Joseph Frank Payne

[1] The son of Joseph Payne, a schoolmaster, and his wife Eliza Dyer who was also a teacher, he was born in the parish of St. Giles, Camberwell, on 10 Jan. 1840.

In 1879 he was sent to Russia by the British government with Surgeon-major Colvill to observe and report on the epidemic of bubonic plague then in progress at Vetlanka, but illness prevented him from achieving much.

[2] In 1899 Payne was elected Harveian librarian of the College of Physicians, and gave many books to the library.

He died at Lyonsdown House, New Barnet, on 16 November 1910, and was buried at Bell's Hill cemetery.

[2] In accordance with the terms of Dr. Radcliffe's foundation Payne visited Paris, Berlin, and Vienna, and made good use of their pathological opportunities.

In 1896 he delivered the Harveian oration at the College of Physicians on the relation of William Harvey to Galen,[3] and in 1900 wrote a life of Thomas Sydenham.

The lectures of 1904 which Payne was preparing for the press at the time of his death address the writings of Ricardus Anglicanus and the anatomical teaching of the Middle Ages.

Payne demonstrated that the Anatomy of the Body of Man, printed in Tudor times and of which the editions extend into the middle of the seventeenth century, was not written by Thomas Vicary, whose name appears on the title-page, but was a translation of a mediæval manuscript.

During the spring of 1909 he delivered a course of lectures on Galen and Greek medicine at the request of the delegates of the Common University Fund at Oxford.

[2] Payne wrote articles on plague in the Encyclopædia Britannica, ninth edition, St. Thomas's Hospital Reports, Quarterly Review (October 1901), and Allbutt's System of Medicine, vol.

In 1889 he published Observations on some Rare Diseases of the Skin, and was president of the Dermatological Society (1892-3); papers by him are in its Transactions.