Henry Peter Bayon
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Henry Peter George Bayon (originally Enrico Pietro Bayon) (born Genoa 1876, died Little Shelford 20 October 1952) was an Italian British physician and researcher notable for his role in the study of carcinogens and for his work on the history of science.
Bayon's father was in the Swiss consular service in Genoa. His father's family had fled from Paris during the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. Bayon's mother, Florence Farington, came from an English Quaker family in the publishing trade. He was educated in Genoa and then at a co-educational school of the Society of Friends in Sidcup. This meant that he grew up he was bilingual in Italian and English from childhood.[1]
Education and early career
Bayon went to the University of Genoa to study engineering, after the completion of this course he decided to study medicine and moved to the University of Würzburg which was one of the leading scientific universities in Europe. He specialised in pathology, and his thesis to gain his Doctorate in 1902 was assessed as the best of that year. He then moved to Switzerland where he worked for a number of years as an assistant in pathology at the University of Geneva. In 1905 he returned to Genoa to become a Doctor of Medicine. In this time he became fluent in both French and German. In 1905 he travelled to London where and completed a course at the London School of Tropical Medicine. He then enrolled as a ship's surgeon and undertook voyages to South America, South Africa, and the Black Sea. When he returned to London he was appointed to several pathology positions and he was elected to a Beit Research Fellowship.[1]
Africa and Russia
In 1907 he joined the Sleeping Sickness Commission in Uganda where he conducted important pathological studies of sleeping sickness and of several other tropical diseases. He contracted a tropical disease himself and was carried by bearers for several days to hospital, which his condition became critical. Once he had recovered he continued his studies, becoming especially interested in the study of leprosy. He left the Sleeping Sickness Commission in 1910. In 1912 he was appointed as the research bacteriologist for the Union of South Africa and he spent most of the following years on Robben Island, where at that time there was a leper colony. He was honoured by an M.D. ad eundem of Cape Town University, and the Government of South Africa sent him to the Russian Empire for six months to study leprosy there. During these six months in Russia was able to learn quite a lot of the Russian. He was also to become embroiled in an extensive controversy over the segregation of lepers, a policy which Bayon was always in favour of.[1] In 1912 Bayon demonstrated that cancer could be caused by chemical agents, producing cancers by injecting tar into animals and so demonstrating that some agents were carcinogens.[2] He published this work in The Lancet.[3]
First World War
When the First World War broke out in 1914, Bayon volunteered to serve as a surgeon with the British Red Cross and spent some time as such in France. In 1915 he was naturalised as a British subject and this enabled him to become a pathologist to the County of Middlesex War Hospital in Napsbury, which had 1,000 beds where he spent the remainder of the war.[1]
