Page:A cyclopedia of American medical biography vol. 1.djvu/165

 BAYLEY l

the St. John Public Hospital and was chairman of its Board of Commissioners for forty years. He was also chairman at different times of the St. John and Pro- vincial Boards of Health. He was elect- ed president of the Council of Physicians and Surgeons in 1881, and was the presi- dent of the Canadian Medical Associa- tion in 1895.

In 1900 he received the honorary LL. D. from the University of New Brunswick, and in his seventieth year, after he took his M. D., the University of Edinburgh conferred upon him a similar honor.

In 184S Dr. Bayard married Susan M. Wilson, but had no children. He died on December 17, 1907. A. B. A.

Bayley, Richard (1745-1801).

This New York physician, who was far ahead of his time in the study of croup and fevers, was born at Fairfield, Con- necticut, in 1745, of French-English descent. He studied medicine under Dr. Charlton of New York but went, after marrying Charlton's daughter, to London where he had the good luck to gain the friendship of William Hunter and per- mission to work in his dissecting-room. On returning to New York he practised with Dr. Charlton, and at this period he began to study the then prevalent and fatal croup, a disease of which little was known. His opinions on this complaint and his successful practice in consonance to them were published in "Richter's Surgical Repository" several years ante- cedent to his own letter on croup because conveyed in the letters of Michaelis, chief of the Hessian Medical Staff to that journal. Michaelis, with that love of truth characteristic of a scientific man, yielded up his own opinion of the croup to adopt those of a comparatively un- known young American.

In 1781 Bayley published his letter to Dr. William Hunter on " Angina Traehe- alis" and subsequently a "History of the Yellow Fever in New York in 1795," attempting in the latter to differentiate between contagion and infection.

BAYLEY

But a serious blow had befallen Bayley in the loss of his wife. He had gone for a winter to London in 1776 and scanty means rather than inclination led him to take a surgeoncy on board a British man o'war coming over here. He found him- self established with the troops on Rhode Island after it had been taken by the English and with no chance, except by resigning, of seeing his wife then 01 in New York. When, finally, he threw up his commission, he only arrived in time to see her die.

Bayley's attention to morbid anatomy and pathology made him the subject of injurious criticism from some of his nar- row-minded contemporaries who accused him of experimentation on sick soldiers. Nevertheless, Bayley, anxious to share his advance in knowledge, delivered lectures in an unoccupied house to students while his son-in-law, Wright Post, lectured to them on anatomy. But the students of 1788 were no wiser than those of to-day and by their imprudence unintentionally roused the people, and the celebrated "Doctors' Mob" broke into the building and unfortunately wreaked their ven- geance on Bayley's rare collection of morbid anatomy which they threw into carts, took away and buried, thereby losing to anatomists many delicate and dexterously prepared specimens.

When the faculty of Columbia College thought it wise to constitute a medical faculty Bayley and Wright Post became professors respectively of Anatomy and Surgery. Bayley was specially good as a lithotomist, and also in 1782 successfully removed an arm from its glenoid cavity by the operation of the shoulder- joint, this being, as far as can be ascertained, the first time it was done in the States.

Although devoted to surgery and delighting in pathological work, Bayley's orderly mind was always upset by the slowness of his fellow townsmen to work for urgent reforms. He and a few others got- the New York Dispensary established and when yellow fever came he slaved day and night for the sick and proclaimed everywhere that the fever was "a