Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture, 1726–1832 ed. by Megan J. Coyer and David E. Shuttleton (review)

The twelve essays here, including the useful introduction by the editors, cover a wide range of perspectives on Scottish literature and medicine. Coyer and Shuttleton’s book sits well with another recent publication with a wider European brief, Medicine and Narration in the Eighteenth Century (ed. Sophie Vasset; Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2013). The two might profitably be read alongside each other, as in both works “literature” is used in the broadest sense of the term and includes medical writings, patient correspondence, diaries, and so on. Craig Franson’s analysis in the first piece shows that Adam Smith’s treatment of sympathy (and the contested issue of physical pain within that rubric) is both philosophical and medical: nerve theory blends with moral theory in his influential Theory of Moral Sentiments. Wayne Wild reinforces this ethical theme with a discussion of the new nervous sensibility as promoted by physicians like Cheyne, Gregory, and Cullen.

The late Robin Dix’s excellent essay discusses physician-poet Mark Akenside’s medically innovative argument for epigenetic embryology, supported in his student thesis at Edinburgh and influencing his great poem The Pleasures of the Imagination (1744). Catherine Jones examines Benjamin Rush’s autobiographical works and the influence of Scottish medicine within them. Rush studied medicine at Edinburgh (1766–78), and his physician autobiography—a new genre—was profoundly shaped (both positively and negatively) by that Scottish experience. Jones reminds us that the Scottish Enlightenment, medical and literary, was an international phenomenon, not a parochial affair.

Switching direction to examine mythologies of poetic death, Rhona Brown demonstrates how the depressive poet Robert Fergusson’s subsequent reputation has been dictated by the fact that he died aged twenty-four in the Edinburgh Asylum for Pauper Lunatics. The rather predictable consequences of this sad fate in the discourse of Romantic genius come to the fore here. Allan Beveridge’s essay reinforces this theme by illuminating Robert Burns’s understanding of his own melancholy and “the miseries of a diseased nervous system” via the medical language of his time and place (p. 145).

The periodical press is a central feature of the Enlightenment in general, but the Scottish publications were particularly important: Megan Coyer discusses the link between the “tales of terror” published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and medical investigation into extreme states of consciousness (via phrenology) by the Glaswegian surgeon Robert Macnish (1802–37). According to Coyer, the tales actually acted as a “template” for his more scientific experimentation—a reversal of our usual assumptions about the direction of travel between literature and medicine. Blackwood’s again plays a role in Katherine Inglis’s consideration of the anxieties about blood transfusion in the 1820s, and the manner in which they manifest themselves in Sir Walter Scott’s work via a tale published in Blackwood’s. Lindsay Levy follows the Scott link by examining his medical holdings in the library at Abbotsford, and argues interestingly that the lack of self-help works demonstrates his stoical attitude to health, despite his otherwise good medical knowledge in the form of antiquarian and ephemeral works.

Two very strong essays leaning far into the nineteenth century conclude the collection, with David Shuttleton’s convincing case that John Thomson’s medical biography of William Cullen (1832) offers textual and discursive nuances and conflicts that transformed a standard “Life” into the first major evaluation of the Scottish medical Enlightenment. Gavin Budge then extends his important work on Brunonian medicine in a wide-ranging piece by showing how Brown’s ideas about nervous irritability informed early sociology (American also) as well as Romanticism, and ultimately the (allegedly) overstimulating effects of mass print culture with which we still live today.

Like many such collections, some of the transitions between sections can feel a little bumpy, but the standard of individual essays is generally high. Inevitably there is much more work to do in...