Bryer, Stephen Perrott (1770-1806), surgeon

Bryer, the son of William Bryer (1735-1803) was baptised at St Peter’s church in Dorchester on 21 September 1770. He married Mary Hart at Melbury Bubb, on 9 June 1794, and the couple had at least two children, Mary Elizabeth (1798-1865) and William Wyndham (1800-1878) (ancestry.co.uk).

In A Collection of Testimonies respecting the Treatment of Venereal Disease by Nitrous Acid, by Thomas Beddoes (1799), is printed a letter from Bryer to Beddoes dated at Weymouth on 8 January the previous year (pp. 33-4).

A letter by Bryer on a case of bronchotomy, dated at Weymouth on 16 January 1800 and subscribed by him as ‘Surgeon and Agent for Sick and Wounded Seamen and Marines at the Port of Weymouth’, was printed in the March 1800 number of the Medical and Physical Journal (pp. 228-9).

A letter by Bryer to a Mr Thoresby on a case of resuscitation, dated at Weymouth, 26 June 1803, is printed in the Appendix to A Sermon preached at the Anniversary of the Royal Humane Society … by the Right Reverend Thomas Burgess, D.D., Bishop of St David’s (3rd ed., 1804, p. 35).

In the first volume of James Sowerby’s British Miscellany, or Coloured Figures of New, Rare, or Little Known Animal Subjects (1806), is printed an illustration of the opah or king-fish from a specimen which Sowerby notes ‘was found near Weymouth, and was procured for me, as soon as the fisherman would part with it, by my friend S. P. Bryer, Esq., of that place’ (p. 45).

According to the inscription on his gravestone at Fordington, Dorset, Bryer died on 18 Apr. 1806, aged 36 years.

See the sources referred to in the 'History' section.