Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth- Century Periodical Press

Front matter

Edinburgh (Critical Studies in Romanticism

Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth- Century

Periodical Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction: Medicine and Blackwoodian Romanticism

Chapter 1 Medical Discourse and Ideology in the Edinburgh Review

‘MEDICAL subjects ought in general, we think, to be left to the Medical Journals.’

Edinburgh Review (1806)'

In his classic essay on ‘Lay Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century: The Evidence of the Gentleman’s Magazine’ (1985), Roy Porter cites this striking declaration as indicative of ‘a growing intellectual division of labour amongst both opinion-producers and opinion-consumers, in which medicine was being set aside for specialists’.* As such, the review article is seen to represent the nineteenth-century revision of the eighteenth-century public sphere - a move away from the ‘notion that men of differing ranks could discourse within it on all subjects on equal terms, through the authenticating token of Enlightenment rationality’.’ However, within the early nineteenth-century Edinburgh literary marketplace, local commercial factors were also at play: the article was co-authored by Jeffrey and Andrew Duncan, junior, and its appearance shortly after the launching of Duncan’s own specialist periodical, the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, in 1805 is most probably not a coincidence.* The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal was also published by Archibald Constable (an advertisement for the new medical journal may be found in the Edinburgh Review of October 1805), and it was not to Constable’s or his editors’ advantage for two of his most successful periodical publications to compete with one another. Medical content in the Edinburgh Review does markedly decline following the 1806 statement, with coverage only extending to medical topics of significant public concern (such as vaccination, malaria, contagious fever, and the treatment of the mentally ill) and also those of particular interest to chemists, physiologists or anatomists. However, the prevalence of medical content and the importance of medical contributors in the early years of the Edinburgh has yet to be fully recognised, and this chapter examines medical discourses and ideologies in the Edinburgh to set up a comparative context for examining the relationship of their primary ideological competitor — Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine — to medical culture. I argue that the reforming and professionalising rhetoric of the Edinburgh emerged, in part, from medico-scientific culture and was harnessed by medical contributors and carried forward in Constable’s medical journal, which, as David Hamilton notes, had a ‘similar format’ to the Edinburgh Review and ‘a similar authority in medical circles’.” As we will see, the move away from including specialist medical content in the Edinburgh — a move that represents a departure from a tradition of British periodicals, such as the Critical Review and the Gentleman’s Magazine, providing cutting-edge medical news, and in the case of the latter, acting as a ‘medical talking-shop’— opened the door for the development of new ways of engaging with medical culture within Blackwood’s, intended for the reading audiences of the popular nineteenth-century literary magazine.°

Edinburgh Medicine and the Founding of the Edinburgh Review

The founding of the Edinburgh is a tale that quickly turned to legend in the nineteenth century. However, all versions of the tale collude in the inclusion of the surgeon John Thomson in the ‘confederacy’ that formed to support the first numbers. In a journal entry of 30 September 1802, Francis Horner writes that after the original plan was drawn up between himself, Jeffrey, and Sydney Smith, ‘[t]he plan was immediately communicated to Murray, Allen, and Hamilton; Brown, Brougham, and the two Thomsons have gradually been made parties’.’” Thomson was by far the most prolific contributor of medical reviews to the Edinburgh in its early years. Today, he is best remembered as the first biographer of William Cullen, and as ‘the Old Chairmaker’ — a persistent innovator, or, from his opponent’s perspective, a radical usurper of the conservative medical faculty at the University of Edinburgh.’ He was responsible for the creation of a Regius professorship of military surgery in 1806 and the establishment of a separate chair of general pathology in 1831 (to commence in 1832). Duncan, junior, and his father, Andrew Duncan, senior, were similarly innovative.’ They campaigned heavily for the establishment of the chair in Medical Jurisprudence and Medical Police at the University of Edinburgh and met with strong opposition from the medical faculty. However, during ‘The Ministry of All the Talents’ (1806-7), the Edinburgh Whigs ‘included the study of medical police as part of their scheme for legal reform’, and the Duncans were ultimately successful.'° The appeal of the new liberal Whig review to such men is unsurprising.

