Science and Medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment (review)

The Scottish Enlightenment—a phenomenon centered around the cities and universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Aberdeen—has captured considerable scholarly interest over the past three decades. The core of this scholarship has promulgated the view that the science and medicine of Enlightenment Scotland were intelligible only through a thorough appreciation of Scotland's social context; in other words, the enlightenment within science and medicine must be recognized within the cultural, political, and economic constitution of Scotland during the Enlightenment. Much of this scholarship was a countermovement to the late Hugh Trevor-Roper's explicit exclusion of science and medicine from the changes he viewed as definitive signs of Enlightenment progress within Scottish history.

Charles W. J. Withers and Paul Wood's edited collection brings together twelve resplendent chapters that further direct interpretations away from Trevor-Roper's errant argument. A. D. Morrison-Low deftly develops an account of the use and place of instruments—those long overlooked historical artifacts—within the material culture and marketplace trade in Enlightenment Scotland; indigenous Scottish manufacturers and markets are contrasted with their more established, and thus more dominating, English counterparts. Withers brings new and valuable meaning to Scottish maps and cartography; he concludes his contribution by challenging us to view not only mapping in the Enlightenment, but mapping of the Enlightenment in relation to "the movement across space of people and ideas, to local differences in meaning, and to the historical geography of Enlightenment audiences" (p. 72). Focusing upon the related earth science of geology, Stuart Hartley draws upon the practical explorations of the earth—the fieldwork. He demonstrates the enormousness of the task required to gather, consolidate, and synthesize a mountain of data gathered "out there" in a way that processes new scientific knowledge for an audience "at home." The field, he argues, was "an ambiguous place, depending as it does upon the 'translation' and impact of theory and upon the export of reliable specimens which stand, in summary form, for greater claims" (p. 296).

The role of Glasgow, in contrast to the other Scottish cultural centers, in the institutionalization of Enlightenment science is central to Roger L. Emerson and Paul Wood's empirical and demographic synthesis. Warren McDougall and Stephen W. Brown skillfully use the trade of books, as seen in the careers of Charles Elliott and William Smellie, respectively, to mark the dissemination of Scotland's Enlightenment thought beyond its national borders. Fiona A. Macdonald gleans evidence from clinical case records that the Glasgow physician Robert Cleghorn developed a wide network of consultants with whom he shared new medical findings, and from whom he modified aspects of his own practice. Charles D. Waterston also used case-history as the framework for his account that distinguishes the multidimensional Enlightenment scholar Sir George Steuart Mackenzie from the more specialized authorities of the nineteenth century.

Biographical analyses of the Enlightenment virtuosi Colin Maclaurin, George Garden, and George Cheyne are used to demonstrate the cultural importance and placement of mathematics, science, and, most surprisingly for Enlightenment scholarship, religion. Judith V. Grabiner explains Maclaurin's success in using Newtonian mathematics to "exemplify certainty and objectivity" (p. 144) during Scotland's Enlightenment. Anita Guerrini cleverly follows the growing importance of religion through the writings of Garden and his pupil, Cheyne; even more important than what she claims about reproductive generation and gender, her essay challenges future Enlightenment scholars to reconsider the role of religion in what has heretofore been too often depicted as an antireligious era.

The editors thematically drew together rather disparate topics, each of which further contributes to the view that science and medicine were, indeed, critical to the outlook and progress implied by the phrase "the Scottish Enlightenment." Each essay also nicely illustrates particular patterns used to create...