Frederic John Poynton

Dr. Frederic John Poynton M.D., F.R.C.P. (26 June 1869 – 29 October 1943) was an English physician who studied rheumatism in children while practising at Great Ormond Street Hospital and University College Hospital. Also a keen cricketer, he played 25 first-class matches for Somerset County Cricket Club between 1891 and 1896. Life and medical career Born in June 1869, Poynton was the son of a Bath clergyman. He was educated first at Marlborough College, and then studied medicine at University College, Bristol. He qualified in 1893 and specialised in children's medicine, which resulted in him being appointed as assistant physician at Great Ormond Street Hospital in 1900, and at University College Hospital (UCH) in 1903. He married Alice Constance Campbell-Orde, daughter of Sir John William Powlett Campbell-Orde in December 1904. UCH appointed him as a full physician in 1910. During the First World War, he served in the Royal Army Medical Corps as a captain. In 1919 he was appointed as a full physician as Great Ormond Street, and over the following years he attempted to secure the site of the Foundling Hospital, which has recently relocated, so that Great Ormond Street could expand. He failed in this endeavour, but these years still provided him with the peak of his medical career. He was the Bradshaw lecturer at the Royal College of Physicians in 1924 and the Lettsomian lecturer at the Medical Society of London in 1927. In 1931, he was elected president of the British Paediatric Association, and in 1934, the year he retired from hospital appointments, he was the Long Fox Lecturer at Bristol. In 1939, he and his wife divorced. In 1907, he wrote a book on Heart Disease and Thoracic Aneurysm. He was particularly interested in childhood rheumatism, a subject on which he wrote extensively, working with Alexander Paine. His writings were often controversial, fueling feuds with a number of his contemporaries. In Poynton and Paine's 1913 publication Researches on Rheumatism, they formulated a streptococcal theory for the cause of acute rheumatism, which was strongly argued against. He was awarded the Dawson Williams Memorial prize for founding the Heard Homes for convalescent rheumatic children in London. He co-authored Recent Advances in the Study of Rheumatism with Dr Bernard Schlesinger, which reached a second edition in 1937.