Henry Burton

Dr Henry Burton (27 February 1799 – 10 August 1849) was a British physician and chemist, who is famous for his identification of blue discolouration of the gums, the eponymous Burton line, as a symptom of lead poisoning. Family Henry Burton was a son of the London property developer James Burton and his wife Elizabeth Westley (1761 – 1837). Henry was a brother of the gunpowder manufacturer William Ford Burton, the architect Decimus Burton, and the Egyptologist, James Burton. As the Cambridge Alumni Database identifies, some sources, including the entry for Henry Burton in the Royal College of Physicians’s Lives of the Fellows, incorrectly state that Henry Burton was the son of one ‘John Burton’. This is incorrect: he was the son of the aforementioned James Burton. On his father's side, his great-great grandparents were Rev. James Haliburton (1681–1756) and Margaret Eliott, daughter of Sir William Eliott, 2nd Baronet and aunt of George Augustus Eliott, 1st Baron Heathfield. Henry was descended from John Haliburton (1573–1627), from whom Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet could trace his descent on the maternal side. He was a cousin of the Tory MP Thomas Chandler Haliburton, and of the civil servant Arthur Lawrence Haliburton, 1st Baron Haliburton.