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Reviewed by:
  • New Medical Challenges during the Scottish Enlightenment
  • Paul Wood, Ph.D.
Guenter B. Risse . New Medical Challenges during the Scottish Enlightenment. Amsterdam and New York, Radopi, 2005. vi, 386 pp. $96.

Over the course of a long and distinguished career the physician-turned-historian Guenter B. Risse has published on a wide array of subjects, from surgery in ancient Egypt to an outbreak of bubonic plague in early twentieth-century San Francisco. But for all the chronological and topical diversity in his corpus of writings, his many articles and books are linked together by a common set of themes that reflect his interests in national and local contexts, changing conceptions of health and disease, the relations between medical theory and practice, the role of institutions in the making of medical knowledge, and the critical use of sources. Such concerns are most clearly in evidence in his research on the period and place to which he has repeatedly returned, namely eighteenth-century Scotland. His sensitivity to national and local contexts, for example, informed his early studies of the continental reception of the controversial medical system of the iconoclastic Edinburgh practitioner John Brown, while his fascination with institutional frameworks and his probing of untapped archival resources came to the fore in Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), his classic 1986 monograph on the Edinburgh Infirmary. New Medical Challenges during the Scottish Enlightenment brings together nine papers (some of them hitherto unpublished) that deal primarily, although not exclusively, with medicine in eighteenth-century Edinburgh and that display the analytical preoccupations that have framed his work since the 1970s. The volume includes chapters on: the infirmary and the Royal Medical Society; William Cullen as an Enlightened "hygienist;" ague and lead poisoning among Scottish miners; the cases of pulmonary [End Page 538] consumption recorded in the notes of the Edinburgh professors and their students; the treatment of "female complaints" by Cullen and his colleagues; and a concluding chapter that reconstructs how Edinburgh physicians handled patients suffering from what the medics categorized as hysteria and hypochondriasis. In addition, the author has appended a select bibliography of manuscripts, theses, primary sources, and scholarly publications related to the history of medicine in eighteenth-century Scotland.

Collectively, the essays that make up New Medical Challenges during the Scottish Enlightenment provide a detailed panorama of the ideas, institutions, and practices of Edinburgh's medical community during what the noted jurist Henry Cockburn dubbed "the great philosophical age of Scotland." Risse has an unrivalled knowledge of the archives associated with the Edinburgh Infirmary, which he puts to good use in most of the chapters in the collection. The two papers on the Royal Medical Society are likewise rooted in largely unexplored manuscript sources, as well as in newspapers and periodicals of the period. The collective portrait he draws of patients and practitioners in the Athens of the North is thus meticulously observed and firmly grounded in archival materials. Furthermore, the analytical tools he employs to create his picture of medicine in eighteenth-century Edinburgh are, on the whole, highly sophisticated and deployed with sensitivity and insight. Yet for all of the empirical and theoretical strengths of the book, it is not without its problems.

There are, for example, a number of minor errors, such as the misspelled name for Lord Torphichen (156) and the inclusion of the Glasgow moralist Thomas Reid on a brief list of the Edinburgh literati (141). Such slips suggest that the author's touch is somewhat uncertain when dealing with individuals who are less central to his concerns than someone like William Cullen, who emerges as the main protagonist (if not the hero) of the story Risse wants to tell about Edinburgh medicine. Cullen was, of course, a dominant figure in the medical world of the Enlightenment, and not just in Edinburgh. But one wishes that Risse had more to say about other important medical men, like the Monros, Robert Whytt, and especially John Gregory and his son James (who do at least receive passing attention). For if Risse had cast his net more widely, he would have been prompted to give some account of the significant theoretical and methodological differences between...

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