Clio Medica : Acta Academiae Internationalis Historiae Medicinae

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How can these finings be interpreted in conclusion? Analysis has revealed firstly that, depending on the chosen period, the socio-geographical situation and the profile of the individual doctor's practice, the clientele varied widely in terms of gender, age and social rank. The consultation behaviour of men and women changed noticeably. Findings overall suggest that up until t8o the gender distribution varied in the individual practices. There was a trend for women to be overrepresented in urban practices during the earlier period...

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The widespread influence exerted by the medical theories of Scottish doctor, John Brown, whose eponymously named Brunonianism radically simplified the ideas of his mentor, William Cullen, has not been generally recognised. However, the very simplicity of the Brunonian medical model played a key role in ensuring the dissemination of medical ideas about nervous irritability and the harmful effects of overstimulation in the literary culture of the nineteenth century and shaped early sociological thinking. This chapter suggests the centrality of these medical ideas, as mediated by Brunonianism, to the understanding of Romanticism in the nineteenth century, and argues that Brunonian ideas shaped nineteenth-century thinking about the effects of mass print culture in ways which continue to influence contemporary thinking about the effects of media...

John Thomson's An Account of the Life, Lectures and Writings of William Cullen (1832; 1859) remains a primary source for the career of the most influential academic physician in eighteenth-century Scotland and is also a significant work of medical history. But this multi-authored text, begun around 1810 by the academic surgeon, John Thomson, but only completed in 1859 by Dr David Craigie, has its own complex history. This chapter addresses what this history can reveal about the development of medical biography as a literary genre...

This chapter examines the medical texts, or "Materia Medica", held by Sir Walter Scott in his library at Abbotsford. While the vast majority of Scott's medical texts are antiquarian, his library also contains rare tracts and ephemera relating to the medical practice of the infamous quack, Dr James Graham (1745-94), and the Burke and Hare controversy of 1828 and its aftermath. Examining Scott's holdings of medical texts in relation to his own health and that of his family and friends, it is argued that the lack of contemporary medical self-help texts in his library is striking and indicative of his stoical attitude towards health, despite his clear interest in medical culture...

In Sir Walter Scott's The Fair Maid of Perth; or St Valentine's Day (1828), the resuscitated subject is referred to as a revenant, a term that Scott borrowed from Henry Thomson's Blackwoodian tale 'Le Revenant' (1827), meaning 'dead-alive'. Taking its cue from the sanguinary subtext of The Fair Maid of Perth, which is fascinated with the shedding of blood and transfusion of fluids, this chapter reads the Scottish revenant as a literary reflection on the extraordinary promise of blood transfusion in the 1820s: that death could be understood as a process, rather than an absolute state, and that medical intervention could restore life to those on the brink of death and even to the recently deceased...

The periodical press in the early nineteenth century was a site of dynamic exchange between men of science and men of letters, and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was a particularly rich site of expression for medical ideas. This chapter explores the symbiotic relationship between the Blackwoodian prose fiction and the scientific and medical investigations of the Glaswegian surgeon and writer, Robert Macnish (1802-37), and in particular, his explorations of altered states of consciousness and phrenology. It is argued that his prose tales reveal the Blackwoodian 'tale of terror' to be an experimental template for the medical theorist and budding phrenologist, revealing problematic sites for medical hermeneutics in early nineteenth-century Scotland...

Many currents in eighteenth-century Scotland--philosoph- ical, literary, medical and religious--served to influence how the poet, Robert Burns, understood his disturbed moods and how he described them in his poetry and letters. By tracking the chronology of his illness and the particular medical language he and his biographers drew upon in relation to the nervous theories current in Scotland and the cult of Romantic sensibility, this chapter examines how Burns' melancholy reflected and was related to the culture and historical period in which he lived...

This chapter charts the biographical, fictional and medical constructions of Robert Fergusson's (1750-74) illness and death from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first century. Fergusson died at the age of 24 in Edinburgh's Asylum for Pauper Lunatics. Thanks to this fact, commentators have become preoccupied with the legend of his illness and death. This chapter analyses the changing attitudes towards Fergusson's illness throughout the centuries by interrogating biographical constructions, fictional imaginings and modern diagnoses of his condition, in order to reflect on changing attitudes towards mental illness and artistic creativity...

This chapter explores the place of Scottish medicine in the autobiographical writing of the Philadelphia physician and signer of the American Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Rush, who studied at the University of Edinburgh from 1766 to 1768. It focuses on Rush's 'Scottish journal' (his account of his period of study in Edinburgh), his protracted feud from 1797 over his treatment of yellow fever with the English journalist, politician and agriculturalist William Cobbett, and his account in 'Travels through Life' of that feud and of the influence of Cullen on his medical theory and practice...

Seventeenth-century advances in microscopy prompted a shift in the dominant theory of human reproduction from one of epigenesis, derived from such ancient authorities as Aristotle, which posited that the mixing of male and female reproductive material generated a being which had not existed before, to one of preformation, whereby embryologists argued that the offspring of an animal already existed in miniature in the reproductive material. This chapter reveals that the poet, Mark Akenside, anticipated the Enlightenment's challenge to the prevailing preformationist orthodoxy when a medical student at Edinburgh in the late 1730s, as evident in his May 1744 thesis entitled De ortu et incremento foetus humani ('On the Origin and Growth of the Human Foetus')...

The foundations of a modern medical ethics does not appear in Britain until the late-eighteenth century, with the publication of John Gregory's Lectures on the Duties and Qualifications of a Physician in 1772. Focusing on the contemporary Moral Sense philosophical ideas formulated primarily by leading members of the Kirk, and the medical writings of the Scottish physicians, George Cheyne, John Gregory, and William Cullen, this chapter explores the fusion of classical and holistic Christian-based medical ethics...

Giving a rigorous philosophical explanation to the imagination's role in sympathy, Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments became a central text in Romantic aesthetics. It not only justified the age's vogue for making suffering an object of artistic pleasure, it treated suffering's affectivity as the very foundation of society. Depicting agony as a spectacle to be read by others, Smith transformed morality into rhetoric, making human subjects into readers of a sentimentalised, textual world. Yet Smith's work restricted the bonds of sympathy, too, following established distinctions between mind and body that helped him to exclude physical pain from sympathetic response...

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No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.