Thomson, in particular, would have been well known to Jeffrey as a fellow member of the Speculative Society and as a founder of the Chemical Society, with which the ‘Academy of Physics’ was merged in 1800." As Geoffrey Cantor has indicated, the ideology of the Academy of Physics foreshadows that of the Edinburgh: ‘[j]ust as the Review was founded as a reaction by a group of young men who were dissatisfied with the state of Scotland, so the Academy came into being some five years earlier owing to a similar discontent on the part of some of its first reviewers’. The purpose of the Academy was ‘the investigation of Nature, the laws by which her phenomena are regulated, and the history of opinions concerning these laws’, and their primary focus was Newtonian science and Baconian inductive methodology — including its applicability beyond the physical sciences. An increasingly nuanced statement on the progress of medical theory and practice, which very much carried on the tradition of the Academy of Physics, arises out of Thomson’s contributions to the early numbers of the Edinburgh.

The emphasis on empirical observation and practice, rather than theory, in British medicine by the end of the eighteenth century is well documented and often associated with the rise of pathological anatomy following the work of Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682- 1771) and Xavier Bichat (1771-1802) and the founding of medical institutions that allowed for large-scale clinical study." In tune with this wider movement, the medical reviews in the Edinburgh deprecate any attempt by an author to privilege individual interpretation or speculative theory over and above the careful collection of empirical data. For example, while the practice of eliminating contagion via fumigation with muriatic acid advocated by Guyton de Morveau is generally met with approval, his theories regarding the action of oxygen on the body are mocked." Immediately following the review of Morveau is another by Thomson, in which he praises John Haygarth’s presentation of statistical data via tables: ‘upon a subject so obscure in its own nature, as the propagation of contagion, we should feel more indebted to the Doctor for an accumulation of new facts, than for any hypothetical explanations, however ingenious’.

This praise for empirical research is tempered, however, in Thomson’s review of Heberden the following year, in language reflexive of the attitudes of Dugald Stewart. In the second volume of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1814), after noting the current celebration of inductive methodology by physicians, Stewart builds upon Cullen’s medical writings by declaring the futility of experience without some guiding noseological theory: ‘without a peculiar sagacity and discrimination in marking, not only the resembling, but the characteristical features of disorders, classed under the same technical name, his practice cannot, with propriety, be said to be guided by any one rational principle of decision, but merely by blind and random conjecture’. Along these lines, Thomson distinguishes between ‘true’ and ‘false’ experience in guiding medical practice:

The former supposes, for its attainment, an historical knowledge of its object, a capacity for observation, and genius to draw proper conclusions; whilst the latter consists only in following blind routine, without reason, and without reflection: in this respect, the enlightened physician is distinguished from the ignorant pretender; and the rational empiric from the mischief-working, contemptible quack."

Serving as an entry point into Thomson’s critique of the lack of system in Heberden’s treatise, this introductory section also speaks to the wider ideology of the first numbers of the Edinburgh Review.

As numerous critics have argued, one of the great innovations of the Edinburgh Review was the professionalisation of literary criticism. Contributors were remunerated handsomely, casting Constable as ‘enlightened patron’ rather than ‘tradesman’ and transforming the nineteenth-century periodical press into ‘a functional equivalent of the cultural authority of Enlightenment philosophers’.'’ As such,

The Edinburgh Review opened a new public domain of literary and scientific culture, which it defined in professional, judicial terms as a disciplinary court of judgment and evaluation rather than a marketplace of information and opinion.”

