William Maddock Bayliss

English physiologist

• Born: May 2, 1860; Wolverhampton, England
• Died: August 27, 1924; London, England

William Bayliss made major discoveries in the field of physiology, most notably in terms of the heart and in biochemistry relating to lymph flow, hormones and their actions, principles of enzyme action, and properties of colloidal biological systems.

Primary field: Biology

Specialty: Physiology

Early Life

William Maddock Bayliss (BAY-lihs) was born to Moses Bayliss and Jane Maddock in the industrial town of Wolverhampton in the English Midlands. His father was a blacksmith who became a successful manufacturer of screws, nuts and bolts, and wrought-iron gates. William attended a small private school in Wolverhampton. He showed an early interest in natural science but later joined his father’s business. His father was more interested in the technical aspects of the manufacturing process than in the commercial side, and William inherited his father’s inclination to do things with his own hands. The boy soon tired of manufacturing and decided to study medicine, the only type of scientific education available to him at that time. He began his studies as an apprentice to a local medical practitioner and learned wound dressing and dispensing at the local hospital.

Moses Bayliss retired in 1880 and the family moved to a newly built house in the London suburb of Hampstead. William had entered University College, London, the preceding year and was following the medical curriculum. After an auspicious beginning in the preclinical sciences, he failed the anatomy examination and found that research, which he took up under physiology professor Burdon Sanderson, was more to his liking.

In 1883, Sanderson became the Waynflete Chair of Physiology at Oxford and, in 1885, Bayliss followed him to Oxford, entering Wadham College as an undergraduate. At twenty-three he was older than the other undergraduates, who jokingly called him “father Bayliss.” He enjoyed undergraduate life and made many friends at Oxford. In 1888, Bayliss returned to University College with a first-class honors degree in natural science and was appointed assistant in physiology.

His father’s house in Hampstead was in the outermost suburbs of London, and Bayliss had to walk more than a mile over Hampstead Hill to catch a horse-drawn bus to University College. The journey was tiring, and he set up a study and private laboratory at the house in Hampstead. This study and the house’s four acres of grounds provided opportunity for recreation and social events. In later years, many young research workers from England and abroad were to enjoy Bayliss’s diffident and kind manner as he hosted tennis parties, garden parties, and formal dinner parties.

The manual skills that Bayliss had learned from his father helped him master difficult electrical and physicochemical techniques not widely used by physiologists at that time, but his interests were more wide-ranging than physiology. Even on vacation he was a student of geology and fossils, of Roman and medieval antiquities, and of wildflowers and the plant and animal life of the seashore. Bayliss was an avid photographer, taking a heavy-plate camera and tripod on vacation. He took all the photographs that illustrated his books.

The single most significant event in Bayliss’s life was Ernest Henry Starling’s arrival at University College in 1890. Apart from marking the beginning of a fruitful research collaboration, their acquaintance led to the marriage of Bayliss and Gertrude Starling, his colleague’s sister, in 1893.

Life’s Work

Bayliss spent his entire career at University College, where he taught and performed research in physiology and related subjects. In 1892, he and Starling published a report on the electrical activity in the mammalian heart and recorded the first human electrocardiograms; part of this work was done at Oxford, where better equipment was available. After some work on vasomotor control that has not stood the test of time, he published two papers in 1894, again with Starling, which foreshadowed Starling’s later work on the formation of lymph and autoregulation of the heart.

In the last years of the nineteenth century, Bayliss and Starling turned their attention to secretions in the small intestine. That work led to the discovery of the gastrointestinal hormone secretin in 1902. Secretin, which is secreted by the mucosa of the small intestine when exposed to acid material from the stomach, is a potent stimulus for pancreatic secretion. It was the first hormone to be identified.

Bayliss’s important work was clouded by the accusation that he failed to anesthetize a dog during a 1903 demonstration as part of a lecture on secretion. Stephen Coleridge, secretary of the National Anti-Vivisection Society, stated that the dog was not anesthetized and had struggled forcibly during the experiment, and had seemed to suffer while in a fully conscious state. What became known as the “Brown Dog affair” was reported in several London papers.

