# American Medical Biographies/Bayley, Richard

​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, Connecticut, 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 permission 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 antecedent 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 unknown young American.
In 1781 Bayley published his letter to Dr. William Hunter on "Angina Trachealis" and subsequently a "History of the Yellow Fever in New York in 1795," attempting in the latter to differentiate between contagion and infection.
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 himself 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 ill in New York. When, finally, he threw up his commission, he arrived in time only to see her die.
Bayley's attention to morbid anatomy and pathology made him the subject of injurious criticism from some of his narrow-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 (q.v.), lectured to them on anatomy. But the students of 1778 were no wiser than those of to-day and by their imprudence unintentionally roused the people, and the celebrated "Doctor's Mob" broke into the building and unfortunately wreaked their vengeance 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 by the operation at the shoulder-joint, this being, so far as can be ascertained, the first time it was done in the United 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 murderer of our own creating," and due partly to a filthy harbor. He noticed it was worse when the West India ships came in the summer and did not rest until he had obtained moderately good quarantine laws.
Like many another physician his life was forfeited to duty. In 1801 he found fever on an Irish emigrant ship and ordered the passengers to go on shore to the tents and rooms provided but to leave their baggage on board. In the morning he found the well and the sick with all baggage huddled together in one big room. The atmosphere into which Bayley walked can be imagined. He stayed a while directing matters but was soon after seized with intense pain in the stomach and head. He had to go home to bed in the afternoon and died seven days after, a most serious loss in every way to his city. Thacher says he was a perfect gentleman; inflexible in attachments, invincible in his dislikes, in temper fiery. A busy surgeon fighting opposition in his own branch and dull ignorance in health officers may perhaps have had some of that "fiery temper" put to his credit as righteous anger.