In the opening number, the ‘Advertisement’ famously announces that the review will ‘be distinguished, rather for the selection, than for the number, of its articles’, and, by their judicious selection, the Edinburgh Review, and Jeffrey most particularly, worked to cultivate a reading public defined by shared, enlightened good taste.” Taste, rather than originality, took primacy in this post-Enlightenment aesthetics, wherein ‘taste’ signalled ‘a communal organization in which the individual confirms selfhood through similarities’.** The arbiters of taste were, of course, the reviewers, and as Mark Schoenfield has argued, through their insistent portrayal of the Edinburgh as objective and professional, the modern ‘fact’ was begotten. However, ‘[t]his “fact” was not an observable phenomenon, but a theoretical construction based on the accumulation of numerical data and the reiteration of observed phenomenon in persuasively objective narratives’. Similarly, physicians and surgeons such as Thomson solidified professional identity through rhetorical appeals to empirical, scientific practice and enlightened judgement and evaluation. However, the veil of objective, professional authority at times does wear thin. Thomson aims what is perhaps his most trenchant attack at the figurehead of the medical establishment at the University of Edinburgh, Dr Alexander Monro, tertius (1773-1859). Thomson’s review of Monro’s Observations on Crural Hernia (1803) opens by highlighting the grand expectations aroused by Monro’s professional eminence and the disappointment that followed perusal of his work.

A prime motivation for Thomson to contribute to the Edinburgh was most probably self-promotion within the medical marketplace; throughout his career he fought to separate the teaching of surgery from anatomy and to establish a separate professorship of surgery in Edinburgh. In 1777 the Royal College of Surgeons had petitioned the Town Council to establish a separate chair of surgery at the University, but instead Monro, secondus, was given the extended title of ‘Professor of Medicine, Anatomy, and Surgery’, subsequently inherited by his son.” Thomson began to give extramural lecturers on surgery in 1800, following his appointment as a surgeon-in-ordinary at the Royal Infirmary; according to his first biographer, his son William Thomson, he was the first person in Edinburgh to systematically cover this topic.” In October 1803, when this article was published, Thomson was strategically positioning himself to obtain a professorship of surgery in Edinburgh. His ambition would come to fruition in 1804, not at the University but at the Royal College of Surgeons.” One of Thomson’s primary criticisms of Monro in the article is the latter’s lack of practical experience as a surgeon: ‘without having observed the parts in their diseased state (and not in bottles), and often have [sic] watched the skilful surgeon in his operation, and having also practised with his own hands, most erroneous ideas may be entertained’.*’ Hernia was an area of specialty for Thomson (he is, in fact, cited in Monro’s treatise), and in this article he carries on from a previous contribution to the Edinburgh on hernia in providing details of his own surgical practices.” His critique of medical theory is also continued from past reviews, as he accuses Monro’s treatise, in common with other medical works, of exhibiting that jealous partiality with which an author magnifies any little original remark or hint of a theory into a doctrine of disproportionate magnitude, and dwells upon it with a degree of complacency and copiousness, which he is often obliged to compensate, by retrenching some of the most important parts of the subject.”

Perhaps even more damningly, Thomson identifies a rhetoric of the ‘curious’ in Monro’s text — more common in eighteenth-century medical texts, but increasingly viewed as unscientific in the nineteenth century — declaring it to evince ‘the wanderings of a mind led astray after curious and strange things, without any sober impression of what is truly useful and important’.*°

The venomous nature of such critiques did not escape the notice of the medical profession in Edinburgh. In a pamphlet entitled The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review, alias the Stinkpot of Literature (1807), the surgeon John Ring (bap. 1752-d. 1821), without naming Thomson, criticises his review of Dr Robert Jackson’s Remarks on the Constitution of the Medical Department of the British Army (1803) for evidencing the ‘calumny and detraction’ of the Edinburgh Review — its self-promotion in the literary marketplace through entertaining defamation.*' Ring also cites Duncan’s 1804 review of Thomas

Thomson’s A System of Chemistry as exposing the ‘jealous and selfinterested’ agendas of the Edinburgh’s medical contributors.” Duncan is also not named, but Ring cites the editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review as remarking that ‘Dr. Thompson [sic] has ascertained who this critic is; and that his conduct is the more illiberal, as he is a rival who is endeavouring to lessen Dr. Thompson’s [sic] class of pupils, in order to augment his own.’ While ‘this critic’ is also said to be ‘the same who vents his spleen in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal’ and a known ‘understrapper’ to Jeffrey, it remains unclear whether Thomson has correctly identified Duncan, since he does not appear to have been an active extramural or university lecturer at this point.” Regardless, it is clear from Ring’s pamphlet that the critical authority of the Edinburgh Review was being undermined by the palpable self-interest of many of its medical articles. Writing in 1814, the physician Joseph Adams reflects that the manner in which medicine was treated in the early numbers, produced a very general disgust among the most respectable part of the faculty. My late friend, Dr. David Pitcairn, on my first return to England, recommended the Edinburgh Review to my perusal, regretting at the same time, that the medical articles did it no credit.**

