Henry Burton

Dr. Henry Burton FRCP (27 February 1799 – 10 August 1849) was an eminent 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.

Henry Burton was a son of the preeminent London property developer James Burton, and his wife Elizabeth Westley (1761 – 1837). Henry was a brother of the gunpowder manufacturer William Ford Burton, the eminent 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.

Henry was educated at Tonbridge School, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, at which he received the degrees MB, ML, MD, BS, and FRCP, and later at St Bartholomew's Hospital.

He went to sea on the 98-gun HMS Boyne before resigning from the Navy and entering the Gunpowder Office. In September 1825, he became Professor of Chemistry at St Thomas' Hospital, where he subsequently became Senior Physician. He was appointed Censor of the Royal College of Physicians in 1838 and later was appointed Consiliarius He is famous for his discovery that a blue line on the gums, the eponymous Burton line, is a symptom of lead poisoning.

Henry Burton married Mary Elizabeth, eldest daughter of William Poulton of Maidenhead, at St. George's, Bloomsbury, in 1826. She died in 1829, without issue, and Henry did not remarry. Henry lived at 41 Jermyn Street, London, and 58 Marina, St. Leonard's-on-Sea.