Edward Nathaniel Bancroft
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Edward Nathaniel Bancroft, M.D. (1772–1842) was an English physician, botanist, and zoologist, known for his writings on yellow fever.
Bancroft was the son of Edward Bancroft. He was born in London and received his schooling under Charles Burney and Samuel Parr. He entered St. John's College, Cambridge, and graduated bachelor of medicine in 1794.[1]
In 1795 he was appointed a physician to the armed forces. He served in the Windward Islands, in Portugal, in the Mediterranean, and with Abercromby's expedition to Egypt in 1801. On his return to England he proceeded to the degree of M.D. in 1804, and began to practise as a physician in London, retaining half-pay rank in the army.
He joined the College of Physicians in 1805, became a fellow in 1806, was appointed to give the Gulstonian lectures the same year, and was made a censor in 1808, at the comparatively early ago of thirty-six; he was a pamphleteer against the pretensions of army surgeons. In 1808 he was appointed a physician to St George's Hospital.
In 1811 he gave up practice in London, owing to ill-health, and resumed his full-pay rank as physician to the forces, proceeding to Jamaica. He remained there for the rest of his life (thirty-one years), his ultimate rank being that of deputy inspector-general of army hospitals. He died at Kingston on 18 September 1842, in his seventy-first year; a mural tablet to his memory was placed in the cathedral church of Kingston 'by the physicians and surgeons of Jamaica'.
Like many naval physicians of his time, Dr Bancroft was a naturalist. The genus name Manta was first published in his paper On the fish known in Jamaica as the sea-devil, 1829.[2]
