Introducing Darwinism to ’s Post-1887 Reconstituted Medical School

JOHN P. M. COURT

“The boys sang their best songs and cheered with renewed vigour.” —The Mail (Toronto), 1890

Abstract. Charles Darwin’s scientific paradigm was largely welcomed in Cana- dian academic biology and medicine, while reaction among other faculty and laypeople ranged from interest to outrage. In 1874, Ramsay Wright, a Darwin- ian-era biologist from Edinburgh, was appointed to the ’s Chair of Natural History. Over his 38-year career Wright integrated the evolu- tionary perspective into medical and biology teaching without accentuating its controversial source. He also applied the emerging German experimental research model and laboratory technology. This study identifies five categories of scientific and personal influences upon Wright through archival research on biographical sources and his writings. Keywords. natural history, biology, Darwinian evolution, medical education Résumé. Les théories de Charles Darwin ont été largement acceptées au Canada en médecine et en biologie, alors que les réactions au sein d’autres dis- ciplines et parmi la population allaient de l’intérêt à l’indignation. En 1874, Ramsay Wright, un biologiste d’Édinbourg, devint titulaire de la chaire d’his- toire naturelle à l’Université de Toronto. Pendant 38 ans de carrière, Wright a intégré la perspective évolutionniste dans son enseignement en médecine et en biologie, mais sans faire part de sa source controversée. Il a aussi utilisé la tech- nologie de laboratoire et le modèle de recherche expérimentale allemands, alors en émergence. Cette étude identifie cinq catégories d’influences personnelles et scientifiques perceptibles chez Wright, partant de ses écrits et de documents d’archives à caractère biographique. Mots-clés. histoire naturelle, biologie, théorie de l’évolution de Darwin, édu- cation médicale

John P. M. Court, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto.

CBMH/BCHM / Volume 28:1 2011 / p. 191-212 192 JOHN P. M. COURT

Professor Robert Ramsay Wright (1852-1933) was recruited from his native as Chair of Natural History for the University of Toronto (U of T) in 1874. Having just ascended the initial rung of his faculty career, he was altogether unfamiliar with Canada and was manifestly less qualified than the Canadian and foreign scientists of varied distinc- tion who had also applied for the position. Nor is there any indication of support for Wright from a Canadian champion, as enjoyed by other notable candidates.1 Speaking much later for those involved in advo- cating Wright’s selection by Premier , in whose hands the decision lay, President recalled their undeclared tripartite agenda for this obscure candidate; viz., to introduce Darwinian evolution through the University’s science curricula, along with the German exper- imental research model, and the adoption of modern laboratory tech- niques.2 Wright ultimately obliged them, playing a vital, often vivid role over his career of 38 years. Yet he did not acknowledge, trace, nor leave a consistent legacy for revealing his sources of intellectual and personal influence. That is our present purpose, approached through unearthing and evaluating a scattered range of sources. Figure 1

Professor Ramsay Wright, portrait by Arnesby Brown, 1919, commissioned by the University of Toronto. Photo by the author. Introducing Darwinism to Toronto’s Medical School 193

James Loudon initially led a loose, covert caucus of Toronto faculty and alumni who remained circumspect in championing the academically and socially volatile Darwinian philosophy. A year after Wright’s arrival, Loudon publicly declared in his 1875 lecture for inaugurating his pro- motion to U of T’s Chair of Natural Philosophy an intention to give evo- lution a wide berth. “Upon these controversies I have no intention to enter. I neither possess sufficient learning for such a purpose, nor am I likely to embark on such a stormy sea.” Loudon did, however, encourage everyone to exercise patience and tolerance for navigating those stormy seas. “Truth, whether religious or scientific, will most assuredly persist unto the end, and we who believe most firmly in the truths of Chris- tianity ought to be the last to fear the progress of research … The needs of the [present] time are patience and forbearance. Science is one of God’s interpreters in the hands of man, although we may misunder- stand its meaning.”3

CONTEXT FOR THE ACADEMIC RECEPTION OF DARWINISM

For more than two decades before Origin of Species (1859) appeared in , the university chairs and Protestant pulpits had earnestly imparted the symbiotic doctrines of “Common Sense” mental discipline, and piety, from the Scottish Enlightenment, and Natural Theology from William Paley through the country’s leading science educators.4 Then from 1859 British North America witnessed another rare convergence by these opinion leaders. English and Scots, the Established (Anglican) Church and other denominations, titanic ecclesiastical foes like Strachan and Ryerson, the secular University of Toronto and the phalanx of reli- gious colleges envious of its Provincial status and endowment, all united in opposition to evolution, as advanced by Origin and Darwin’s 1871 sequel, The Descent of Man. So thunderously did the heavens rain down on Darwin and his evolution paradigm that their prospective defenders and those still undecided, such as two U of T physical science professors, H. H. Croft of chemistry and Wright’s predecessor, Alleyne Nicholson, discreetly maintained a public silence.5 The formidable bulwark of traditional belief in Divine Creation and fixity of species began to be breached at a few universities by the 1870s, through the confluence of four intellectual streams. First, the inde- pendent “critical spirit” of objective reason unfettered by dogma—par- ticularly contentious as applied to the Bible in Higher Criticism— steadily gained adherence. Second, from the 1870s, new chairs in philosophy, notably the stellar John Watson (Queen’s) and Paxton Young at Toronto introduced the more overarching and evolution-com- patible doctrine of philosophical idealism.6 Third and conjointly, the exploratory research ideal and the hypothetico-deductive method

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appeared, introducing laboratory technology that originated from Ger- man scientists.7 Fourth, stood the compelling clarity of evidence (acknowledged as incomplete) of Darwin’s texts and those of his prolific “Bulldog” defender, T. H. Huxley. This coalescence of allied forces, buttressed by the 1849 University of Toronto Act that gradually eroded the dogmatic influences carried over from King’s College, raised the sightlines of influential former students. From 1873 there were 15 alumni members in the university senate,8 sev- eral of whom harboured ambitions for institutional challenges to the traditional perspectives. In particular this cadre of ambitious students, who had enrolled after 1849 with the understanding that secularism was the basis for this “godless university,” expressed their disdain for the traditional outlooks espoused by the Rev. President John McCaul and several senior professors: Beaven and Hincks, also both clerics; together with and Edward Chapman, who were initially anti-Dar- winian.9 By 1874, no doubt influenced by their former classmate, the strongly pro-evolution William Dawson Lesueur, and his spirited articles in the Canadian Monthly and National Review, these influential alumni supported evolution and its companion forces—the interrogative inves- tigation of natural phenomena, and the critical spirit of objective rea- soning unencumbered by dogma. Senate members notwithstanding, what is clear from the sources doc- umenting that era for U of T, the religious colleges and the Provincial Government, is that no faculty member taught as an openly vocal pro- Darwinian in ’s universities during the initial 15 years to 1874. Ramsay Wright much later recalled that to have done so during the 1870s “was still regarded as dangerous.”10 Suzanne Zeller, citing other authorities, went further in asserting that: “No strong public defender of the [Darwinian] theory emerged [in Canada] during the half-century after 1859.”11 Those few whose supportive sympathies were later appar- ent, such as the briefly-tenured Alleyne Nicholson and James Loudon, evidently felt constrained, even at Ontario’s secular university, and with- held their opinions until the older generation of faculty had retired.

