William Orville Ayres (1817–87)

American physician and zoologist. Graduated from Yale in 1837 and began a career as a schoolteacher; returned to Yale to study medicine and qualified as a medical doctor in 1854. Practised medicine in San Francisco; professor of theory and practice of medicine and (from 1862) dean of the medical faculty at Tolland Medical College. An authority on the ichthyology of the United States’s Pacific coast. Left California in the 1870s; practised medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, circa 1874–87. Lecturer on diseases of the nervous system at Yale Medical School, 1879–87.