According to Henry Cockburn, Thomson himself ‘left the Review from offense, in its infancy’. While the nature of this offense is unknown, Adams notes that an ‘eminent physician’ informed him ‘that the managers had determined to omit noticing any such [medical] publications, as they could not depend on the candour of any one to review them’.*° Duncan’s Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal instead provided a comparatively more ‘polite and dispassionate’ periodical context in which to notice the latest medical publications, and it included contributions from medical writers across the political spectrum, while often providing a platform for Duncan’s own reforming causes, including his promotion of the rising field of medical jurisprudence.*”

As Porter has noted, in the nineteenth century ‘the medical press was a prime medium for the attainment of greater collective professional self-consciousness and identity’.** The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, in particular, built upon its literary cousin’s rhetoric of professional critical authority. Its ‘Advertisement’ echoes that of the Edinburgh in declaring the editors’ intended selectivity. They announce that, in selecting which texts to review in the ‘Critical Analysis’ section, ‘the Editors will be chiefly regulated by the importance of the subject, the excellence of the manner in which it is treated, and the rarity or expense of the work; and it is their wish rather to bring into notice real improvements, and to encourage diffident abilities, than to discover imperfections, and to expose errors’.*” Perhaps the professionalising rhetoric of the Edinburgh Review could only be realised if medical contributors redirected medical discourse to a less controversial periodical context. However, physiological and anatomical topics continued to be covered with polemical charge.

Whig Ideology and Medico-Scientific Discourse

Joseph Adams’s reflections on the negative reception of many of the early medical articles introduce his pamphlet, An Illustration of Mr. Hunter’s Doctrine, particularly concerning the Life of the Blood, in Answer to the Edinburgh Review of Mr. Abernethy’s Lectures (1814), which, according to the advertisement, was printed in order to be bound within copies of the review of John Abernethy’s lectures. The review was written by John Gordon (1786-1818), an extramural lecturer in physiology who, like his mentor John Thomson, was ‘almost certainly a Whig’.*® In his review Gordon builds upon the physiological teachings of the surgeon, Whig politician and historian John Allen, a key ideologue of the Edinburgh and an early influence on several of its contributors.“

Allen is said ‘to have lived two quite discrete lives’: as an extramural lecturer in physiology in Edinburgh until 1802, and then as an esteemed member of the Holland House set, ‘that early nineteenth-century centre of Whig politics’. L. S. Jacyna has persuasively argued that a common thread runs between his physiological and social theories:

In his 1790 dissertation to the Royal Medical Society he sought to explicate the workings of the human mind without any reference to an immaterial principle. In his lectures on physiology he constructed an account of vitality which dispensed with any form of superadded vital principle as the condition of life and organization. In his political writings, he propounded a naturalistic concept of monarchy which denied that any divine efflation was mingled with the corporeal reality of the king.”

Allen’s ‘Lectures on Animal Oeconomy’ (1794-1802) were the first lectures wholly dedicated to an emerging, more systematic ‘scientific’ physiology to be delivered in Edinburgh. According to Jacyna, in these lectures he forwarded ‘a view of the body as de-centralized but coherent’, emphasising the chemical ‘self-regulating mechanisms’ of the animal economy rather than the nervous system. This was a significant deviation from the nervous physiology of Cullen, with its emphasis on the nervous system as the ‘central integrating organ’. While noting that Allen himself does not make the connection to Whig politics explicit, Jacyna argues that ‘Allen’s deposition of the brain and nerves from the pre-eminent place they had occupied in earlier Scottish physiology can now be seen more clearly as an attempt to demonstrate the redundancy of central control.” Among those who are listed as attending his lectures are Gordon and Thomson, along with Francis Horner (1778-1817), Thomas Brown (1778-1820) and Henry Reeve (1780-1814) — all contributors to the Edinburgh.” Schoenfield has noted the influence of Allen’s physiological reasoning on Horner’s political economy as exposed in the Edinburgh — ‘the continuity between the biological and the economic’ and his emphasis on ‘economics as a material science’.** Within the medical marketplace, however, it was Gordon that carried on Allen’s legacy after his departure for Holland House (necessitated by the unwelcome reception of his politics in Edinburgh). Daniel Ellis, Gordon’s biographer, notes that his decision to offer a separate series of extramural lectures on physiology in 1813, previously taught in conjunction with anatomy, was influenced by the success of Allen’s lectures, which ‘excited greater interest among the medical students of this school, than any given at that period, either within or without the walls of the University’.”

