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Reviewed by:
  • Philosophic Whigs: Medicine, Science, and Citizenship in Edinburgh, 1789–1848
  • Philip K. Wilson
L. S. Jacyna. Philosophic Whigs: Medicine, Science, and Citizenship in Edinburgh, 1789–1848. Wellcome Institute Series in the History of Medicine. London: Routledge, 1994. vii + 213 pp. $89.95; £40.00.

Biography remains one of the most enduring historiographic methods. L. S. Jacyna, in a work that may not be as apparently biographical as the author suggests, has detailed the cultural and ideological educational milieu, the professional identities of surgical and medical educators, and the politico-philosophical Whiggism that persisted in Edinburgh from the late-eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries. To substantiate his choice of genre, he has explored these issues through the successive medical careers of one family: John, William, and Allen Thomson.

Jacyna carefully explains his ideological view of the “philosophic Whigs” as a group of natural philosophers who pursued science and medicine as instruments and objects of reform. The Thomsons’ careers exemplified ways in which Edinburgh’s university organization and medical practice were both dependent upon and shaped by the city’s polity. In early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh, the Tories maintained a stronghold over the appointed university positions. When John Thomson was unable to secure an existing chair at the medical college, he sought to establish new pedagogical posts in physiology and pathology. Thomson’s innovative addition of a “pathological dimension” to the teaching posts he obtained elsewhere was, as Jacyna describes, one active measure of reforming the traditional medical curriculum. Jacyna argues that Thomson’s preoccupation with either filling or creating a demand for medical knowledge ensured that the politicization of his professional activities would be “overt and played out on a public stage” (p. 177).

John Thomson’s son William furthered his father’s attempts to instill Whiggism at both Edinburgh and Glasgow medical colleges, but his desires remained unfulfilled due to his early death. William’s brother, Allen, eventually weakened the Tory stronghold with his appointment to the chair of anatomy at Glasgow in 1848. Allen Thomson’s success relied in part upon his particular focus upon animal development. In particular, he maintained that the anatomical development of different animals was comparable to developments within the manufacturing industry: ascending either scale of development, one found increasing divisions of labor. Thomson’s emphasis on the developmental or “historical dimension” of the organism, to use Jacyna’s phrase, was actually a “Whig theory of bodily history” (p. 174).

Jacyna’s explication of the “inescapable presence of the political in the world of nineteenth-century medicine” (p. 6) is convincingly argued. The ways in which political ideology can inform, influence, and shape scientific thinking are clearly elucidated. Moreover, Jacyna demonstrates how the ideological dispute between private interest and public virtue was embodied in the Thomson family. He has modeled a rhetorical analysis of the politicized nature of medical discourse in the “Athens of the North.” However, the polemical issues outside the Thomsons’ coterie suggest that at least some of the criticisms raised in contemporary Edinburgh medical communications were based on more than recognizable [End Page 160] partisan politics. Jacyna has added a comprehensive view of the political structure of this historically important medical community, but a more critically balanced analysis, one that must assuredly incorporate Jacyna’s findings, still awaits an author.

Philip K. Wilson
Truman State University
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