his skeleton: ‘It is stated that on the night before the funeral a medical gentleman connected with the hospital abstracted the skull, intending to send it to the English College of Surgeons, and inside the scalp the skull of the corpse of a white man, also in the dead-house, was inserted in lieu of that which had been removed. When this mutilation was discovered the hands and feet were cut off to frustrate any attempt of the first mutilator to obtain the whole skeleton. The trunk was then buried, the coffin carried to the grave covered by a black opossum skin rug and followed by above a hundred citizens. In the following night, it is stated, the body was raised from the grave by order of the house surgeon of the hospital.’ An inquiry took place. Crowther was suspected as having carried out the first mutilation and was suspended from his post. A petition was sent to the Governor Charles Du Cane seeking an annulment of his suspension, but without success. The outcry over what had happened to Lanne directly led to the introduction of the 1869 Anatomy Act, regulating the practice of anatomy in the colony and protecting the dead from dissection without prior consent, the first legislation of its kind in Tasmania. Lanne’s skull was later donated to the anatomy department of the University of Edinburgh by Crowther’s son, Edward. It has since been returned to Tasmania. Crowther was a popular if controversial figure in Hobart and was active in politics. He was elected to the House of Assembly as the member for Hobart. He resigned, but from 1869 to 1885 held the Hobart seat on the Legislative Council. From 1876 to 1877 he was a minister without portfolio in the administration of Thomas Reibey. In December 1878 he was invited to form his own government as premier and served until October 1879, the first medical practitioner to hold that office in Tasmania. Apart from his surgical career, Crowther also had a number of successful business interests. In the 1850s he owned saw mills and exported timber to other Australian colonies and New Zealand and frame houses to California. He also owned whaling ships and shipped guano to Tasmania and the mainland. He later transferred his interests to the new Anglo-Australian Guano Company. Crowther became a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 1874. In 1889 a statue of Crowther was erected in Franklin Square in Hobart. After a campaign led by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, in August 2022 the City of Hobart Council voted to remove the monument. Sarah Gillam