The Edinburgh Medical School and Its Professors in My Student Days (1865-1869)
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Edinburgh Medical Journal Ap7~il 1923 THE EDINBURGH MEDICAL SCHOOL AND ITS PROFESSORS IN MY STUDENT DAYS (1865-1869). By BYROM BRAMWELL, M.D., LL.D., F.R.C.P.E. Mr President and Gentlemen,?Allow me, in the first to to be place, thank you for asking me to give this address: asked to follow in the footsteps of the many distinguished men who have given the Inaugural Address to the Royal Medical Society is an honour which I assure you I fully appreciate. It is always a great pleasure to speak in this hall: it recalls many memories; and I thought it might be interesting to the men you to hear something of my student days and of who were my teachers. I commenced the study of medicine now exactly ty seven years ago?on ist November 1865. The Edinburg now. t e Medical School was then much smaller than it is average annual number of University medical students urm^ the four years that I studied was 4&9> the avera?e alll^ua number during the past four years was 1825. The comparison o is not, perhaps, altogether a fair one, for the numbers stu en years have been swollen by the war and the women in there were, of course, no lady medicals my day. un er At that time we both worked and played disadvantages compared with you students of to-day. t en rma , was no Students' Union; there were no hostels, ui in*., > situated in a hole, was a dingy, dirty, insanitary ica c asse was the me dissecting-room deplorable (all ^ then held in the old University, and the dissecting-room corner o at the top of the stairs in the north-west delivered The Inaugural Address to the Royal Medical Society, 20th October 1922. Byrom Bramwell quadrangle). Sir William Mitchell Banks, in writing to con- gratulate Sir William Turner on his election as Principal, in the year 1903, termed it "that terrible old dissecting-room at the top of the stair." There were at that time no beautiful permanent dissections to study from; the bodies were often imperfectly preserved?sometimes, before we had done with them, in an advanced state of decomposition. Let me illustrate this point by a little incident. One beautiful summer morning in June 1866 I went with my dear old friend, Edward Harriman Dickinson, and another friend, Dods, by an early train to fish the Clyde. We were alone in the carriage. VVe had not gone very far when Dickinson began sniffing about, poking his " head under the seats, and said, There is a beastly smell in this " carriage." Dods, who was a somewhat stolid man, replied, I " " think it must be the maggots in my creel; then he added, / got them from 'my partIn my day there were no practical classes, except in physiology; there were no clinical tutors; we had to work out the cases for ourselves; that was perhaps not a disadvantage, for we had more time to think; we had, too, more clinical material to work with?the proportion of students to beds in the hospital was smaller than it is now; further, we had the Royal Medical Society; then, as now, it was a flourishing institution. I was elected a member on 15th November 1867. I well remember the reverence with which I regarded the Presidents, more particularly, Sir, the Senior President, and the feeling of nervous trepidation with which I got on my feet for the first time to make a few disjointed and incoherent remarks. I was elected the Curator of the Library on 4th December 1868. I was never a President; the winter I would certainly have been a President, I had gone into practice. This also prevented my being house-physician to Professor Sanders, who had just been elected Professor of Pathology, and who, with the assistance of David Hamilton, afterwards Professor of Pathology in the University of Aber- deen, reorganised the pathological department, and made it, as it has since been, one of the most important features of the Medical Faculty. Sanders was a very able physician and clinical teacher, and after Warburton Begbie's death was, for a few years, the leading consulting physician in Scotland. By leaving Edinburgh I also had to refuse the invitation of the Professor of Medicine (Professor Laycock) to act as his assistant in succession to David Ferrier. i34 Professors in my Student Days The medical professors of the University, some of their assistants, and many of the extra-mural lecturers and teachers were very remarkable men ; indeed, I speak advisedly when I say that, so far as my knowledge enables me to judge, there was never any medical school in the world at any period of its existence which, at any one time, had such a number of extraordinarily able and distinguished men as the Medical School of Edinburgh had when I became a medical student in November 1865.