Alexander Small. Mezzotint by J. Faber, junior, after B. Dandridge.

He leans on a volume of ancient medical writings by Aulus Cornelius Celsus. A portrait of the surgeon Alexander Small who worked around the west end of the Strand in London and is reported to have died in 1752. In 1698 he was described by John Colbach of York Buildings as"Mr. Alexander Small a surgeon in New Round Court, a young man of great honesty and industry, and one whom I frequently imploy." (J. Colbach, A relation of a very sudden and extraordinary cure of a person bitten by a viper, London 1698): New Round Court was at the extreme west end of the Strand, on the north side. Later he moved south of the Strand to York-Buildings, Villiers Street. His monument in St Mary the Virgin, Clifton Reynes, Buckinghamshire, includes his bust by Roubiliac (also attributed to Scheemakers: Malcolm Baker, 'The making of portrait busts in the mid-eighteenth century', The Burlington magazine, December 1995, 137, p. 830). He was not the same Alexander Small, surgeon (1710-1794) who associated with Benjamin Franklin