 The youngest child of Edmund Turner, a banker of Truro, and Joanna his wife, daughter of Richard Ferris, he was born there on 13 August 1793.He was educated at Truro grammar school under its headmaster Cornelius Cardew, and was then apprenticed to Nehemiah Duck, one of the surgeons to St Peter's Hospital, Bristol.Turner left Bristol at the end of his apprenticeship for London, where, in the autumn of 1815, he entered as a student under Astley Paston Cooper, at the united borough hospitals of Guy and St. Thomas.