John Ward, surgeon

A carte-de-visite portrait of surgeon John Ward of Bodmin in Cornwall.

Born in or about 1797 at Fowey in Cornwall, John Ward became a Member of the Royal College Surgeons (MRCS) and a Licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries (LSA) in 1818. The London and Provincial Medical Directory (1850) lists John Ward of Bodmin as Surgeon to the Duke of Cornwall’s Rangers and to the East Cornwall Hospital and Dispensary.

On 18 June 1834 at Lanliver, a village five miles south of Bodmin, he married Mary Kendall, youngest daughter of the Reverend Charles Kendall (Royal Cornwall Gazette, 21 June 1834). The marriage produced six children.

The couple appear on the 1861 census living at Honey Street in Bodmin with two unmarried daughters and four servants.

In later years John Ward served as a Justice of the Peace. He died, aged 72, on 7 September 1869 at 2, St Giles’s Close in Reading, Berkshire, the residence of his son, Reverend Joseph May Ward. He left an estate valued at £12,000.

Photographed by the banker and amateur photographer William Peters of Beckenham in Kent (and later of Ashfold House, Slaugham, Sussex).

[From an album compiled by the photographer’s daughter, Mrs Marianne Charlotte Isabelle Gilbert, wife of Colonel Walter Raleigh Gilbert of Priory House, Bodmin, Cornwall.]