RAMSAY WRIGHT’S UNACKNOWLEDGED WELLSPRINGS

Throughout his 38 years at Toronto, Ramsay Wright refrained from iden- tifying the fundamental influences that affected his intellectual journey. Accordingly, this study will examine sources to interpret the scientific and social influences that Wright absorbed and reflected in the course of his successful introduction of evolution, for both his adopted univer- sity’s teaching of basic sciences and medicine, together with the German research model and laboratory technology, and as well to English-Cana- dian secondary schools’ zoology curricula.

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Recollections found in Wright’s obituaries together with mentions found within his students’ and colleagues’ memoirs focus overwhelm- ingly on the favourable regard with which he was held for his charis- matic teaching and mentoring attributes. They reveal little, however, about how and where Wright’s intellectual life found its inspirations. By comparison, since he was Wright’s close friend,12 William Osler faith- fully acknowledged his philosophical muse, Sir Thomas Browne; his formative mentors, Father Johnson, Dr. Bovell (Toronto), and Dr. Palmer Howard (Montreal); and his many later career influences. Wright, on the other hand, left few signposts of his intellectual development other than his acknowledgments of Charles Darwin and A. R. Wallace in his high school textbook.13 What, then, were the principal sources of influence on Ramsay Wright’s academic career? Without the documentary record of an archival fonds, the matter of tracing his primary inspirational roots is a quest reliant in part upon induction and inference. But more than his scientific, intel- lectual underpinnings will be canvassed, since a leader-mentor’s influ- ence is reflected through his personality and charisma as well as the sub- stance of his teachings. Much of Wright’s Toronto reputation was based on his institution-building achievements, and the subsequent lore and mythology of his interpersonal skills in teaching and administration. On that combined basis, the sources of influence upon Wright fall within the following five groupings: his childhood family; his University of Edinburgh education, and particularly his graduate supervisor, Pro- fessor Wyville Thomson of the Challenger Oceanography Expedition; the leading British evolutionists, notably Huxley and Newell Martin (while at Johns Hopkins) and less directly, Charles Darwin and Francis Galton; Professor William Osler; and finally, the influence of certain Toronto University administrators, viz.: Loudon and his presidential suc- cessor, ; classicist and University College Principal Mau- rice Hutton; ; and Toronto’s medical deans from 1887, particularly Charles Clarke. We will consider each of these influential groups thematically, rather than through a strictly linear chronology.

THE SCOTTISH CHILDHOOD FAMILY INFLUENCES ON ROBERT WRIGHT

About six miles east of Stirling, the town of Alloa lies on the north bank of the River Forth in Scotland’s former coalfields of County Clackman- nanshire, where Robert Wright was the third son born to the Reverend John and Christian (Ramsay) Wright on 23 September 1852. Reverend Wright had joined the Free Church of Scotland at its founding nine years earlier, serving as minister of Alloa’s East Free Church, which left himself and his family to share in this breakaway sect’s dire financial circumstances.14

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Closely associated with these coalfields lay a significant trove of fos- sils. T. H. Huxley described one in particular in 1862, when Robert (as he was known in Scotland) was nine years old, as “the discovery of a large Labyrinthodont, with well-ossified vertebrae.”15 Robert as a boy might have preferred imagining his landscape stirring with prehistoric, croco- dile-like creatures rather than bitterly divided Presbyterians, and coal- pits. Those discoveries may have sparked in him an interest in palaeon- tology as a gateway to the emerging, lively issues of evolution. His parents typified the middle- and upper-class Scots’ love of learning and progressive belief in the social and spiritual value of education.16 Sup- ported financially by his maternal uncle, John Ramsay,17 Robert was sent to the Alloa Academy and then on to Edinburgh High School, matriculating in 1868 into the heart and soul of the Scottish Enlighten- ment, the University of Edinburgh. Wright was barely 16 years of age. The cost would have seemed immense, although like his 20th-century colleague and friend, U of T President Robert Falconer, he may have qualified for a scholarship for promising boys of limited financial means. Both had registered in the standard arts course leading to the Master of Arts which was in fact Edinburgh’s undergraduate first degree. Falconer’s biographer relates that its curriculum “had not been seriously altered since 1708 … mirror- ing the medieval trivium and quadrivium” of compulsory Latin, Greek, mathematics, logic, moral philosophy, natural philosophy, and rhetoric which included English literature. Wright (as Falconer later did) studied physics under the distinguished natural philosophy professor, Peter Guthrie Tait. The biological sciences, however, were not offered to arts candidates.18 Robert had enrolled in the classics and humanities; those wishing to major in biology, natural history or other sciences would enroll in an undergraduate medical program. The beginning of Wright’s pivotal change of course may have come a few weeks later with the opportunity on 8 November 1868 to attend the inaugural Sunday Evening Address on a non-theological topic, delivered by the visiting Professor Huxley, “On the Physical Basis of Life.”19 Lionized by large contingents of Scottish faculty and students, who admired his clear, log- ical exposition of evolutionary principles and fearless stand against con- servative dogma, Huxley was also renowned as a riveting speaker. Fal- coner later described such guest lectures by prominent thinkers as events of great excitement for Edinburgh’s undergraduates.20 The University of Edinburgh’s Archives contain student records of that era that log Wright’s MA (1871) and his postgraduate BSc (1873). His graduate science courses included two sessions (1871-72 and 1872-73) in natural history with his supervisor, the renowned C. Wyville Thom- son, as well as botany, chemistry, practical chemistry, physiology, and geology. The records make no mention of scholarships or other awards

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presented to Wright. They do reflect his initial, 1873 faculty apprentice- ship as a biology lab instructor at the rank of Assistant to the interim Pro- fessor of Natural History, Dr. Carus of Leipzig,21 who substituted while Thomson directed the landmark HMS Challenger expedition on the high seas, 1872–76. These Edinburgh influences on Wright are the best documented and most straight-forward of the five groupings of influences on his career. His post-graduate studies centred on natural history with specialization in aquatic zoology,22 approached through the new combination of sci- entific objectivity, laboratory research emphasizing microscopy, and the principles of evolution. An informal exchange of correspondence early in his Toronto career reflects Wright’s rapport with his former botany instructor, the renowned Professor John Hutton Balfour of Medicine, Botany and Edinburgh’s Royal Botanic Garden.23 It is apparent, however, that Wright’s zoology supervisor (Fig. 2) was his foremost model and inspiration for what subsequently became his own successful lecturing style at Toronto. Professor Thomson’s infectious, charismatic style was manifested in “a light, springy step; he was a delightful and instructive lecturer, who had on his table a profusion of specimens of which he made incessant use, but spoke without notes… Thomson was a fluent and lucid lecturer, and a successful professor, greatly appreciated by his many students. His classes at Edinburgh were among the largest in the university.”24 Figure 2

Professor Sir Wyville Thomson (1830-1882). Photograph from Wm. E. Hoyle, (ed ), Challenger Expedition Reports: Portraits of the Contributors (London, UK, 1897).

