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Benchimol A, Brown R, Shuttleton D, editors. Before Blackwood's: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment. London (UK): Pickering & Chatto; 2015 Feb.
In October 1817, when Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine famously launched itself into the literary marketplace as a Tory rival to the liberal Whig Edinburgh Review, the most polemical article of the first number was the infamous ‘Chaldee Manuscript’.2 In an often-told tale, James Hogg, ‘The Ettrick Shepherd’ (1770– 1835), sent the publisher, William Blackwood (1776–1834), his satirical biblical allegory of the Edinburgh publishing world in September 1817. However, what appeared the following month was a substantially revised and extended version by John Gibson Lockhart (1794–1854) and John Wilson (1785–1854). The satire is primarily aimed at Archibald Constable (1774–1827), the publisher of the Edinburgh Review and the Scots Magazine (competitively re-launched as the Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany in October 1817), but a range of allegorised local characters feature – some coming to the aid of Blackwood and others joining forces with Constable. The effect was sensational, as ‘[t]he original little brown-covered brochure of the new periodical was torn in pieces by eager buyers and clamorous critics, and Blackwood’s Magazine leaped all at once into the knowledge, the curiosity, and the attention of the book-loving world’.3
The colourful mapping of perceived allegiances in the ‘Chaldee’ includes references to key medical figures, making it a useful starting point for an exploration of the relationship between the vibrant medical culture of early nineteenth-century Edinburgh and the highly politicized popular periodical press. As L. S. Jacyna has noted, the label of ‘Whig’ or ‘Tory’ was of great importance in determining one’s medical career trajectory at this time.4 Until the Universities (Scotland) Act of 1858, the University of Edinburgh was administrated by the town council, and, in the eighteenth century, relative harmony between the interests of the town council and key medical innovators such as William Cullen (1710–90), Joseph Black (1728–99), and Alexander Monro, primus (1697–1767) and secondus (1733–1817) provided a stable intellectual and political environment for medical teaching and research to flourish. However, following the French revolutionary epoch, a reactionary town council came to control appointments to the medical faculty and ‘dissent replaced consensus and social disorder displaced harmony’.5 Battle lines were drawn and re-drawn, not only between periodicals and their publishers, but also between leading medical teachers and practitioners. According to Lawrence, ‘[t]he characteristic feature of Edinburgh intellectual life in these years is the way that different issues repeatedly divided the medical and wider community in different ways’.6 However, while the Edinburgh school of medicine was in decline by the early nineteenth century, this was by no means a period of stagnation, but rather one of continued innovation, particularly by those whose politics stood opposed to the reign of Dundas despotism.7
This chapter examines how many of those at the forefront of this innovation used the popular periodical press to forward their professional agendas. Taking representations of medical writers in the ‘Chaldee’ as a prompt, it particularly examines those polemical figures who were perceived as allegiant to the ‘liberal Whig’ ideologies of the Edinburgh Review – its drive ‘to provide a scientific basis for Reform by yoking opposition policy to Scottish Enlightenment political economy’.8 This is not to imply that only medical writers of a particular political cast might contribute to certain popular periodicals or that particular medical issues were necessarily neatly divided along party political lines, but rather that the politicized popular periodical press played a key role in shaping medical discourse during this period, as those authors who turned to periodicals, such as the Edinburgh Review or Blackwood’s, were read within (and also frequently drew upon) their distinctive ideological contexts, utilized their stylistic conventions, and built upon previous articles. Further, the popular periodical is identified as a key site of disciplinary formation and contention during the professionalization of medicine in the early nineteenth century. William Christie, in examining the Edinburgh’s ‘multi-disciplinary’ approach to the ‘knowledge economy’ of the early nineteenth century, concludes that ‘by the time the big Reviews were under way, the educated public implied in early nineteenth-century periodical discourse was already breaking down into distinct areas of amateur and academic specialization, each initiating its own dedicated organ of enquiry or instruction’.9 This chapter expands upon this contention by focusing particularly upon the Edinburgh’s medical content and its key medical contributors.
