Background
Joseph Toynbee was born in Heckington, Lincolnshire in 1815. He was the second son of fifteen children of the wealthy land owner and farmer George Toynbee (1783–1865).
physician university professor
Joseph Toynbee was born in Heckington, Lincolnshire in 1815. He was the second son of fifteen children of the wealthy land owner and farmer George Toynbee (1783–1865).
After several years of private teaching, he attended King"s Lynn Grammar School in Norfolk. At the age of seventeen he studied medicine. He studied anatomy under George Derby Dermott (1802–1847) at Hunterian Medical School at the Great Windmill Street, and later gained a reputation for a prosector.
He performed studies on the functionality of the Eustachian tube and of the tympanic membrane and tried to restore attempts, the tympanoplasty. When Saint Mary's Hospital was founded in Paddington, he a became an aural surgeon and a lecturer on ear diseases — his course of clinical lectures being published in 1855 and 1866. During this time period he composed two major works: "A Descriptive Catalogue of Preparations Illustrative of the Diseases of the Ear" (1857), and "The Diseases of the Ear: Their Nature, Diagnosis and Treatment" (1860).
From his many dissections of "deaf ears", he studied ankylosis of the stapes.
He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in March 1842. Austrian otologist Adam Politzer (1835–1920) penned biographies in French (1905) and German (1914) honoring Toynbee, whom Politzer regarded as a major influence.
Beginning with Joseph, the Toynbees have been prominent in British intellectual society for several generations (note that this diagram is not a comprehensive Toynbee family tree):.
Royal Society.