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WRIGHT OUT TO SEA? THE MYTH OF A CHALLENGER EXPEDITION BIOLOGIST THAT NEVER WAS

Through his widely acclaimed scientific voyages between 1868 and 1876 for ocean-floor marine life, Professor Thomson, knighted in 1876, was that era’s most celebrated aquatic biologist. Perhaps from the fact that Wright’s own later research based in Toronto was largely focused on aquatic biology, with the fact that Thomson had been his Edinburgh graduate supervisor, a myth emerged during Wright’s Toronto career that he, too had been associated with the Challenger Expedition. In par- ticular, Professor A. G. Huntsman, a former student and subsequently a junior colleague of Wright at Toronto who authored Wright’s 1934 Royal Society of Canada obituary, declared from his dual vantage points of professional collegiality and personal friendship with the deceased Wright that: “Shortly after graduation he was appointed a member of the Challenger Deep Sea Expedition.”25 Thirty-eight years later the Zoology Department’s official historian, E. Horne Craigie, also a career zoolo- gist, repeated that same claim, basing it on the published obituary and his subsequent correspondence with Professor Huntsman, who had reit- erated the claim in 1967 notes prepared as advisory to Craigie’s Zoology Department history project.26 Huntsman’s assertion that Wright was “appointed a member” is unquestionably a lapse of overstatement. Wright himself acknowledged in his 1911 address to the Royal Society of Canada that his lone brush with the project was short-lived and non-sci- entific, modestly assisting Thomson’s interim replacement, Dr. Carus, in “unpacking the first treasures sent home from the Challenger Expe- dition,” while the ship was still away on its extended ocean voyage.27 A canvass of the Challenger expedition’s meticulously documented proceedings and extensive scientific publications reveals unambigu- ously that although Wright’s career was launched soon after HMS Chal- lenger put out to sea (December 1872 for more than three years until May 1876), his name does not appear among the project’s painstaking accounts and reports. Thomson had recruited two experienced expedi- tion biologists, one of whom had to be replaced shortly before embarka- tion. Ironically the replacement was the Upper-Canadian-born (later Sir) John Murray.28 What is more puzzling than the myth that Wright, prior to emigrating to Canada, was involved with his supervisor’s most famous project is that he was evidently also not involved in the subsequent scientific ana- lytical work. From the Challenger project’s Edinburgh labs, their aquatic specimens gathered on the voyage were widely disseminated for study. They then carefully catalogued the ensuing wealth of scientific reports and articles—some 50 volumes, published between 1880 and 1895. Some Americans (e.g., A. Agassiz, W. K. Brooks)29 and European biologists as

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well as Britons (e.g., Huxley, Herdman)30 were invited to participate during those two decades, 1876 to 1896; but from the extensive pub- lished evidence, no biologists in Canada were involved.31 Along with species diversity the project further supported evolutionary principles through expanding scientific knowledge on habitat ranges and migra- tory patterns of known species—research of the sort pursued by George Lawson of Dalhousie. Wright, for his part, ultimately made clear in 1911 that he had not been professionally involved.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE BRITISH EVOLUTIONISTS ON WRIGHT’S RESEARCH AND TEACHING

The force and effect with which Charles Darwin and his evolutionary associates influenced scientific life and higher learning during the 19th century have been noted. Our interest is the extent to which the monu- mental watershed of Darwin’s and Huxley’s ideas influenced the research and pedagogical approaches taken by Ramsay Wright. Darwin himself was famously reclusive, hence it is not unusual that Wright made no direct or personal connection with him. The fact that Darwin regarded himself as primarily a zoologist, dating from his epic voyage aboard the Beagle, may have served as an example inspiring Wright to lean toward that same subspecialty. Darwin’s close associates, however, were fully up to the task of reaching out to the new faithful. In the 1860s and 1870s the science students of London, Cambridge and Edinburgh prided themselves on being among the most eagerly receptive. Without doubt this sector of influence’s paramount impact on Wright came from Thomas Henry Huxley, through two powerful forces: Hux- ley’s clear articulation of evolutionary theory and practice in conjunction with his own soundly progressive ideas for teaching and research; and his enthusiasm for boldly disseminating his ideas and principles as widely as possible. It was Huxley, generally a decade or two before Wright began to enjoy credit for them at Toronto (occasionally in con- junction with a senior medical colleague such as William Aikins or James Graham) who gave voice and pen to most of the fundamental notions for reforming medical education. To summarize, Huxley’s ideas encom- passed setting aside faith-based and metaphysical assumptions for the study of natural phenomena as observable and testable; full acceptance of the evolutionary paradigm as fundamental to understanding both comparative (i.e., zoological) as well as human morphology, physiology, and medicine. “Huxley wrote a series of articles around 1870 that linked discussions of the cell, protoplasm, and evolution to proposed changes in medical and science education.”32 He also called for universal adaptation of the German institutes’ model for sponsoring and conducting experi- mental research; scientific education based on German methods such as

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microscopy taught primarily in the laboratory, with relatively fewer for- mal didactic lectures; adoption of the body of knowledge and assump- tions known collectively as the Cambridge school of physiology (for- mulated with one of his protégés, Sir Michael Foster); an overall approach to medical education as involving a thorough grounding in the basic sciences, reformed via evolutionism, as precursors to the clinical disciplines; arranging curricula in such a way that basic science educa- tion was universally accessible in the schools, and continued to be avail- able generally and for optional specialization in post-secondary acade- mies other than alongside medical schools’ clinical teaching; instead, that basic sciences be taught for school matriculation and pre-medical cur- ricula, and established as prerequisites for admission to the core clinical curriculum of medical schools; and integration of the latter into univer- sities, for teaching conducted (in the German mold) by dedicated, salary- subsidized specialists in medical research and clinical teaching.33 From his modest base in the School of Mines, Huxley promulgated these ideas with thorough and consistent efficiency through a strategic program of speaking to, and publishing for, both public and academic audiences, and with influential lobbying. His articles appeared in pop- ular and scientific periodicals as well as newspapers and, as his health permitted, he accepted prominent, widely reported speaking engage- ments—including as principal guest speaker for the official opening of Johns Hopkins University in 1876, with a conjoint North American speaking tour. Huxley’s lobbying activities centred around influencing science policy and curricula for schools, universities, and professional and academic societies, through correspondence or sitting on their advi- sory panels (e.g., membership on the Royal Society of London’s advisory board for the Challenger expedition), as well as through advancing favoured candidates for influential appointments in those settings (such as Foster to Cambridge and Newell Martin to Hopkins). While Wright acknowledged Darwin and Wallace in his 1889 high school zoology text, it was one of his distinguished academic medical col- leagues, Professor J. P. McMurrich, in his 1934 obituary for Wright, who made note of his late mentor’s pedagogical inheritance from T. H. Hux- ley and Newell Martin.34 Through his outstanding but sadly foreshort- ened career at Hopkins, Martin brought to the evolutionist movement in North America a vibrancy, credibility, and a superb framework of schol- arship. Had his health not failed by the time of Johns Hopkins medical school’s long-delayed opening, he might well have been included as a fifth doctor in John Singer Sargent’s touchstone group portrait. Martin was a trusted junior author and admired colleague of Huxley while his career was launching in England, and subsequently an articulate spokesperson and advocate for Huxley’s ideas.35 It was in this latter con- nection that Wright established with Martin a rapport of sufficient col-

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legiality, that several favoured Toronto biology, physiology, and med- ical students were drawn after graduation into post-graduate specialties in science with Martin and Keith Brooks and at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1889 for specialist residencies.36 In addition, it is clear that Wright’s 1889 high school textbook benefited in its ideas and presentation from the school texts previously published by Huxley, and those by Huxley and Martin. Wright’s intellectual and career debts to Huxley and Newell Martin were, in a word, monumental.