Such treatment of an animal would have meant criminal charges, the loss of Bayliss’s license under the Vivisection Act, and the probable loss of his position at University College. Bayliss was persuaded to seek redress in the courts, probably at the urging of Starling and others, who saw this false accusation as a chance to blunt antivivisectionist sentiment. The antivivisectionists made an unfortunate choice of target in Bayliss, who had the financial means to risk the hazards of a court action and whose gentle manner in the witness box was a great help to his case. He sued Coleridge for libel; the jury trial lasted four days and ended in an award of two thousand pounds to Bayliss. Long lines waited to get into the court each day, and the proceedings and verdict were reported in British and French newspapers. Bayliss used the award to establish a research fund in physiology at University College. That same year, Bayliss was promoted to assistant professor at University College. He was also elected to membership in the Royal Society.

After the work on secretin, Bayliss turned his attention to enzyme action and the adsorption phenomenon. This work would occupy him for the rest of his life. He determined that enzymes act as catalysts—that is, they facilitate various chemical reactions in the body—and he published these findings in the monograph The Nature of Enzyme Action in 1908. He completed some preliminary work on the kinetics of enzyme action and in 1912 showed that enzymes are capable of synthesizing large molecules from smaller subunits.

In 1911, Bayliss was awarded a Royal Medal, and in 1912 he was appointed Professor of General Physiology, a chair specially created for him at University College. These honors did not detract from his accessibility and easy manner with students and colleagues. In his laboratory, he was always available to undergraduate as well as research students, and to visitors from other laboratories. He was often sympathetic to minorities when their views were attacked as a result of emotional prejudice, and he publicly supported women’s suffrage and birth control. In 1915 he published Principles of General Physiology.

During World War I, Bayliss turned his attention to practical problems. After severe battlefield injury, it was common for a soldier initially to show signs of recovery, only to die a few hours later from circulatory collapse with a very low blood pressure. To prevent this secondary wound shock, Bayliss reported in 1916 that intravenous infusion of a solution of 6 percent gum acacia in saline, which had a viscosity similar to blood, would raise and maintain the blood pressure. During the next two years, he showed that damaged tissues release vasodilators into circulation; the massive dilation of blood vessels that resulted, often coupled with blood loss from the wound, caused a profound and usually fatal drop in blood pressure. These changes could be reversed by an intravenous infusion of colloidal material. His observations are fundamental to modern methods of treating shock.

As a result of his work, many thousands of soldiers’ lives were saved by intravenous infusions of gum acacia and saline. The gum acacia and saline solution was not ideal, but the success of this technique led to the availability of adequate supplies of blood on the battlefield in World War II.

Bayliss produced little original research in the last few years of his life, but continued to work on lectures, reviews, and monographs relating to his earlier work, and to revise later editions of Principles of General Physiology and The Nature of Enzyme Action. Bayliss died in London in 1924.

Impact

Bayliss lived and worked during the birth of modern physiology and contributed greatly to the field. He was one of the founders of the younger science of biochemistry as well. He made major contributions to the modern understanding of the physiology of the heart and the lymphatic system, to the physiology and biochemistry of hormones, and to the biochemistry of enzyme action. This knowledge of hormones and enzymes is fundamental to understanding living systems; thus, his discoveries lie at the heart of the diagnostic and therapeutic methods of modern medicine. Bayliss also showed a desire for fair treatment for those less favored than himself, and for generosity toward those whose scientific views differed from his.

Bibliography

Bayliss, Leonard E. “William Maddock Bayliss, 1860–1924: Life and Scientific Work.” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 4 (Summer 1961): 460–79. Print. An account of Bayliss’s life and work written by his son, also a physiologist. Includes a complete bibliography of Bayliss’s scientific publications.

Hill, A. V. “Bayliss and Starling and the Happy Fellowship of Physiologists.” Journal of Physiology 204 (1969): 1–13. Print. An account of early twentieth-century physiology and physiologists by a physiologist who trained under and worked with both Starling and Bayliss.

Henderson, John. A Life of Ernest Starling. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. Print. A biography of Starling that discusses his life and work with Bayliss, his colleague and brother-in-law.

Howard, John M., and Walter Hess. History of the Pancreas: Mysteries of the Hidden Organ. New York: Kluwer Academic, 2002. Print. Written by two academic pancreatic surgeons, includes information about Bayliss and his work.