The eldest son of John Bradbury, a merchant, J. B. Bradbury was born at Saddlesworth in Yorkshire. At the age of seventeen, he began an apprenticeship with a doctor and four years later was admitted to Caius College, Cambridge, whence he migrated to Downing College, with a scholarship, after four terms. He obtained first-class honours in the natural sciences tripos in 1864, a year before graduating as B.A, and went on to study medicine at King’s College, London, graduating as M.B. in 1867. He returned to Cambridge in 1866 for a ten-year term as lecturer on comparative anatomy at Downing, after which he lectured on anatomy and physiology at Caius till 1880, when the claims of a flourishing private practice intervened. In 1869 he was elected, on H. J. H. Bond’s resignation, to the staff of Addenbrooke’s Hospital, on which he remained active for no less than half a century.

Bradbury held the Linacre lectureship at St. John’s College from 1872 to 1894. In the latter year, he began a thirty-six years’ tenure of the Downing professorship of medicine, but took little part in the development of the Cambridge Medical School. He acted as an examiner in medicine both at Oxford and Cambridge. He was Bradshaw Lecturer in 1895 and Croonian Lecturer in 1899 at the Royal College of Physicians, and was senior Fellow on the College List at the time of his death. Bradbury was married twice: firstly, to Sarah, daughter of James Openshaw, and, secondly, in 1885 to Jane, daughter of Rev. R. Gwatkin. He was survived by one son and two daughters. He died at Cambridge.

G H Brown

[Lancet, 1930; B.M.J., 1930; Lyle, 143; Biog.Hist.of Caius College, ii, 357]