Henry Bond was the son of Rev. William Bond, fellow of Caius and rector of Wheatacre, Norfolk, by his wife Martha, daughter of Richard Hayles of Cambridge. He was admitted to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, from Norwich Grammar School in 1820 and won a scholarship in the following year. He studied medicine at London, Edinburgh and Paris, and took the degree of M.B. in 1825 and that of M.D. in 1831. Cambridge was his home for the remainder of his life. He built up an extensive practice in the town and became physician to Addenbrooke’s Hospital. In 1851 he succeeded Dr. Haviland as Regius professor of physic in the University, and from 1856 to 1863 he represented the University on the General Medical Council.

To his tenure of the chair, which lasted for twenty-one years, must be given some of the credit for the contemporaneous rise in the reputation of the Cambridge Medical School. His lectures, studiously prepared, reviewed comprehensively the existing state of knowledge on the subject under discussion. At the same time, he was sparing in his use of words and impatient of digression. In the Hospital, he showed himself to be a shrewd observer and a confident diagnostician. The enemy of ostentation in any form, he disliked even university ceremonial, and his brusque manner, assumed to dispel any suspicion that he wished to ingratiate himself, offended all but his closest friends. Perhaps this same eccentricity was the cause of his refusal to publish anything more than a brief account of some hospital cases and a syllabus of his lectures. He married a daughter of William Carpenter of Toft Marks, Norfolk, and had a large family.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1883; D.N.B., v, 338; B.M.J., 1883; Al.Cantab., i, 315]