* Let me try and give you some idea of these men. John Hutton Balfour was the professor of botany; he was a great botanist, a distinguished man of science ; we called him " " Woody Fibre ; he was a dry and uninteresting lecturer. George J. Allman was the professor of natural history ; he was an Irishman, and a poet. He used to drive up to the south-west corner of the quadrangle at two o'clock in his jaunting car (I have only seen one other Irish side-car in Edinburgh during the whole time I have lived here), briskly jump off, run up the steps, and give us charming descriptions of such things as coral reefs and the deep-sea fauna of the Tropics. Lyon Playfair (b. 1818, d. 1898) was the professor of chemistry. Playfair was a good chemist?he had been a pupil and protege of Liebig, the great German chemist? he was, too, a man of great common sense, a capital organiser, a business man, a man of affairs. During the twenty years he held the professorship he made great improvements in the chemical department, more particularly in the laboratory. In my third year (1868) he resigned the professorship in order to become Member of Parliament for the Universities of Edinburgh and St Andrews ; he at once took a distinguished position in Parliament, was Postmaster-General in one of Mr * Professors in the University :?John Hutton Balfour, George J. Allman, Lyon Playfair, John Goodsir, John Hughes Bennett, William Henderson, Robert Christison, Douglas Maclagan, James Spence, Thomas Laycock, James Syme, James Young Simpson. Assistants to the Professors;?James Dewar, William Turner, Ramsay Heatley Traquair, John Chiene, James A. Russell, Morrison Watson, William Rutherford, Thomas R. Fraser, James Ormiston Affleck, David Ferrier. Extra-mural Lecturers and Teachers:?Wm. R. Sanders, Mathews Duncan, Thomas Keith, Daniel Rutherford Haldane, George Balfour, Thomas Grainger Stewart, P. H. Watson, D. Argyll Robertson, Thomas Annandale, John Duncan, Joseph Bell, A. Crum Brown, Henry D. Littlejohn, J. Bell Pettigrew, P. D. Handyside. *35 Byrom Bramwell Gladstone's ministries (1873-74), was knighted in 1883, and raised to the peerage in 1892. Playfair was a very lucid lecturer; he gave an admirable course, well balanced to the needs of his large conglomerate class, composed of medical students, arts students, and men studying to be scientific chemists, commercial chemists, and pharmacists. The numerous experiments made before his class were invariably successful ; this he owed in large part to his assistant, James Dewar. Most of you probably know the name of Sir James Dewar, he is one of the most distinguished, perhaps the most distinguished, chemical physicist of the last fifty years; he has made a great number of most important original investiga- tions and discoveries; with Sir Frederick Abel he discovered cordite (smokeless powder), and is the inventor of the thermos flask (Dewar's flask). I was fortunate in making the personal acquaintance both of Playfair and Dewar, for I happened to get the second medal in Playfair's class; it entitled me to a Hope Scholarship and to work for several months in the chemical laboratory. John Goodsir (b. 1814, d. 1867) was the professor of anatomy. When I knew Goodsir he was a very sick man. I shall never forget his appearance as he came into the lecture- room on the first day of my first session?a tall, gaunt, emaciated man, in a black skull-cap, staggering in on the arm of his stalwart assistant, the curator of his museum, Mr Stirling. Goodsir had suffered for many years from tabes ; and it was remarkable how, though frequently racked with severe lightning pains and heavily handicapped by the other disabilities which advanced tabes entails, he for many years went on fulfilling the duties of the professorship and prosecuting those researches which made his name famous. " Dr Logan Turner, in the Life of his father, states : Goodsir had a world-wide reputation as the most philosophical anatomist of the century." In his obituary notice in the Edinburgh Medical Jout7ial (April 1867, p. 962), it is stated: "Every department of anatomy he had studied minutely?human, comparative, morphological, physiological, pathological and each department he had enlightened by his discoveries." In my day Goodsir was never seen in the dissecting-room, but the practical work of the department was most admirably carried on by a remarkable staff of assistants. 136 Professors in my Student Days The first assistant was William Turner. I need not say much to this audience of Sir William Turner; he served the the University for long period of sixty-two years, and served it well. He came to Edinburgh on the recommendation of Sir James Paget, as Goodsir's first assistant, at the age of 22 ; he filled this post for thirteen years; then, in my second winter session, when Goodsir died, was elected to the professor- he was ship ; Professor of Anatomy for thirty-six years; he finally was elected to the high and onerous position of I rincipal of the University; this' position he held for thirteen years.