Gordon’s motivations for contributing to the Edinburgh were clearly, in part, a self-promotional move by an aspiring extramural lecturer striving to get ahead in a fiercely competitive marketplace in which medical students might choose between university lecturers, such as Monro, tertius and Duncan, senior, and extramural teachers, like Gordon, Thomson, and even Robert Knox. Contributing to periodicals, even quasi-anonymously, could be advantageous to men of science in developing ‘their reputations among the cultural élite’: Gordon, for example, was widely considered to be the contributor of the anti-phrenological Edinburgh article that famously brought Spurzheim to Scotland to defend his and Gall’s new science of the mind, although neither Gordon nor his biographer ever confirmed this attribution.” Conversely, anonymous contribution to popular periodicals could also provide a certain freedom from culpability in which, particularly in the case of the Edinburgh, the individual might be subsumed within the collective, authoritative ‘we’ carefully cultivated by Jeffrey."

It is from this collective, authoritative stance that Gordon precedes the better-known surgeon William Lawrence (1783-1867) in attacking Abernethy’s lectures on the vital principle. The review is unremittingly harsh, referring to the lectures as ‘a collection of bad arguments, in defence of one of the most untenable speculations in physiology; interspersed with not a little bombast about genius, and electricity, and Sir Isaac Newton’.” In his vitriolic reaction against any form of speculation, Gordon joins in the chorus of past articles in the Edinburgh, which set out the proper methodology and domain of both the physical and mental sciences. Perhaps most poignantly, in a review of Heberden’s Commentaries on the History and Cure of Diseases (1802), Thomson declares: ‘The questions concerning vitality bear the same relation to the study of physiology, and the practice of medicine, as the metaphysical discussions concerning the materiality, or immateriality of the soul, to the phenomena of mind.” Further, physiological reasoning, which Gordon presents as a more plausible alternative to Abernethy’s vital principle, is in tune with Allen’s influential teachings. Concerning secretion, Gordon writes:

Although, however, it is yet to be ascertained, to what diversity of chemical influence the blood is subject, in the different organs of the body, we see no reason whatever to doubt, that its conversions are accomplished solely by the operation of those affinities which regulate chemical combination among the particles of matter in general. We are aware, that many sensible persons have imagined, that there is something in living bodies which controls the usual chemical affinities, and forces the elements of these bodies into combinations altogether different from what such affinities would produce; but we own we have often been surprised at the sort of reasoning employed in support of this theory.

According to Jacyna, the root of Allen’s radical physiology was his denial of the need for a super-attending vital principle in controlling chemical affinities. Gordon’s published lectures on physiology collude with his statements in the Edinburgh.”

