Frederick Noël Lawrence Poynter FLA (24 December 1908 – 11 March 1979) was a British librarian and medical historian who served as director of the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine from 1964 to 1973.

[2] Poynter was influenced by the historian Max Neuburger, who joined the Wellcome staff after fleeing Nazi occupied Europe.

When library space was allocated at the Wellcome building in Euston Road in 1941, it was Poynter that was appointed to organise the transfer of the books.

This was interrupted when he was posted to the Royal Air Force educational branch, but by becoming a fellow of the Library Association, he was able to complete his professional qualifications in 1942.

When Bishop resigned in 1953, due to frustrations with the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum and its director, Edgar Ashworth Underwood, Poynter took over as librarian and began in this role with the publication of the quarterly Current Work in the History of Medicine, followed by a catalogue of the library's incunabula.

[2] In 1958, Poynter was a key player in founding the Faculty of the History of Medicine and Pharmacy of the Society of Apothecaries,[3] serving first as its secretary and editor of its proceedings, and then as its chairman in 1970.

Its success led to the foundation of the BSHM in 1965,[2] when he was one of its founding committee members along with William Copeman, Haldane Philp Tait, K. D. Keele, D. Geraint James, Douglas Guthrie, E. S. Clarke and Charles Newman.

[8] He was appointed to the editorial board of the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, with the assistance of his American colleagues.

[2][15] In 1951, with his friend Bishop, they published work on the medical attendant of Oliver Cromwell in A Seventeenth Century Doctor and his Patients: John Symcotts, 1592?–1662.