author
C. Aston (Charles Aston) Key
1793–1849
Best known as a leading English surgeon, he also left behind a concise medical work that reflects the practical, hands-on spirit of nineteenth-century medicine. Trained in the London hospital world and remembered for surgical skill and teaching, he wrote with the clarity of someone used to the operating room as much as the page.
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About the author
Born in Southwark in 1793, Charles Aston Key became one of the best-known English surgeons of his generation. He trained in medicine in London, studied under the influential surgeon Astley Cooper, and built his career through the great teaching hospitals of St Thomas's and Guy's.
Key was admired as an operator and lecturer, and his reputation grew steadily through hospital practice, teaching, and professional honors. Sources also describe him as an early user of ether anaesthesia in England, which places him close to an important turning point in surgical history.
As an author, he is chiefly associated with A Short Treatise on the Section of the Prostate Gland in Lithotomy (1824), a focused surgical work that shows his practical interest in improving operative technique. He died in 1849, but his name still appears in medical histories and library catalogs as both a respected surgeon and a writer of specialist medical literature.