Unsurprisingly, Blackwood’s (along with the Quarterly Review) would take the opposite side of the debate surrounding the vital principle. A later Blackwoodian review of Sir Benjamin Brodie’s ‘Introductory Lecture’ to the Royal College of Surgeons in May 1820 praises Brodie for his attempt to ‘prove that the laws which govern life differ from those “which govern the changes of inorganic matter”. Many of the medical authors who contributed to Blackwood’s were proponents of the vital principle (and also devoted Tories), such as W. P. Alison, who, unhindered by the complications of political nonconformity (and with familial connections to the Gregory dynasty), went on to hold Cullen’s esteemed chair of the practice of medicine at the University of Edinburgh.** However, the review of Brodie stands out as relatively atypical in Blackwooa’s in the early 1820s, for its exclusive focus on physiological subject matter and for its lack of obvious literary extrapolation. One of the only comparable articles is D. M. Moir’s ‘Letter Relative to the Late Dr Gordon’ in December 1819. Without discussing Gordon’s particular opinions regarding the vital principle, Moir praises the systematic methodology he employs to discover ‘[t]he laws of organic life, and the wonderful processes by which nature carries on the functions of vitality’.°’? Medical texts are rarely reviewed in Blackwood’s, and appear to be selected for their cross-referential literary potential (as is the case for Wilson’s reviews of medical texts discussed in the introduction above). As such, a neat comparison of the ideological underpinnings of reviews of medical texts and the physiological theories forwarded or critiqued in the Edinburgh and Blackwood’s is not possible. Rather, we must look more broadly to the ways that the magazine engaged with medical subject matter through its ‘innovative mixture of literary forms and discourses’.°°

In their edited volume on science in nineteenth-century periodicals, Gowan Dawson, Richard Noakes, and Jonathan R. Topham argue that ‘[t]he breakdown of the ideal of a bourgeois public sphere and the developing sense of distinct literary and scientific spheres, was, if anything, more evident in the monthly magazines’. However, they cite the founding of Blackwood’s as the moment in which a new type of ‘self-consciously literary’ magazine was born, which discarded the categorisation of articles previously typical of British monthly magazines.°' As such, medical themes and representations are diffused throughout the magazine. Imaginative and discursive writings engage with contemporary medicine in a range of ways, medical reviews take on a more literary form, and ‘reports of advances in medical — or more particularly, coroner’s — science’ appear in the Noctes dialogues.” As the following chapter will argue, even the magazine’s infamous ‘tales of terror’ may be read as hybrid medico-literary texts, evolved from the type of popular medical material previously published in monthly magazines. Their Gothic intensification of the embodied first-person singular mode characteristic of Blackwood’s critical discourse expresses a striking opposition to the disembodied, authoritative, and perhaps even medico-scientific collective discourse of the Edinburgh.

1. [Francis Jeffrey and Andrew Duncan, jr.], ‘Willan and others on Vaccination’, ER, 9 (October 1806), 32-66 (p. 32).

2. Porter, ‘Lay Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century’, p. 142.

3. Dawson, Noakes, and Topham, ‘Introduction’, in Cantor et al. (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, p. 4 (on the Edinburgh Review, see p. 11).

4. On the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, see Comrie, History of Scottish Medicine, vol. 2, pp. 507-11; Loudon and Loudon, ‘Medicine, Politics and the Medical Periodical 1800-50’, in Bynum, Lock and Porter (eds), Medical Journals and Medical Knowledge, pp. 49-69.

5. Hamilton, The Healers, p. 196.

6. Rousseau, ‘““Stung into action ...”: Medicine, Professionalism, and the News’, p. 184; Porter, ‘Lay Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century’, p. 144.

7. As quoted in Clive, Scotch Reviewers, p. 196.

8. Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, pp. 78-112.

9. On Duncan, senior, see Chalmers (ed.), Andrew Duncan Senior: Physician of the Enlightenment; McCrae, ‘Andrew Duncan and the Health of Nations’.

10. Crowther and White, On Soul and Conscience, p. 9.

11. Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey, vol. 1, p. 54; Cantor, ‘The Academy of Physics at Edinburgh 1797-1800’, p. 112.

12. Ibid. p. 110. See also Pottinger, Heirs of the Enlightenment, p. 4, p. 53.

13. Cantor, ‘The Academy of Physics at Edinburgh 1797-1800’, p. 111. For the source of this quotation in Cantor’s article, see ‘Extracts from

26. 27:

34. 35. 36.

the Minutes of the Academy of Physics, vol. i 1797, 1798, 1799’, in Welsh, Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Brown, M.D., pp. 498-9.