AN ADULT LIFETIME OF FRIENDSHIP WITH SIR WILLIAM OSLER

Figure 3

Dr. (later Sir) William Osler as a professor at McGill Medical School, 1881. Photoprint courtesy of the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University.

By coincidence William Osler’s (1849-1919) initial appointment to the faculty of his former medical school, McGill, fell into place at the same time as Wright’s to Toronto. “On my return to Canada in July 1874 a berth was waiting, a lectureship on the Institutes [fundamentals] of Medicine, which necessitated an immediate course of predatory reading in preparation for the delivery of 100 lectures!”37 Osler had spent much

202 JOHN P. M. COURT of his childhood and youth as an enthusiastic naturalist, finding his way to medicine by that route. So he thoughtfully took an initiative while vis- iting family for Christmas in 1874 to introduce himself to Wright, also a minister’s son and just three years younger than himself, and welcome him to Canada. He may have regaled Wright with his introduction to dine, before having left London, with the eminent Cambridge School physiology patron, William Sharpey’s inner circle, including “the kindly old man with bushy eyebrows,” Charles Darwin, who spoke pleasantly of Principal Dawson of McGill. Wright later described to Osler’s first biographer, Harvey Cushing, how he had been taken along to meet William’s “old preceptor in Weston,” Father Johnson, examining specimens and slides of a trematode worm that Osler had discovered in the gills of a newt. Wright docu- mented the trematode in his first paper published in Toronto (1879), naming this species Sphyranura Osleri.38 Through Wright’s shortage of Canadian friends and Osler’s generosity of spirit, fondness for conver- sation, and their mutual interest in biology as well as laboratory research, the two remained in close touch as their careers progressed in different cities. Between Wright’s influence and the city’s pride in its quasi-native son, Osler became a willing guest speaker at ribbon cuttings for the uni- versity’s biology and medical buildings in 1889 and 1903, and at aca- demic and professional conferences. His remarks on those occasions, interspersed with the classical literary references he loved, and mentor- ing advice for medical students, were lucid and unwavering in support of the progressive university medical education as envisioned by Huxley, Newell Martin and his academic physician colleagues (also acquain- tances of Osler), Drs. Aikins and Graham, and the volunteer adminis- trator, William Mulock. Mulock’s deep pockets and determination to launch great projects, such as federation with the religious colleges, reconstituting and housing the medical faculty, and the “[Queen’s] Park Hospital” proposal, gave rise to Osler’s and Wright’s most often mentioned partnership—“a typ- ical continental Studienreise” for “racketing” around Europe through the summer of 1890. Osler was there, at his own expense, to visit the great medical institutions of Germany while also vacationing and renewing acquaintanceships, whereas Wright was sponsored by Mulock to study models and methods of zoological museums for replacing Toronto’s, ruined in the disastrous University College fire February 1890. As Wright summarized in an addendum to the Medical Faculty’s Fall Opening Lecture (delivered by Professor Graham), during the summer he and Osler had visited “some twelve of the more important European uni- versities,” and although his object “was chiefly the study of the newer museums of natural history,” he “had various other educational topics brought under his notice,”39 such as a lecture in Paris on hypnotism.40

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Separating in England during early July to pursue separate interests, he and Osler regrouped in August to attend the Tenth International Medical Congress in Berlin. There, Robert Koch, already renowned as the discoverer of the tubercule bacillus in 1882, and subsequently the causes of amebic dysentery and cholera, announced a laboratory cure for the fatal disease of consumption (tuberculosis)—soon recognized most regrettably as premature.

INFLUENCES ON WRIGHT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

Wright initially taught in a makeshift University College laboratory with a few rudimentary microscopes, until 1878 when a new campus home was opened for the School of Practical Science. Its laboratories served fac- ulty and students of the physical sciences in both the college and the engineering school, becoming Wright’s teaching and research base for the next 11 years. From the early 1880s until he resigned as Vice-Chan- cellor in 1901, William Mulock was U of T’s most influential advocate for realizing a strong, publicly supported medical school along the Hop- kins model. Students would be taught pre-clinical (basic) sciences, fol- lowed by clinical teaching in hospital settings, both taught by laboratory research-oriented faculty. Unfortunately, like many Victorian barrister politicians in the Sir John A. Macdonald mold, Mulock had a readiness to embrace confrontation in lieu of patiently building consensus. As his biographer gently put it, he “was of a restless nature. Perhaps a little too eager for action and quick results[,] and endowed with a surplus of mental and physical energy, he left no stone unturned to gain a point.”41 For whatever reasons, Wright’s 1890 summer mission abroad aroused no discernible public notice back in Toronto. Indeed, in writing to seek a special funding allocation from the Education Minister, the Hon. George Ross, he reported: “I have devoted the summer to arranging and cata- loguing what was rescued from the old museum [after the fire].”42 Sel- dom was the light of Vice-Chancellor Mulock’s generosity hidden under a bushel, and indeed, Wright’s intrepid follow-up adventure later that year was calculated to be a very public affair. Evidently intending to cast some strategic luster on their institution’s medical education mis- sion—the object of perennial challenges from the Canada Lancet journal and the unsubsidized yet successful Trinity medical faculty43—Mulock agreed to fund, also at his own expense, a second 1890 voyage for Wright to Germany. Discretely avoiding public mention of Wright’s recent sojourn there, Mulock presented a formal request to the Medical Faculty, which had been called into an urgent session to consider it. He pro- posed that Wright be granted two months’ leave to travel immediately to secure for the university a reproducible sample and formula for “Koch’s lymph” (later called tuberculin), optimistically but erroneously regarded

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in Berlin as a potentially miraculous cure. The proposal’s full, flowery wording and Dean Aikins’s acceptance were dramatically publicized via detailed press notices.44 With dramatic haste, that same day Wright was given a hero’s “rousing send-off” from Union Station, replete with train platform speeches and William Mulock “smiling serenely and bowing graciously” to a gathering of “about 600 undergraduates and about 100 graduates” of U of T, hastily marshalled for the occasion.

