Edinburgh's Contribution to Medical Microbiology (review)

This book chronicles the development of microbiology in Edinburgh—its institutions and its personalities. Charles J. Smith, former senior chief medical laboratory scientific officer and archivist in the Department of Bacteriology at Edinburgh University Medical School, has compiled a wealth of information here about microbiologists in Edinburgh.

Bacteriology in Edinburgh developed in a pattern much like that of other countries, beginning with applications to surgical infection in the 1870s, and becoming linked with pathology and public health by the 1880s and 1890s. Sir Joseph Lister, whose pioneering antiseptic surgery techniques were inspired by Louis Pasteur, and Sir William Watson Cheyne, Lister’s house surgeon at the old Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, made the first serious attempts to study bacteria in the 1870s. They did not stay long: they moved on to University Hospital in London in 1877. The sustained presence of microbiology began with a later surgeon, Professor John Chiene, who opened the first teaching and research laboratory for bacteriology at the Edinburgh Royal College of Physicians’ new Medical School in 1884. The first three chapters recount these early developments in surgery, the appointment of the city’s first health officer, and the opening of diagnostic bacteriology laboratories at the Royal College of Physicians, the City Fever Hospital, and the Usher Institute, founded in 1902 through the patronage of a family of Edinburgh distillers.

A desire for a more systematic teaching of bacteriology led to the creation of the Robert Irvine Chair of Bacteriology at the University of Edinburgh in 1912, the central focus of the book. The development of bacteriology at the university is related through biographical chapters on the holders of this chair from 1912 through 1991: professors James Ritchie, T. J. Mackie, Robert Cruickshank, B. P. Marmion, and J. G. Collee. These men established the form and direction of medical microbiology at the university and in Edinburgh at large, training the staff for laboratories in hospitals and public health institutions throughout the city. Short vignettes on the founding and activities of these laboratories complete the book.

The author’s perspective as a member of the technical staff in bacteriology at Edinburgh University provides one of the more unusual and welcome features of this volume: the substantial amount of information provided about the work and training of nonfaculty members of the staff. The book is heavily illustrated and includes photographs of most of the people and locations mentioned. Appendices provide biographies of members of the Department of Bacteriology at Edinburgh University who are not given fuller treatments in the text, accounts of notable research, bibliographies of sources and obituaries, and anecdotes about their extracurricular activities.

These portrayals of microbiologists, laboratories, and research make the book a useful reference, but a less successful history. A dearth of analysis and synthesis leaves the reader to make most of the connections that relate the institutions and the people to one another. The absence of an index makes this a cumbersome task.