Background
William Baynham was born on December 7, 1749, in Virginia, the son of Dr. John Baynham of Carolina.
William Baynham was born on December 7, 1749, in Virginia, the son of Dr. John Baynham of Carolina.
After five years of study under Dr. Walker, considered one of the ablest surgeons in America, William Baynham went, at the age of twenty, to London. Here he entered St. Thomas's Hospital as a student and so distinguished himself that he soon gained the attention and later the close friendship of Else, the professor of anatomy.
In 1772 William Baynham was employed by Charles Collignon, professor of anatomy at Cambridge, to dissect and prepare the subjects for his lectures. He continued in this employment for several winters and in the remaining part of each year was a partner with a surgeon of Margate, named Slater. In 1776 he accepted an offer from Else on the following terms: "He was to superintend the anatomical theatre and dissecting room, prepare bodies for his public demonstrations, make preparations for the museum and to instruct his pupils in the arts of dissecting, injecting, making anatomical preparations, etc. , at a salary of eighty and ninety pounds the first two years and one hundred pounds a year for five succeeding years - at the expiration of which (having qualified himself in the interim for the office) Mr. Else was to relinquish to him the professor's chair or to take him as joint professor on equal terms as he might choose. " Before the end of this period, however, Else died suddenly, in 1781.
Baynham missed by a narrow margin election by the governors of the Hospital to the professorship thus left vacant. Disappointed in his expectations, he became a member of the "Company of Surgeons" and practised surgery for a few years in London and then returned to America, after an absence of sixteen years, and settled in Essex, Virginia. Here he built up a large practise, becoming especially distinguished in surgery. He performed several operations for stone, cataract, and extra-uterine conception. A detailed account of a case of the latter may be seen by reference to the New York Medical and Surgical Journal. He is credited with having performed the first successful operation for extra-uterine pregnancy. An alleged discovery by Baynham of a fine vascular membrane on the surface of the cutis immediately under the rete mucosum was incorrectly reported by Cruikshank and copied into Wistar's Anatomy. William Baynham died at the age of sixty-six.
William Baynham was a member of the Surgeons' Company of London.
Baynham was slow and not very distinct in the enunciation of his ideas. He generally, on first acquaintance, disappointed those whose expectations had been raised and whose opinions of him had been formed from his reputation. But if not "a ready man, " he was a "full and accurate one. "
Baynham married a daughter of the Rev. John Mathews of Essex County.