Within the final chapter of the ‘Chaldee’, Constable gathers his friends about him ‘to make war upon the man whose name is as ebony’ (Blackwood ). Amongst his followers are:
The ‘horn’ is the Edinburgh Review, and the ‘chief physician’ is Dr Andrew Duncan, Sr, (1744–1828), professor of the Institutes of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh, president of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (elected in 1790 and again in 1824), and founder of the public lunatic asylum at Morningside. 11 Despite this list of achievements, as M. McCrae notes, Duncan, Sr, was initially an outsider to the medical establishment, without strong familial or political connections.12 His son, Dr Andrew Duncan, Jr, would become the first Regius Professor of Medical Jurisprudence and Medical Police at the University of Edinburgh.13 Duncan, Sr, does not appear to have contributed to the Edinburgh Review, but his initiative for the founding of the public lunatic asylum was promoted numerous times in the Scots Magazine .14 Duncan, Jr, to whom this reference primarily relates, did contribute reviews of the Pharmacopoeia Collegii Regii Edinburgensis and Dr Thomas Thomson’s A System of Chemistry in 1804, as well as a wide-ranging review, with some apparent input from the editor, Francis Jeffrey, of the current literature on vaccination and small pox in 1806. However, by 1817 Duncan had long ceased to contribute to the Edinburgh, and his perceived allegiance to Constable must come from another quarter.Andrew the chief physician, and Andrew his son, who is a smooth man, and one which handleth all wind instruments, and boweth himself down continually before the horn which is in the forehead of the man which is crafty, and worshippeth it.10
The opening sentence of he and Jeffrey’s 1806 article on vaccination, declaring ‘MEDICAL subjects ought in general, we think, to be left to the Medical Journals’, has been cited by Roy Porter in his classic essay on ‘Lay Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century: The Evidence of the Gentleman’s Magazine’ (1985) as indicative of ‘a growing intellectual division of labour amongst both opinion-producers and opinion-consumers, in which medicine was being set aside for specialists’.15 Its appearance shortly after the launching of Duncan’s own specialist periodical, the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, in 1805 is most probably not a coincidence.16 The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal was also published by Constable (an advertisement for the new medical journal may be found in the Edinburgh Review of October 1805), and it was not to Constable’s or his editors’ advantage for two of his most successful periodical publications to compete with one another. As David Hamilton notes, the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal had a ‘similar format’ to the Edinburgh Review and ‘a similar authority in medical circles’.17
Dawson, Noakes and Topham cite Porter’s article in their discussion of the increasing specialization of periodicals in the early nineteenth century, which, as they note, was a substantial revision of the public sphere of eighteenth-century Scotland that had ‘relied on a notion that men of differing ranks could discourse within it on all subjects on equal terms, through the authenticating token of Enlightenment rationality’.18 However, it should be noted that when the other great Romantic-era review, the Quarterly Review, was founded in 1809, it did frequently include reviews of medical works, but its publisher, John Murray, did not have a competing medical journal at this time.19 Medical content in the Edinburgh Review does markedly decline following the 1806 statement, with coverage only extending to medical topics of significant public concern (such as vaccination, malaria, contagious fever and the treatment of the mentally ill) and also those of particular interest to chemists, physiologists or anatomists. However, the prevalence of medical content and the importance of medical contributors in the early years of the Edinburgh Review has yet to be fully recognized.
The founding of the Edinburgh is a tale that quickly turned to legend in the nineteenth century. However, all versions of the tale collude in the inclusion of the surgeon, John Thomson (1765–1846), in the ‘confederacy’ that formed to support the first numbers. In a journal entry of 30 September 1802, Francis Horner writes that after the original plan was drawn up between himself, Jeffrey and Sydney Smith, ‘[t]he plan was immediately communicated to Murray, Allen, and Hamilton; Brown, Brougham, and the two Thomsons have gradually been made parties’.20 Thomson was by far the most prolific contributor of medical reviews to the Edinburgh Review in its early years. Today, he is best remembered as the first biographer of Cullen, and as ‘the Old Chairmaker’ – a persistent innovator, or, from his opponents’ perspective, a radical usurper of the conservative medical faculty at the University of Edinburgh.21 He was responsible for the creation of a Regius professorship of military surgery in 1806 and the establishment of a separate chair of general pathology in 1831 (to commence in 1832). The Duncans were similarly innovative. They campaigned heavily for the establishment of the chair in Medical Jurisprudence and Medical Police at the University of Edinburgh and met with strong opposition from the medical faculty. However, during ‘The Ministry of All Talents’ (1806–7), the Edinburgh Whigs ‘included the study of medical police as part of their scheme for legal reform’, and the Duncans were ultimately successful.22 The appeal of the new liberal Whig review to such men is unsurprising.
