William Bayliss

Sir William Maddock Bayliss was an English physiologist, born in Wednesbury, Staffordshire, on 2 May 1860, whose father, a merchant of ornamental ironwork, moved the family to Hampstead in north London. He began to study medicine at University College London in 1880 but dropped out when he failed anatomy, and attracted to physiology he studied under John Burdon Sanderson at Wadham College, Oxford, where he won a first class degree. He returned to University College London in 1888 as an assistant to Edward Sharpey-Schafer and in 1890 began his collaboration with Ernest Starling. They studied pressures in the veins and capillaries and then, in 1897, the control of the motility of the gut. Bayliss also studied the circulation of the brain and the action of enzymes and was a founder of the Biochemical Society. A Professorship in General Physiology was created for him at University College London in 1912, and he was awarded the Royal Medal in 1911 and the Copley Medal in 1919.