There was then a general rush towards the professor, who was cheered again and again by those present. He was then asked to mount a truck on the plat- form, and as he did so the cheering was again renewed…. He thanked the boys several times… and surrounded by hundreds of students Prof. Wright was wheeled on the truck to the side of the train. The boys sang their best songs and cheered with renewed vigour…. As the train moved off Prof. Wright stood on the platform of the Pullman car and waved his hat time and again at the throng.45

Two months later The Varsity reported that Wright had obtained a consignment of lymph and forwarded it to his physiology protégé, Dr. A. B. Macallum (who had also been trained by Newell Martin and Osler).46 Moreover: “Prof. Wright has secured a position in Dr. Koch’s laboratory, and is rapidly informing himself of the method of preparation of the lymph.”47 Heady moments! Little wonder that 22 years later, Wright still depicted this as a career highlight in his biographical entry in Men and Women of the Times. Sadly, Koch’s announcement was premature, and his enthusiasm and track record led to equally premature reactions on a large scale. While Osler at Hopkins had cautioned a conservative approach,48 and the French government (for undeclared reasons) stopped Koch’s shipment of lymph to Pasteur at their border,49 the tragic counterpoint to drama-laden overreactions such as Toronto’s can be seen in reports of fatally ill victims of TB who also hurried off to Berlin in the end stages of their distress to partake of the miracle “cure.” Mulock and Wright remained closely linked in the years preceding50 and following the latter’s Osler- and Koch-related forays to Europe. With the Vice-Chancellor’s independence through his influential vol- unteer capacities, Mulock absorbed the censure to which he and Wright were jointly exposed through a disclosure by Dean Walter Geikie of Trinity Medical School that they had misled the government and the university’s neighbours in illicitly using a portion of the new Biology building for the medical faculty’s teaching of human dissection. From the Biology building’s 1889 opening until the deception was made pub- lic in 1892, U of T’s Faculty of Medicine made reference in its enrolment promotional advertisements that: “Teaching of Anatomy [takes place] in the lecture room, dissection room … of the Medical College [on Ger- rard Street east of Parliament Street].”51 President Wilson admitted pri-

Introducing Darwinism to Toronto’s Medical School 205

vately to Chancellor Blake that “Dr. Geikie’s statement could not be con- tradicted, so I said nothing about it.” As academic administrator of the Biology building and a Medical Faculty chair, Wright clearly participated from the outset in this deception. Notwithstanding, Mulock was able to persuade the senate and a subsequent meeting of alumni a few months later that, having done so under his instructions, Wright should be held blameless.52 Along with perennial volunteers and William Mulock, the successive Presidents Strachan, McCaul, Wilson, and James Loudon are remembered in connection with their notoriety within the University for shifting allegiances, bitter rivalries, Machiavellian schemes, and cabals formed out of mutual interests. Arriving as a fresh face and a generation younger, Ramsay Wright had the opportunity to soar above the political turbulence to earn general admiration. A few other faculty recruits in his cohort did successfully rise with unaligned neutrality. Two such were Oxford University expatriates, classicist Maurice Hutton and the chem- istry successor to Prof. H. H. Croft, William H. Pike. They befriended Wright and were his faculty co-directors in 1882 for the acclaimed cam- pus production of Antigone by Sophocles, which included Wright’s musi- cal adaptations of Mendelssohn’s score and his direction of the Greek chorus.53 For his part, however, as our previous review of his medical science- related collaborations with Mulock reveals, Wright was partly drawn into the administrative-political morass. In 1901, he was appointed by the provincial Liberals as Dean of Arts and the University’s first and only Vice President, while continuing as biology Professor in both Arts and Medicine. A natural leader would have spiraled upward from that strate- gic plateau, intervening to mitigate President Loudon’s isolation and suspiciousness by building bridges, consensus, and harmony. Instead, Wright elected to distance himself from Loudon’s withering personality and intransigent style, focusing instead externally on the field of aquatic biology in Canada while facilitating a postgraduate path to Johns Hop- kins for talented students. Internally he also continued developing the curricula as well as a lively esprit de corps in the 1889 Biology Building as the professional home for science students (especially zoology) in both Arts and Medicine. The physician academics, notably Professor Graham (who also maintained a close friendship with Osler and other Hopkins connections)54 and the successive Deans, Aikins, Ogden, and Reeve, pursued negotiations for absorbing Trinity Medical School through a merger that was made attractive in conjunction with the Faculty’s new 1903 Medical Building.55 In 1906, by then Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, William Osler emerged as the U of T Presidential Search Committee’s and Pre- mier Whitney’s ideal nominee.56 After a polite interval, however, he

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graciously declined their offer. Clearly a recommendation by Osler for an alternative candidate would have carried considerable weight. Having conferred with Premier Whitney, however, he accepted the view that they were inclined toward making an external choice. Hence Osler pro- vided in his letter to the search committee a muted commendation for Wright, saving more effusively praise for one of his Oxford colleagues.57 The successful candidate—an Edinburgh alumnus, Robert Falconer— moved quickly to rebuild and energize relations between the president’s office and all faculty members. Falconer sought out Wright in 1907, secur- ing his allegiance58 and subsequently enhanced his vice presidential sta- tus through occasional opportunities to represent the university on his behalf. The two quickly developed a close friendship that continued after Wright’s 1912 retirement. Sir Robert and Lady Falconer often visited the Wrights at Oxford, exchanged intimate letters, sought out Wright to represent U of T at English academic functions (such as the University of London’s 1926 centenary), and even commissioned Wright’s university portrait in 1918 from an English artist (Fig. 1).59 The last consideration concerns a Toronto colleague’s influence on one of Wright’s evolutionary interests that emerged as he neared retire- ment. Toronto’s first Professor of Psychiatry, Charles K. Clarke, was from 1908 Wright’s superior as Dean of Medicine, and his decanal colleague while Wright served as Dean of Arts. Clarke’s principal function was Superintendent of the provincial Hospital (formerly Asylum) for the Insane in Toronto, 1905-11. He later moved to become Medical Superin- tendent of Toronto General Hospital, 1911-18, and then the founding Medical Director beginning in 1918 of the mental health and eugenics advocacy organization, the Canadian National Committee for Mental Hygiene (CNCMH). Prompted by despair at the severe overcrowding at Canadian and U.S. mental institutions, beginning about 1895 Clarke had begun to focus keenly, and before long obsessively, on the dispropor- tionate rate of admissions among immigrant groups. From 1904, Clarke lobbied the Federal immigration inspection service and published articles on the “defective and insane” immigrant, aggressively advocating for racial and ethnic profiles in immigration policies.60 By 1907 his attitude toward immigrants had hardened.61 Wright took up this cudgel in 1911, arguing that governments should assume various prescriptive duties, including the regulation of marriage through investigation by qualified state physicians into the “fitness” of those wishing to do so, and for barring immigration of the aforemen- tioned offenders. Canada’s immigration policy should target “as far as possible immigration of a high quality from the British Isles and North- ern Europe.” Moreover the “quality” of individual immigrants, who were then arriving in high numbers to Canada, should be more closely monitored through “specially trained health-officers at the various