Thomson, in particular, would have been well known to Jeffrey as a fellow member of the Speculative Society and as a founder of the Chemical Society, with which the ‘Academy of Physics’ was merged in 1800.23 As Geoffrey Cantor has indicated, the ideology of the Academy of Physics foreshadows that of the Edinburgh, as:
The purpose of the academy was ‘the investigation of Nature, the laws by which her phenomena are regulated, and the history of opinions concerning these laws’, and their primary focus was Newtonian science and Baconian inductive methodology – including its applicability beyond the physical sciences.25 An increasingly nuanced statement on the progress of medical theory and practice, which very much carried on the tradition of the Academy of Physics, arises out of Thomson’s contributions to the early numbers of the Edinburgh.[j]ust as the Review was founded as a reaction by a group of young men who were dissatisfied with the state of Scotland, so the Academy came into being some five years earlier owing to a similar discontent on the part of some of its first reviewers.24
The emphasis on empirical observation and practice, rather than theory, in British medicine by the end of the eighteenth century is well documented and often associated with the rise of pathological anatomy following the work of Giovanni Battista Morgagni (1682–1771) and the founding of medical institutions that allowed for large-scale clinical study.26 In tune with this wider movement, the medical reviews in the Edinburgh deprecate any attempt by an author to privilege their individual interpretation or speculative theory over and above the careful collection of empirical data. For example, while the practice of eliminating contagion via fumigation with muriatic acid advocated by Guyton de Morveau is generally met with approval, his theories regarding the action of oxygen on the body are mocked.27 Immediately following this review is another by Thomson, in which John Haygarth’s presentation of statistical data via tables is praised, as ‘upon a subject so obscure in its own nature, as the propagation of contagion, we should feel more indebted to the Doctor for an accumulation of new facts, than for any hypothetical explanations, however ingenious’.28
This praise for empiricism is tempered, however, within Thomson’s review of Heberden the following year, in language reflective of the attitudes of Professor Dugald Stewart (1752–1828), the ‘most influential interpreter of Enlightenment thought for the new generation’, towards medical theory.29 In the second volume of his Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind (1814), Stewart, after noting the current celebration of inductive methodology by physicians, builds upon Cullen’s medical writings by declaring the futility of experience without some guiding noseological theory, as:
Similarly, in his review Thomson distinguishes between ‘true’ and ‘false’ experience in guiding medical practice:without a peculiar sagacity and discrimination in marking, not only the resembling, but the characteristical features of disorders, classed under the same technical name, his practice cannot, with propriety, be said to be guided by any one rational principle of decision, but merely by blind and random conjecture.30
This introductory section serves as an entry point into Thomson’s critique of the lack of system in Heberden’s treatise, but also speaks to the wider ideology of the first numbers of the Edinburgh.The former supposes, for its attainment, an historical knowledge of its object, a capacity for observation, and genius to draw proper conclusions; whilst the latter consists only in following blind routine, without reason, and without reflection: in this respect, the enlightened physician is distinguished from the ignorant pretender; and the rational empiric from the mischief-working, contemptible quack.31
As numerous critics have argued, one of the great innovations of the Edinburgh Review was the professionalization of literary criticism. Contributors were remunerated handsomely, casting Constable as ‘enlightened patron’ rather than ‘tradesman’ and transforming the nineteenth-century periodical press into ‘a functional equivalent of the cultural authority of Enlightenment philosophers’, as characterized by Ian Duncan. As such: ‘The Edinburgh Review opened a new public domain of literary and scientific culture, which it defined in professional, judicial terms as a disciplinary court of judgment and evaluation rather than a marketplace of information and opinion’.32
In the opening number, the ‘Advertisement’ famously announces that the review will ‘be distinguished, rather for the selection, than for the number, of its articles’, and, by their judicious selection, the Edinburgh Review, and Jeffrey, most particularly, worked to cultivate a reading public defined by their shared, enlightened good taste.33 Taste, rather than originality, took primacy in this post- Enlightenment aesthetics, wherein ‘taste’ signalled ‘a communal organization in which the individual confirms selfhood through similarities’.34 The arbiters of taste were, of course, the reviewers, and as Mark Schoenfield has argued, through their insistent portrayal of the Edinburgh as objective and professional, the modern ‘fact’ was begot. However, ‘[t]his “fact” was not an observable phenomenon, but a theoretical construction based on the accumulation of numerical data and the reiteration of observed phenomenon in persuasively objective narratives’.35 Similarly, physicians and surgeons, such as Thomson, solidified professional identity through rhetorical appeals to empirical, scientific practice and enlightened judgement and evaluation.
