AAI Biosketch

Stanhope Bayne-Jones: A Biosketch

by John S. Emrich and Bryan Peery
December 2012, page 17

A Biographical Sketch

Born in New Orleans on November 6, 1888, Stanhope Bayne-Jones was orphaned when his father committed suicide in 1894, one year after his mother had passed away due to complications arising from the birth of his younger brother. Bayne-Jones lived with his grandfather, Joseph Jones, a practicing physician and a professor of medicine and chemistry at Tulane University, for two years, until Joseph’s death in 1896. After a childhood filled with boarding schools and moves from one relative’s home to another’s, Bayne-Jones entered Yale, where he received his A.B. in 1910. Determined to follow in his grandfather’s footsteps, he began his medical studies at Tulane University before transferring to the Johns Hopkins University in 1911. He received his M.D. in 1914 and remained at the Johns Hopkins Hospital as house officer (1914–15) and assistant resident pathologist (1915–16). After he was appointed head of the new Laboratory of Bacteriology and Immunology at Johns Hopkins in early 1916, Bayne-Jones studied bacteriology and immunology under Hans Zinsser (AAI 1917, president 1919–20) at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York for six months before the laboratory opened.

Bayne-Jones joined the U.S. Army Medical Reserve Corps (MRC) in 1915. He was commissioned at the rank of first lieutenant and promoted to captain the following year. In May 1917, he volunteered to be integrated into the British Expeditionary Force. He was reassigned to the American Expeditionary Forces upon their arrival in March 1918. After the armistice, he was promoted to major and remained in Germany until he was relieved of active duty in May 1919.

Bayne-Jones returned to Johns Hopkins in the summer of 1919 and became assistant professor of bacteriology the following year. In 1923, he accepted a position as a professor of bacteriology at the recently opened University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. He left Rochester in 1932 and became a professor of bacteriology at Yale University School of Medicine, where he was appointed dean three years later. From 1932 to 1938, he was also Master of Trumbull College at Yale.

When the Second World War began in 1939, Bayne-Jones was promoted to lieutenant colonel in the MRC and, two years later, headed the Commission on Epidemiological Survey of the Board for the Investigation and Control of Influenza and other Epidemic Diseases in the Army. From 1942 to 1946, Bayne-Jones was once again an active-duty officer, serving multiple positions within the Office of the Surgeon General. He quickly rose through the ranks, becoming colonel in 1942 and brigadier general in 1944. He was relieved from active duty in 1946 and, the following year, accepted an appointment as president of the Joint Administrative Board of the New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, a position he held until 1953. After serving as the technical director of research and development for the Office of the Surgeon General (1953–56), Bayne-Jones was appointed by the secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1957 to chair an advisory committee charged with establishing guidelines for National Institutes of Health research following that year’s dramatic increase in the NIH budget.

His many military and civilian honors include a British Military Cross (1917), a French Croix de Guerre (1918), election to the American Philosophical Society (1944), the U.S. Typhus Commission Medal (1945), the Chapin Medal of the Rhode Island State Medical Society (1947), the Bruce Medal of the American College of Physicians (1949), the Passano Foundation Award (1959), and a Decoration for Outstanding Civilian Service from the U.S. Army (1965).

In addition to serving AAI as president (1930–31), Bayne-Jones was an associate editor of The Journal of Immunology (1936–49).

Bayne-Jones died at his home in Washington, DC, on February 20, 1970, at the age of 81.

 


References

This biographical sketch is compiled from Stanhope Bayne-Jones,“Curriculum Vitae,” American Association of Immunologists Records, Box 8, Folder 11, University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Albert E. Cowdrey, War and Healing: Stanhope Bayne-Jones and the Maturing of American Medicine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992).

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