THE BRITISH 752 APRIL 29, 1933] THE WARRINGTON ACADEMY, 1757-86 IMEDICAL JOPJRNAL

(1747-1822): " of the English practitioners of medicine in the eighteenth century no one, unless perhaps Richard Mead, carried higher the tradition of scholar physician Ajaba tt thttra- than John Aikin." His father, the Rev. John Aikin, was one of the founders of the Academy. He studied THE WARRINGTON ACADEMY (1757-86) AND ITS medicine at Edinburgh and practised in Chester, Warring- INFLUENCE UPON MEDICINE AND SCIENCE ton, and Manchester. He was apprenticed to Dr. John White of Manchester, who wrote on the " Management While on a visit to this country Dr. John F. Fulton of of Pregnant and Lying-in Women." Aikin wrote a small the Yale University School of Medicine, attracted by a work, Thoughts on Hospitals, and in this expressed his leader in the Times of August 5th, 1932, referring to the belief in wound infection by a viable agent conveyed by will of a public-spirited alderman of Warrington-the late air. He deplored the bad results of the treatment of Mr. Arthur Bennett-visited Warrington, and obtained compound fractures in hospitals, and advocated adequate material for an interesting paper on the Warrington ventilation to minimize the dangers. He also wrote on Academy, which he read before the Johns Hopkins Medical lead as a therapeutic agent. In general literature he wrote History Club, Baltimore, on November 28th, 1932.' Space a ten-volume dictionary of biography-the predecessor of only permits a summary and some significant extracts, the National Dictionary; the Biographical Memoirs of but to be fully appreciated the whole paper should be Medicine in Great Britain; and several other works. read. Thomas Percival (1740-1804), the first pupil of tbh " Baltimore," he said, " was the first place in this country Warrington Academy, studied medicine at Edinburgh and where medical history really took root, so now, through a practised in Warrington and Manchester. He founded series of fortunate and highly appropriate circumstances, it the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. He has become the chief centre for the intensive study of history also " wrote the greatest work on medical ethics that has in and in addition made scientific con- of medicine and science. . For some years I have been appeared English, growing more and more impatient with those scholars who tributions of the first importance to public health and assume that the only thing that matters in science and philo- problems of putrefaction." Caleb Hillier Parry (1755-1822), sophy is the development of ideas, and that great contri- the celebrated Bath physician, who wrote on the arterial butions should be recorded dispassionately and independently pulse and angina pectoris, studied the breeding of Of other of the of the lives of those who created them. . . My con- sheep to improve wool production. pupils viction is that an idea cannot be fully understood or Academy the most famous is Thomas Robert Malthus, evaluated unless one has studied the soil from which it grew. F.R.S., whose famous Essay on Population led to the The most intimate and important part of the idea is, in my Malthusian doctrine, and indirectly through Darwin and opinion, the man who created it-how he lived, who his Wallace to the theory of natural selection. friends were, and what perchance he took for his breakfast After the Academy's cessation at Warrington, it moved or his dinner. to Manchester, remaining until 1803. Then to York for " What forces were at work upon him in his childhood, thirty-seven years, but returned to Manchester again until who were his contemporaries, and teachers; what was 1853, when it moved to London. the art and literature upon which he was brought up, and During these migrations the college exerted through- finally, was his mind fettered or inspired by religious con- its liberal teachings a profound effect upon the life of the victions? No one has expressed this broad point of view, as nation, and it produced the commanding figure of James related to scientific history, more effectively than Dr. Sigerist Marqineau. From London the college moved in 1889 to in his recent book, Man and Medicine." Oxford, and in 1893 came to occupy the new and beautiful of Manchester College. The chapel with its Burne- Why was it, Dr. Fulton asks, that many of the most buildings contributions to English medicine and science Jones windows, and the library with its statue of Martineau, important of above its celebrated Warrington in the eighteenth century came from a rather restricted portrait Priestley, and, all, He window, give vivid testimony of its past, of its unfettered district in and about the county of Lancashire. been believes this to be due to the religious unrest of the time, minds, and the rich intellectual life with which it has which brought the Warrington-Academy into being. The so long associated. The college is no longer directly concerned with the of science, but I urge that the move- object of the Academy was to provide a liberal education, teaching wvould free from religious tests, to those dissenters who wished ment that brought Manchester College into being did much also to the renaissance of scientific among to enter the professions, or who desired the higher educa- promote thinking Indeed, it has been frcm the soil tion of a university. The universities of England were English-speaking people. of free that much of English science has grown since closed to dissenters up to the year 1880. " Michael Foster, thinking for example, could not be appointed professor of physio- the time that Warrington closed its doors." logy at Cambridge in 1878 because he was a fervent non- This imperfect summary of Dr. Fulton's paper would conformist (Baptist)." The Academy continued actively be very incomplete without reference to the link between for twenty-seven years, but finally dissolved in 1786. The Baltimore and Warrington. This. link consists in the subjects taught were: divinity, classics, languages and library of the Warrington Dispensary, which was bought belles-lettres, languages and natural history, natural by Osler in 1906 and taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital. philosophy, and mathematics. Joseph Priestley is the It now forms part of the Welch Library. The library was most famous name associated with the Academy. He gathered together by some of the men connected with the taught languages and belles-lettres from 1761 to 1767. Warrington Academy, and Osler refers to the purchase He conducted experiments on electricity and wrote a in an address on " The Library of a Medical School " in History of Electricity at Warrington. Priestley was also the Johns Hopkins Bulletin, July, 1907. After describing a pioneer in the teaching of history, for at that time how the library came to his knowledge he said: history was not a fully recognized subject of university study. Dr. Fulton says: " Little wonder that historians I may mention in passing that the library is very rich of science and medicine have only recently become in English medical pamphlets of the seventeenth and yrominent in university life." eighteenth centuries, and contains a large number of the During its twenty-seven years of active life 393 students works of classical medical authors which we had not in the were trained at the Academy, and of these twenty entered library. " in the medicine, seven are mentioned Dictionary of I think it will be that Dr. Fulton became Fellows of the generally agreed National Biography, and three deserves the thanks of the medical profession of this of Of the medical men who Royal College Physicians. for his and effort to stay the most are: country eloquent timely attained fame the prominent John Aikin, of time from a in the Thomas and Caleb Hillier Parry. John Aikin shadow darkening bright period Percival, history of English medicine and science, and by so doing American ' Bulletin of the Insttitte of the History of Medicine, February, he has forged another link between British and 1933, vol. i, No. 2, p. 50. (Supplement to the Bulletin of the medicine. Johns Hopkins Hospital, February, 1933, vol. lii, No. 2.) J. S. MANSON.