Adding to the confusion, another younger brother, also called Charles Badham, became vicar of All Saints Sudbury in Suffolk.
[3] David Badham seems to have started his medical career in Scotland, where he achieved some notoriety for setting a patient's irregular heartbeat to music.
[4] In 1833, a Radcliffe travelling fellowship allowed Badham to practise medicine in France and Italy, for some of the time as personal physician to Thomas Barrett-Leonard MP.
Dr Badham was more successful as a mycologist, writing a well-received Treatise on the esculent funguses of England, published in 1847.
Eating wild fungi was considered an eccentric and dangerous pastime in England at the time and the book attracted some popular interest, if only as a curiosity.
Badham became interested in fungi generally, as well as myxomycetes, sending unusual collections to the leading mycologist of the day, the Rev.
[11] Badham's last major work was a compilation of articles first published in Frazer's Magazine, with the strange title Prose halieutics, or ancient and modern fish tattle.