Richard Bayley

Richard Bayley (1745 – August 17, 1801) was a New York City physician and the first chief health officer of the city. In 1766 he was apprenticed to New York City physician John Charlton. Bayley married John's sister, Catherine Charlton, at St. John's Episcopal Church (Elizabeth, New Jersey) in 1767; her father was the rector of St. Andrew's Church (Staten Island, New York). The couple had three children, Mary Magdalen (b. 1768, m. 1790 to Wright Post, d. April 9, 1856), Elizabeth Ann (1774-1821, later known as Mother Seton, and the first native-born citizen of the United States to be declared a saint ), and Catherine (1776–8).

Richard Bayley traveled to London in 1769, where he studied anatomy with William Hunter. Bayley returned to the United States in 1772, where he opened a practice with Charlton, his father-in-law and former instructor. Guy's son James Roosevelt Bayley became a Roman Catholic Bishop and Archbishop. 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. By 1783, Bayley had begun performing cataract surgery. His laboratory was attacked in the 1788 Doctors' Riot, which was sparked by public outrage at the illegal procurement of corpses for dissection.

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 federal Quarantine Act of 1799.

Bayley contracted yellow fever while checking a ship that 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.