Erichsen began his medical studies at
University College, London under
Robert Liston. Going on to Paris, he witnessed his first
colotomy under Amussat before returning to London as a house surgeon. He devoted himself in the early years of his career to
physiology, and lecturing on general
anatomy and physiology at
University College Hospital. In June 1876 he was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society. By 1887, he held his most prestigious honour of president of the council of university college. having been for some years surgeon-extraordinary to
Queen Victoria. As a surgeon his reputation was worldwide, and he counts (says Sir W. MacCormac in his volume on the Centenary of the Royal College of Surgeons) among the makers of modern surgery. He was a recognized authority on concussion of the
spine, and was often called to give evidence in court on apparent cases of
railway spine. credited with this statement from 1873: "There cannot always be fresh fields of conquest by the knife; there must be portions of the human frame that will ever remain sacred from its intrusions, at least in the surgeon's hands. That we have already, if not quite, reached these final limits, there can be little question. The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will be forever shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon." (quoted in
Christopher Cerf and
Victor Navasky (eds.), I Wish I Hadn't Said That: The Experts Speak and Get it Wrong! (2000), 31). (Cf. Clarke's First Law, from Profiles of the Future – see Wikipedia article,
Clarke's Three Laws: "When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.") The correct quotation is "There cannot always be fresh fields for conquest by the knife. There must be portions of the human frame that will ever remain sacred from its intrusion – at least, in the surgeon’s hand. That we have nearly, if not quite, reached these final limits there can be little question." The final sentence in the inaccurately quoted statement actually comes from a biography of
Joseph Lister, written well after Erichsen died, in which the following sentence appears: "Mr. Erichsen believed that the abdomen, the brain, and the chest would be forever shut from the intrusions of a wise and humane surgeon." Later writers falsely attributed these words by the biographer to Erichsen himself, but this attribution is inappropriate: the text in Erichsen's 1873 address immediately following the quoted sentences mentions surgical procedures "from the base of the brain to the lowest organ in the pelvic cavity" as "triumphs of the surgeon's art." A more complete reading of Erichsen's address suggests that his views were much more nuanced. == Personal life ==