Adopting a medical career, he became a pupil of
Ralph Fletcher of
Gloucester, (a surgeon of considerable eminence in his profession, and of some note as a collector of pictures), and later married his daughter. Yearsley moved to London, where he entered himself a student at
St. Bartholomew's Hospital. He was admitted a member of the
Royal College of Surgeons of England and a licentiate of the
Society of Apothecaries in 1827; later in life he added to these qualifications the licentiateship of the
Royal College of Physicians, Edinburgh (1860), and he graduated M.D. at
St. Andrews University in 1862. After practising for a short time in Cheltenham, he established himself about 1829 as a general practitioner at
Ross in
Herefordshire. He removed to London about 1837, and started to practise as an aural surgeon. He opened an institution for the relief of diseases of the ear in Sackville Street,
Piccadilly, and in 1846 he became surgeon to the
Royal Society of Musicians. He founded a hospital specialising in the diseases of the ear, the
Metropolitan Ear Nose and Throat Hospital in
Kensington. Yearsley deserves recognition as one who assisted in bringing aural surgery out of the degraded position it held at the beginning of the 19th century. He insisted strongly upon the connection between
deafness and disease of the
naso-pharynx. At first he practised freely the removal of the
tonsils as an aid to recovery from deafness, but in later life experience led him to modify his views, and he performed
tonsillectomy much less often. Yearsley learnt, too, the value of an artificial
tympanum in the relief of certain forms of deafness, and he very justly recommended the use of the simplest form of film in preference to the more complex tympana employed by some of his contemporaries. Yearsley was less scientific than either
George Pilcher or
Joseph Toynbee, and, though original in his views and bold in expressing his opinions, he too often spoilt his cause by his controversial temperament. ==As a publisher==