Autograph Letter Signed to Mrs Metcalfe, a letter of condolence on the death of her father, the surgeon Frederic Carpenter Skey.

12mo: 1 p. Good, on lightly-aged paper, with a couple of light spots at foot. Sixteen lines of closely-written text. He is forwarding a 'Copy of a Resolution unanimously adopted by the Council of this college on the 17 Inst'. He wishes to state his 'personal regret' at her 'great bereavement'. Her father was 'a man, who stood so high in the profession of which he was so great an ornament; who fulfilled the duties of the several Offices he held in this College with so much conscientiousness, good feeling and ability and who ever Commanded the esteem and respect of his Colleagues and the Offices of the Institution'. Skey's name is not mentioned, but this item is from the Skey archive. In an obituary Skey was described as 'one of the chiefs of that great school of surgery of which Abernethy was once master, and indeed the founder' and 'almost the last of Abernethy's private pupils'. Hancock gives his name to the procedure known as 'Hancock's amputation' (the amputation of the foot through the astragalus).