Born December 4th, 1866, the younger son of George and Mary A Cheatle, his father being a solicitor, his elder brother being Sir George Lenthal Cheatle. He entered Merchant Taylors' School in January, 1876, and left in 1882, having been in the school XI in 1882 and in the school XV in 1882-1883. He was educated at King's College Hospital, and afterwards proceeded to Vienna; on his return to England he took the MRCS and after serving as House Surgeon to Lord Lister he acted as House Accoucheur to the hospital. He then determined to devote himself to otology, and was appointed Assistant Aural Surgeon to King's College Hospital, where he became Aural Surgeon on the retirement of Dr Urban Pritchard. He also acted as Teacher of Otology at the Royal Army Medical College, and was for a time Surgeon to the Royal Free Hospital. At the Ninth Otological International Congress he was awarded the Adam Politzer Prize, and in 1906 he was appointed Hunterian Professor of Surgery and Pathology at the Royal College of Surgeons, and lectured on the Surgical Anatomy of the Temporal Bone. He was President of the Section of Otology at the International Medical Congress held in London in 1913, of the Section of Laryngology and Otology at the Bath Meeting of the British Medical Association in 1925, and of the Otological Section of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1910. He served during the European War, first as Major and then as Hon Lieutenant-Colonel in the medical branch of the Royal Air Force, acting as Hon Consultant to the military hospitals of the London and Eastern Command and Aural Surgeon to the King Edward VII and King George V Hospital. He was mentioned in despatches and was decorated CBE, military division. He died in London on May 11th, 1929, a widower without children, and was buried in Burford, Oxfordshire, where his family had settled in 1819; his ancestor, Speaker Lenthal, lived at The Priory, which was given to him by King Charles I. Cheatle was a patient, careful worker and a cautious theorizer. Exceptionally shy and retiring in character, he allowed others to receive credit for discoveries in aural surgery which he himself had made. Perhaps his greatest contribution to aural surgery was in his preparation of specimens - over 700 in number - to illustrate the variations in the anatomy of the mastoid region, and the influence of the anatomical type on the clinical features and progress of middle-ear infection. This collection he presented, in 1911, with a descriptive catalogue written by himself, to the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, as a supplement to the famous Toynbee Collection, continuing, in later years, to add many other preparations and to keep the catalogue up to date. Cheatle's specimens illustrate the age and sex variations in the form and structure of the temporal bone; they provide the basis of anatomical fact on which rest the present-day operations on the mastoid region. He proved that the dense mastoid was not, as was commonly held, the product of chronic inflammation, but a normal anatomical type of bone which is indirectly causative of chronic suppurative middle-ear disease.