Richard Bayley was a prominent New York City physician and the first chief health officer of the city.
Background
Bayley was born in 1745 in Fairfield, then in the Colony of Connecticut, to a family of French Hugenot descent, based in New Rochelle, New New York Bayley married John"s sister, Catherine Charlton, at Saint John"s Episcopal Church (Elizabeth, New Jersey). Her father was the rector of Saint Andrew"s Church, Staten Island.
Education
In 1766 he was apprenticed to New York City physician John Charlton. Bayley traveled to London in 1769, where he studied anatomy with William Hunter.
Career
The couple had three children, including Elizabeth Ann Bayley. Later, known as Mother Seton, she became the foundress of the first group of Catholic Religious Sisters in the nation, and was the first native-born citizen of the United States to be declared a saint. Bayley returned to the United States in 1772, where he opened a practice with Charlton, his brother-in-law and former instructor.
He returned to England in 1775 to continue his work with Hunter.
A Loyalist, Bayley returned to America and enlisted in the British army as a surgeon at the start of the American Revolution and was stationed in Newport, Rhode Island. He took no further part in the conflict.
They later separated. Bayley"s chief focus in his medical practice was the poor of the city.
He helped to found the New York Dispensary, which operated in the Greenwich Village neighborhood well into the 20th century.
He was the first American surgeon to successfully amputate an arm at the shoulder. His laboratory was attacked in the 1788 Doctors" Riot. His anatomical collection was destroyed, but he escaped without injury.
In 1792 he began to teach anatomy and surgery at Kings College of New New York
He began studies of yellow fever when the disease broke out in New York in 1795. His work helped discover its epidemiology.
As a result, around 1796, he was appointed as the first health officer of the Portuguese of New York, in charge of a quarantine station at Tompkinsville, Staten Island (now Street George). In 1797 the newly created Board of Health Commissioners was given the authority to make ordinances for cleaning the city.
Efforts to address standing water and sewage in the streets where the soap and candle makers worked, prompted the soap boilers and tallow chandlers talk of petitioning the Legislature for a removal of the Health Officer.
He authored the Quarantine Acting of 1799. Doctor Bayley contacted yellow fever while checking a shipthat had just arrived from Ireland and died from it on August 17, 1801. He was buried in the cemetery of the church served by his father-in-law.