The son of a Suffolk yeoman, born near Stowmarket, in which town he was apprenticed at an early age to Mr Bailey, the surgeon-apothecary, whose daughter he married in 1815. After his apprenticeship he studied at St George's Hospital and at the Windmill Street School of Anatomy, where he soon gained a reputation for skill in dissection. This skill secured for him an appointment as Demonstrator of Anatomy under Professor James Macartney at Trinity College, Dublin, where he proved a successful teacher. At Dublin he failed to obtain the diploma, so he went to Paris where he spent the winter of 1814-1815. Here he wrote his *Sketches of the Medical Schools of Paris*, which gives an interesting and illuminating account of the French medical course, of how Dupuytren lectured on inguinal hernia to twelve hundred students, and of the dullness of Chaussier. In March, 1815, Crosse settled in Norwich, and in 1820 published *A History of the Variolous Epidemic* which occurred in Norwich in the year 1819 - valuable for its account of the progress of vaccination. In 1822 he was elected Assistant Surgeon, more than 500 Governors attending and voting, and in 1826 Surgeon, to the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. He soon acquired a great reputation as a lithotomist and a large practice as a surgeon. In 1833 he was awarded the Jacksonian Prize of the Royal College of Surgeons for an essay on "The Formation, Constituents, and Extraction of the Urinary Calculus". In the following year he was made a FRS. He had a series of forty apprentices, among whom was G M Humphry (qv), the first Professor of Surgery at Cambridge. Crosse died on June 9th, 1850, and was buried in Norwich Cathedral. His portrait is in the College Collection. He was commonly known as 'Crosse of Norwich'. Publication: *Treatise on the Formation, Constituents, and Extraction of the Urinary Calculus*, 4to, bibliography running from p.108-280, plates, London, 1835.