See Keel, ‘The Politics of Health and the Institutionalization of Clinical Practices in Europe in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century’. [John Thomson], ‘Morveau on the Means of Purifying Infected Air’, ER, 1 (October 1802), 237-43.

[John Thomson], ‘Dr. Haygarth on Infectious Fevers’, ER, 1 (October 1802), 245-52 (p. 248).

Stewart, Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, vol. 2, p. 440. For further on Cullen and philosophy, see Barfoot, ‘Philosophy and Method in Cullen’s Medical Teaching’.

[John Thomson], ‘Heberden on the History and Cure of Diseases’, ER, 1 (January 1803), 466-74 (p. 467). For further on Thomson and Stewart’s philosophy, see Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, pp. 135-7. Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, p. 25.

‘Advertisement’, ER, 1 (October 1802), 2-3 (p. 2).

Schoenfield, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, p. 75.

Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 86.

[William Thomson and David Craigie], ‘Notice of some of the leading Events in the Life of the late Dr John Thomson, formerly Professor of Surgery to the Royal College of Surgeons, and of Military Surgery in the University of Edinburgh, and more recently Professor of General Pathology in the University’, EMS], 67 (1847), 131-93 (p. 162). Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 89.

[John Thomson], ‘Dr. Monro on Hernia’, ER, 3 (October 1803), 136-46 (p. 144).

. Monro, Observations on Crural Hernia, pp. 66-7; [John Thomson],

. [Thomson], ‘Dr. Monro on Hernia’, p. 137. . Ibid. p. 140. On the nineteenth-century critique of the curious, see

Kennedy, Revising the Clinic, pp. 54-5.

. Ring, The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review, p. 1. . Ibid. p. 32. . Ibid. p. 38. Comrie’s list of Professors and Lecturers in the Edinburgh

Medical School up to 1870’ does not include Duncan as a lecturer at this time (The History of Scottish Medicine, vol. 2, pp. 628-31). Adams, An Illustration of Mr. Hunter’s Doctrine, p. 1.

Cockburn, Life of Jeffrey, p. 143.

Adams, An Illustration of Mr. Hunter’s Doctrine, p. 1.

37:

39, 40. 41.

42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47.

49, 50.

DEF 54.

Loudon and Loudon, ‘Medicine, Politics and the Medical Periodical 1800-50’, in Bynum, Lock and Porter (eds), Medical Journals and Medical Knowledge, p. 60. On the promotion of medical jurisprudence in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, see Crowther and White, On Soul and Conscience, pp. 9-10.

Porter, ‘The Rise of Medical Journalism in Britain to 1800’, in Bynum, Lock and Porter (eds), Medical Journals and Medical Knowledge, pp. 6-28 (p. 19).

‘Advertisement’, EMSJ, 1 (January 1805), 1-6 (p. 5).

Lawrence, ‘The Edinburgh Medical School’, p. 271.

For an overview, see Christie, The Edinburgh Review and the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain, pp. 39-58.

Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 51.

Ibid. p. 67. For further, see Lawrence, ‘The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment’.

Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 71.

Ibid. p. 190; University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections, MS Gen 1476/A/9250.

Schoenfield, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, p. 65.

Ellis, Memoir of the Life and Writings of John Gordon, p. 108. Dawson, Noakes, and Topham, ‘Introduction’, in Cantor et al. (eds), Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, p. 28. See Ellis, Memoir of the Life and Writings of John Gordon, pp. 96-7; van Wyhe, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism, pp. 44-51. On Jeffrey’s editorial policy, see Christie, The Edinburgh Review and the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain, pp. 39-44.

[John Gordon], ‘Abernethy on the Vital Principle’, ER, 23 (September 1814), 384-98 (p. 384).

[Thomson], ‘Heberden on the History and Cure of Diseases’, p. 474. [Gordon], ‘Abernethy on the Vital Principle’, p. 389. Owsei Temkin has noted the significance of this review as championing ‘the chemical explanation of life’. See ‘Basic Science, Medicine, and the Romantic Era’, p. 98.

See Ellis, Memoir of the Life and Writings of John Gordon, p. 13; Gordon, Outlines of Lectures on Physiology, p. 68.