Introducing Darwinism to Toronto’s Medical School 207 points of departure” to carry out “a more searching examination than is now enforced.” Wright concluded his Presidential Address to the coun- try’s intellectual elite by admonishing them that “some of the causes of decadence may undoubtedly be counteracted by the judicious applica- tion of sound eugenic principles, and any nation will do well to give these serious consideration.”62 Ironically Wright’s close friend and doubtless most astute advisor, Sir William Osler (elevated to a baronetcy in 1911) seems to have had just one brief brush with the eugenics movement, in England, and then by 1912 was actively taking pains to steer clear of it. Even with regard to Mendelian medical genetics vis-à-vis his own cases, “Osler was perhaps prudent in avoiding a discussion of modes of inheritance.”63 Although originally agreeing to give a paper at the First International Congress of Eugenics in London (UK) during 1912, “under the Presidency of Major Leonard Darwin,” he decided to withdraw a few months beforehand.64 From that time, Osler evidently had no contact with, nor comment upon the movement.65 Wright, on the other hand, was in England at the time attending the Congress as a delegate, although his interest in eugenics seems to have waned during his retirement that commenced two months later.

REFLECTIONS ON THE IMPACT OF WRIGHT’S INFLUENCES

For his initial mandate to introduce evolution, Ramsay Wright’s fore- most achievements may have been his lectures and the forthright clarity of his high school zoology textbook, disseminated nationwide during Darwinism’s first, critical half-century. His public addresses and scientific papers that were published in journals, averaging about one per active year, typically dealt with aspects of zoological morphology or physiology at a descriptive level, without reference to evolutionary implications. Wright enthusiastically incorporated the other two legs of his peda- gogical tripod into his teaching and research—the German experimen- tal method and modern laboratory techniques, notably microscopy. His papers drew on the perspective of sub-specialties such as parasitology, histology and cytology, yet he declined to explore species’ origins or variation through the evolutionary lenses of palaeontology, geographi- cal distribution, homology or generational descent. For the formal open- ing proceedings of the Biology Building on 19 Decemer 1889, as an important example (during which Wright shared the platform with four medical academics, including Osler and Welch from Johns Hopkins), he spoke on “The Pathogenic Sporozoa,” a subgroup of parasitic Proto- zoa, which he illuminated with “the case of a girl of fifteen who died of general carcinosis” with “growths in the breasts and mesentery.”66 In Wright’s last scientific laboratory-based paper, one focusing on animal

208 JOHN P. M. COURT embryology and cytology that he read to the Royal Society of Canada in 1906, he offered no link to the nascent field of genetics.67 Not until 1911 did he make scholarly reference to the dramatic emergence of Mendelian heredity and genetics, in citing a list of the new subdisciplines that derived from biology. That reference provided a segue into the climax of Wright’s Presidential Address, to highlight societal stresses and advocate for social engineering measures in human eugenics. This study has traced the sources of influence on Ramsay Wright’s academic career that impacted his professional activities during his 38 years at the University of Toronto. Five categories of influence on him, rarely acknowledged, have been identified and probed. They proved crucial for informing Wright’s approach in cautiously introducing the evolutionary paradigm into the medical and scientific curricula, as well as the broader culture of Toronto and Canada.

NOTES

1 Archives of Ontario (AO), Provincial Secretary’s Office Correspondence, RG 8-1-1-D. John P. M. Court, “Recruiting a Scientific Enigma: Ramsay Wright at the University of Toronto and Its Reconstituted Medical School, 1874 to 1912,” Historical Studies in Edu- cation, 22, 1 (Spring 2010): 61-81. 2 James Loudon, “The President’s Report for 1899-1900” (University of Toronto), quoted in E. Horne Craigie, A History of the Department of Zoology of the University of Toronto up to 1962 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press and Department of Zoology, 1972), p. 9; John P. M. Court, “Robert Ramsay Wright” (entry), Dictionary of Canadian Biography (DCB) XVI, in press, through the courtesy of the DCB. 3 “Professor Louden’s [sic] Inaugural Lecture: The Sources of Light,” Globe (Toronto), 32: 248, 16 October 1875, p. 8. 4 A. B. McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence: Critical Inquiry and Canadian Thought in the Vic- torian Era (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979, reprinted 2001), p. 29-30, chap. 2 and 3. 5 A. B. McKillop, Matters of Mind: The University in Ontario, 1791-1951 (Toronto: Ontario Historical Studies Series and University of Toronto Press, 1994), p. 116-17. 6 McKillop, Matters of Mind, p. 188; Suzanne Zeller, “Environment, Culture, and the Reception of Darwin in Canada, 1859–1909,” in Ronald L. Numbers and John Sten- house, eds., Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion, and Gender (Cam- bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 96, 108; and Ruth Weir, “Darwin and the Universities in Canada,” Interchange, 14, 4-15, 1 (1983-84): 76. 7 McKillop, A Disciplined Intelligence, p.106. 8 Legislature of Ontario, University Senate Reform Act, 36 Vict. (April 1873), c 29, (The Crooks Act). An additional nine Senate members selected by the Provincial Govern- ment, initially chosen in 1873 by Premier Mowat, included The Globe’s founding pub- lisher, Hon. George Brown—a vocal, public advocate of secular and science education: Library and Archives Canada (LAC), George Brown fonds, MG 24 B40, Mowat letter to Brown, 9 April 1873, p. 1946-47. 9 University of Toronto Archives (UTA), James Loudon Records, B72-0031, “The Mem- oirs of James Loudon, President of the University of Toronto, 1892–1906,” unpubl. ms., n.d. (ca.1907); William James Loudon, Sir William Mulock: A Short Biography (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada Limited, 1932), p. 68-70, 202 (17); and Martin Friedland, The Uni- versity of Toronto: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), chap. 5.

