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

Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture hearkens to a time when science and literature had not been siloed by disciplinarity. Today, with too much to know in any field, there is again a virtue to connectivity. Coyer and Shuttleton, by bringing together psychiatrists, literary scholars, historians, librarians and doctors, illuminate a neglected corner of medical humanities. If the Enlightenment in Scotland is renowned for its philosophy, history and political economy, it was also driven by medical science. The membership registers of the Royal Society of Edinburgh show large numbers of medical men. Furthermore, the Society maintained literary and scientific classes both, and welcomed talks by Henry Mackenzie and the presidency of Walter Scott. Clearly, there is more to register here than an Enlightenment paralleled across disciplines. The virtue of this book is its ability to show how perspectives interwove and advanced as – and because – they were articulated together through contemporary rhetoric.

Taking as its starting point the year 1726, when the Edinburgh medical faculty was founded, Scottish Medicine and Literary Culture engages major figures, ideas and discourses. It begins with the medical implications of Adam Smith’s sympathy, and ends by tracking their distant echoes in midnineteenth-century literary and social considerations of mass culture. A lot happens in between, and individual insights abound.

A literary scholar will be most interested in essays that show the intersection between enlightenment and medicine in prominent authors. Robin Dix suggests that Mark Akenside’s poetry hints toward his insights as a doctor. Rhona Brown shows Robert Fergusson’s construction as a medical subject. Allan Beveridge considers how Burns, influenced by ideas of sensibility and melancholia, described his own ills. Editor Megan Coyer reminds us of Blackwood’s Gothic as a medicalised discourse.

Another strength is the book’s concern with varied literary discourses. Dix and Coyer analyse medicine as it echoes in poetry and the short story; Brown engages the case history and consultation. Chapters by Catherine Jones and David E. Shuttleton investigate physician auto/ biography as a distinct genre, and show its role in establishing reputations and histories.

Provocative, too, are the chapters on Walter Scott. Here the materials are alluring, yet not quite sufficient to argument. Lindsay Levy evaluates Scott’s library for its dearth of contemporary medical advice books. We can make more, however, from the presence of historic medical books, or from Scott’s archive of Burke and Hare documents. From absence, we can infer only that we have not found texts that Abbotsford may or may not have had, and that may or may not have been treated as ephemeral resources in kitchen or lady’s library. Similarly, in Katherine Inglis’s analysis of The Fair Maid of Perth, scenes of return from death that do not refer to the means of that resuscitation may not speak to the prevalence of transfusion. Another context could be J. B. Winslow’s 1740 Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, part of an ongoing conversation that resounded with stories of corpses waking to life on the first slice of the anatomist’s scalpel.

All of which is to say that this book is a stimulating read. We may wish for a more coherent organisation – essays on life writing might have been clustered, for instance. Still, they are mutually informative. Springing across chapters on how Benjamin Rush (signatory to the Declaration of Independence), intersected with and adjusted in relation to his varied medical contexts, or on how Robert Burns’s melancholia met the philosophical and medical terms of the time, we gain a rich appreciation for the intensities, alignments and disjunctions of a complex cultural discourse.

Moreover, with all this variability, one fascinating thread is strongly apparent. For Craig Franson, Adam Smith negotiates sympathy across and in opposition to the suffering body. Sensibility partnered with stoicism in the face of pain is a marker of refinement. For Wayne Wild, sensibility...