Introducing Darwinism to Toronto’s Medical School 209

10 R. Ramsay Wright, “Presidential Address: The Progress of Biology,” Royal Society of Canada Proceedings and Transactions, 3rd Series, 5 (1911), App. A (37-48): 46. 11 Zeller, “Environment, Culture, and the Reception of Darwin,” p. 92. 12 In the Preface to his retirement project, a translation of medieval Persian astronomy (1029 AD) by M. Al-Biruni (U of T Fisher, ms 5123), Wright referred to his “Intimacy with Sir William Osler, whose fine library was assembled in illustration of the History of Science.” Michael Bliss noted the Wrights’ close friendship in Oxford with the Oslers; and Wright’s role during the late 1920s in finalizing Osler’s monumental bib- liographic bequest for transfer to McGill University: William Osler: A Life in Medicine (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), p. 482, 487. 13 R. Ramsay Wright, An Introduction to Zoology for the Use of High Schools (Toronto: Copp Clark Co. Ltd., 1889). Through this textbook, “Wright presented organic evolution as the principle integrating the whole field.” Carl Berger, Science, God, and Nature in Vic- torian Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 75. 14 Alloa and Clackmannanshire municipal officials, e-mail correspondence to the author, 2006. Craigie, History of the Department of Zoology, App. B (fragments of Wright family correspondence), p. 78, noting the “dire poverty” of Free Church clergy in that era after 1843. 15 T. H. Huxley, “Palaeontology and Evolution,” in Critiques and Addresses (New York: Appleton, 1873), p. 185. Although the extinct subclass Labyrinthodonta resembled a crocodile, it was an amphibian (like frogs, salamanders, and lizards) rather than a rep- tile. 16 Wright Family lore through the courtesy of John Ramsay’s descendant, Janna Ramsay Best, June-July 2009. 17 Craigie, History of the Department of Zoology, App. B. John Ramsay’s consistently gen- erous philanthropy is documented in: Freda Ramsay, John Ramsay of Kildalton, M.P. (Toronto: Peter Martin Associates Limited, 1969). 18 James G. Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer: A Biography (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 21-22, 26. 19 T. H. Huxley, “On the Physical Basis of Life,” Methods and Results: Essays (New York: Appleton, 1897), p. 130-65. 20 Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer, p. 27. 21 E-correspondence from Irene Ferguson, University Archives, University of Edin- burgh, to the author, February 2006, also confirming that Wright was awarded their honorary Doctor of Laws degree at a ceremony on 12 July 1912. 22 By the time of his retirement Wright was regarded in Toronto as “specially interested in marine biology. He is Assistant Director of the [Canadian] Government Marine Bio- logical Department, with stations at St. Andrews, N.B., Nanaimo, B.C., and on Geor- gian Bay.” Star Weekly (Toronto), 11 May 1912, University of Toronto (UTA), Press Clippings. 23 Wright used much of his first summer in Canada “dredging” for marine specimens at Gaspé and “botanizing” on Anticosti Island: Royal Botanic Garden Archives (Edin- burgh), J. H. Balfour fonds, Wright to Balfour, 28 October 1875, courtesy of Margaret Olszewski. 24 Sir William A. Herdman, Founders of Oceanography and their Work: An Introduction to the Science of the Sea (London: Edward Arnold & Co., 1923), p. 39, 45. 25 A. G. Huntsman, Biological [sic] Dept., University of Toronto, Obituary for “Robert Ramsay Wright,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Canada, 1934 (iv-vi), p. iv. UTA, B78- 0010/020(05), President’s Annual Report for 1933-34, “Robert Ramsay Wright,” anon. typescript of obit. notes, apparently by or with Huntsman (5 pp.), p. 1. 26 UTA, Archibald Gowanlock Huntsman (1883-1973) fonds, B2005-0006/022(29), “The U. of T. Department of Zoology,” typescript, p. 4, prepared by Huntsman for Craigie, His- tory of the Department of Zoology.

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27 R. Ramsay Wright, “Presidential Address: The Progress of Biology,” Royal Society of Canada Proceedings and Transactions, 3rd Series, 5 (1911), App. A (37-48): 43. 28 Herdman, Founders of Oceanography, p. 69-72. Sir John Murray (1841-1914) was born at Cobourg, Ontario, serving aboard the Challenger as the fauna biologist and, after Thomson’s death, as the project director. 29 Keith R. Benson, “American Morphology in the Late Nineteenth Century: The Biology Department at Johns Hopkins University,” Journal of the History of Biology, 18, 2 (Sum- mer 1985): 177. 30 Benson, “American Morphology,” p. 184. Brooks reported on the Challenger’s Stom- atopoda, Herdman on their Tunicata, and Huxley on Spirula. 31 William E. Hoyle, ed., Challenger Expedition Reports: Portraits of the Contributors [88 in all] Reproduced from the Photographs Presented by Them to Sir John Murray (London, UK: Dulau, 1897). 32 Philip J. Pauly, “The Appearance of Academic Biology in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of the History of Biology, 17, 3 (Fall 1984): 369-97, 371. 33 T. H. Huxley, “A Lobster: Or, The Study of Zoology,” 1861, in Discourses Biological and Geological: Essays (New York: Appleton, 1898) p. 196-228; Huxley, “On the Physical Basis of Life,” 1868, in Methods and Results: Essays; Huxley, “On Medical Education,” 1870, in Critiques and Addresses, p. 56-70; Huxley, “Universities, Actual and Ideal,” 1874, p. 31-72, and “The Connection of the Biological Sciences with Medicine,” 1881, p. 333-57, in Science and Culture and Other Essays (New York: Appleton, 1888); Huxley, “Address on University Education,” 1876, 99-127 in American Addresses with a Lecture on the Study of Biology (New York: Appleton, 1888); Huxley, Science Primers: Introductory (Toronto: Canada Publishing, 1881, orig. publ. London, 1880); Huxley, An Introduction to the Study of Zoology, Illustrated by the Crayfish (New York: Appleton, 1880, 1888); Cyril Bibby, “Thomas Henry Huxley and University Development,” Victorian Studies,2 (December 1958): 97-116, esp. p. 100-113; and G. L. Geison, Michael Foster and the Cam- bridge School of Physiology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 135-41. 34 J. P. McM. [McMurrich], “Prof. R. Ramsay Wright,” Nature, 132 (21 October 1933): 631. 35 Henry Newell Martin, “The Study and Teaching of Biology: An Introductory Lecture delivered at the Johns Hopkins University, 23 October 1876,” The Popular Science Monthly, X, LVII (January 1877): 298-309; C. S. Breathnach, “Henry Newell Martin (1848-1893): A Pioneer Physiologist,” Medical History, 13, 3 (July 1969): 271-79; and T. H. Huxley and H. N. Martin, A Course of Elementary Instruction in Practical Biology (Lon- don: Macmillan, 1877, and Rev. ed. extended and edited by G. R. Howes and D. H. Scott, 1889). 36 Sandra F. McRae, The “Scientific Spirit” in Medicine at the University of Toronto, 1880–1910 (PhD thesis, University of Toronto, 1987), “‘The Picked Men of their Time’: Toronto and the Johns Hopkins University,” p. 192 ff. 37 Sir William Osler, “Introduction,” (1919), Bibliotheca Osleriana (Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1969), p. xxiv. 38 Harvey Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler, Volume 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), p.118, 125-26. 39 Wright’s account is an editorial synopsis (not verbatim) briefly appended to Prof. Graham’s keynote lecture, in The Canadian Practitioner, 16 October 1890, p. 31-32. The historical record for this trip has survived through correspondence, made available to Oslerian biographer-scholars, that arose from Osler’s extensive network of contacts in Europe and his own letters home to his family and colleagues: see Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler, p. 329-34 and Bliss, William Osler, 1999, p. 179-80. Mulock’s biog- rapher includes mention of his sponsorship of Wright’s subsequent (1890-1) expedi- tion to visit Koch in Germany: William James Loudon, Sir William Mulock: A Short Biog- raphy (Toronto: Macmillan of Canada Limited, 1932), p. 264; but no word on the summer, 1890 mission. He noted, however, that the western wing of the new Biology

Introducing Darwinism to Toronto’s Medical School 211

building was then under construction to “provide accommodation for the museum” (p. 259). McRae, The “Scientific Spirit,” p. 163-65, n. 9, concluded, based on two of Wright’s subsequent articles (in which he down-played his “museum” commis- sion), that his summer trip was intended “to study the most effective means of applying scientific methods to the solution of medical problems;” and “to study the ways in which European medical schools used the basic sciences as part of medical education.” 40 J. E. Graham, communication to The Canadian Practitioner, 15, 16 (16 August 1890), p. 389. 41 Loudon, Sir William Mulock, p. 65. 42 AO, RG 2-29-1-252, General Correspondence Files of the Minister of Education (MS 2636), Wright to Hon. George Ross, 1 September 1890; emphasis added concerning the discrepancy in how Wright spent his summer. 43 R. D. Gidney and W. P. J. Millar, “The Reorientation of Medical Education in Late Nineteenth-Century Ontario: The Proprietary Medical Schools and the Founding of the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Toronto,” Journal of the History of Medicine, 49 (January 1994). 44 The Mail (Toronto), 25-27 November 1890; The Globe, 25-27 and 29 November 1890; The Varsity (U of T), 10, 9 (2 December 1890): 103; and The Canadian Practitioner, 15, 23 (1 December 1890): 555. 45 The Mail, 26 November 1890, p. 6. The same day’s Globe, p. 8, substantially supports that account. 46 A. B. Macallum, “Osler’s Influence on the Research Student,” CMAJ, Special Osler Memorial Number, July 1920, p. 89-90. 47 The Varsity, 10, 13 (27 January 1891): 156. 48 Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler, p. 334-35. 49 The Mail, 27 November 1890, p. 1; The Globe, 27 November 1890, p. 1. 50 Both were members of “a party of [four] gentlemen” who travelled to the USA in 1888 preparatory to planning the Park Hospital: “The New Hospital in Toronto,” The Cana- dian Practitioner, 13, 1 (January 1888): 27. 51 Paid advertisements, The Maritime Medical News, 1, 5 (July 1889) to 4, 9 (September 1892). The deception was dropped by altering the text beginning with the next edi- tion, 4, 10 (October 1892). 52 Loudon, Sir William Mulock, chap. VIII, “An Adventure with the University Senate,” p. 83-89 and App. II, “Address Delivered by Mr. Mulock… September 13, 1892,” p. 251- 82, also with his justifications in the “Park Hospital” contretemps. Ontario Medical Journal, 1, 4 (November 1892): 172-73; Friedland, The University of Toronto, p. 132-34; and UTA, Langton Family fonds, B65-0014/004, Sir Daniel Wilson’s Journals, 1 March 1892, p. 202. 53 News item re Pike’s appointment, The Canadian Journal of Medical Science, 5, 1 (January 1880); 28. Pike’s career in Toronto: Friedland, The University of Toronto, 2002, p. 156-57. “News and Notes” re “Antigone,” The Canada School Journal, 7, 60 (May 1882): 114; Wilson’s Journals, 14 April 1882; and the performances of Antigone took place on April 11 and 12; also see a review by “C.P.M.” in The Canada Educational Monthly and School Magazine, 4 (April 1882): 190-92. Hutton declined to be considered for the pres- idency in 1906, unlike Wright, hence as Principal of University College he was named Interim President between Loudon and Falconer, in lieu of Wright as the Vice-Presi- dent. For a balanced assessment of Hutton’s character and contributions, see , The Young Vincent Massey [Hutton’s undergraduate student, 1906-10] (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981), p. 34-35. 54 McRae, The “Scientific Spirit,” p. 203-6, assigns to Dr. Graham (1847-1899), Toronto’s highly respected Professor of Medicine, “much of the credit for directing individual Toronto graduates to join Osler at Johns Hopkins” during the 1890s.

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55 W. R. Feasby, MD, “A Short History of the University of Toronto Faculty of Medi- cine,” (ca.1970), reproduced in The Medical Graduate, 27, 2 (Spring 1983): 7-10. Feasby, p. 8, credits Dean Reeve as the foremost planner and visionary for the 1903 Medical Building, and also as “the principal mover towards the erection of Convocation Hall. It is said that he conceived the main ideas of its architecture.” 56 AO, F5, James Pliny Whitney fonds, MU 3121, letter of 20 December 1906 to his brother, E. C. (Ned) Whitney, “… nothing would happen that would be so fortunate for the University as for him [Osler] to accept.” 57 Despite casting a wide net locally and internationally, the search committee’s (and government’s) only letters of recommendation received in support of Wright were from Hutton and Osler: Fisher Rare Books, MS Coll. 1, Sir Edmund Walker archive, Presidential Search Committee and Letters files. UTA, A73-0015/041(51/10), Secretary of the Board of Governors Records, Presidential Search Committee. AO, James Pliny Whitney fonds, which also reflects that no recommendation was made to Whitney on Wright’s behalf by Dr. A. B. Macallum, still a close personal friend of Whitney since their youthful days together at Cornwall, Ontario. 58 Greenlee, Sir Robert Falconer, p. 121; Hutton’s recommendation, p. 112. 59 UTA, A67-0007/055, President’s Office Correspondence, Falconer to Wright, 28 Octo- ber 1918. The portraitist commissioned by the university was an English artist, John Alfred Arnesby Brown of Norwich. 60 Among several by him on this theme, see: C. K. Clarke, “The Defective and Insane Immigrant,” Bulletin of the Ontario Hospitals for the Insane, II, 1 (July 1908): 3-22. 61 Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990); Ian R. Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane:Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997); and Dowbiggin, entry for Charles Kirk Clarke in DCB, Vol. XV. 62 Wright, “Presidential Address,” p.43. 63 Victor A. McKusick, MD, “Osler as a Medical Geneticist,” in J.A. Barondess, J. P.McGov- ern and Charles G. Roland, eds., The Persisting Osler: Selected Transactions of the First Ten Years of the American Osler Society (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1985), p. 164. 64 Osler’s activities leading up to, and during the Eugenics Congress (per Cushing, The Life of Sir William Osler, and Bliss, William Osler) make clear that he had no intervening reason such as illness or a scheduling conflict in deciding to withdraw; nor was any reason given in the subsequently published Congress Report, Problems in Eugenics (London: Eugenics Education Society, 2 vols ). Osler’s replacement was British pathol- ogist, F. W. Mott, speaking on a topic of his own, “Heredity and Eugenics in relation to Insanity.” 65 Confirmed via helpful personal communications from two Osler authorities, Dr. Charles G. Roland of McMaster University (3 September 2003—since sadly deceased) and Pamela Miller (26 September 2003), History of Medicine Librarian, Osler Library, McGill. 66 The Canadian Practitioner, 1 and 15 January and 1 February 1890; subsequently reprinted (Toronto: J. E. Bryant Co., 1890). CIHM/ICMH Microfiche no. 28938. 67 Ramsay Wright, “An Early Anadidymus of the Chick,” Trans. RSC., 2nd Series, Vol. XI, read to Sect. IV, 1906, p. 21. Anadidymus is an embryo’s failure to separate, resulting in conjoined twins separated at the leg or distal end while fused at the proximal or head or cephalic end.