However, the veil of objective, professional authority at times does wear thin. Perhaps the most trenchant attack by Thomson is aimed at the figurehead of the medical establishment at the University of Edinburgh: Dr Alexander Monro, tertius (1773–1859). Thomson's review of Monro’s Observations on Crural Hernia (1803) opens by highlighting the grand expectations one has based on a person’s titles, but in this case the highest ranking professor at the University of Edinburgh has disappointed. A prime motivation for Thomson to contribute to the Edinburgh was most probably self-promotion within the medical marketplace, and throughout the course of his career, he fought to separate the teaching of surgery from anatomy and to establish a separate professorship of surgery in Edinburgh. In 1777 the Royal College of Surgeons had petitioned the town council to establish a separate chair of surgery at the university, but instead, Monro, secondus, was given the extended title of ‘professor of Medicine, Anatomy, and Surgery’, which was subsequently inherited by his son.36 Thomson began to give extramural lecturers on surgery in 1800, following his appointment as a surgeon-in-ordinary at the Royal Infirmary, and according to his first biographer – his son, William Thomson – he was the first person in Edinburgh to systematically cover this topic.37 In October 1803, when this article was published, Thomson was strategically positioning himself to obtain a professorship of surgery in Edinburgh, which in 1804 would come to fruition, not at the university, but at the Royal College of Surgeons.38 One of his primary criticisms of Monro in the article is his lack of practical experience as a surgeon, as ‘without having observed the parts in their diseased state (and not in bottles), and often have [sic] watched the skilful surgeon in his operation, and having also practiced with his own hands, most erroneous ideas may be entertained’.39 Hernia was an area of speciality for Thomson (he is, in fact, cited in Monro’s treatise), and in this article he carries on from a previous contribution to the Edinburgh on hernia in providing details of his own surgical practices.40 His critique of medical theory is also continued from past reviews, and Monro’s treatise is said to have the same fault as many other medical works:
The venomous nature of such critiques did not escape the notice of the medical profession in Edinburgh. In a pamphlet entitled The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review, alias the Stinkpot of Literature (1807), the surgeon, John Ring (baptized 1752, d. 1821), without naming Thomson, critiques his review of Dr Robert Jackson’s Remarks on the Constitution of the Medical Department of the British Army (1803) as evidencing the ‘calumny and detraction’ of the Edinburgh Review – its self-promotion in the literary marketplace through entertaining defamation.42 However, it is Duncan’s review of Thomas Thomson ’s A System of Chemistry in 1804, which is said to particularly expose the ‘jealous and self-interested’ agendas of the medical contributors themselves.43 Duncan is also not named, but Ring cites the editor of the Anti-Jacobin Review as remarking that ‘Dr. Thompson [sic] has ascertained who this critic is; and that his conduct is the more illiberal, as he is a rival who is endeavouring to lessen Dr. Thompson’s [sic] class of pupils, in order to augment his own’. While ‘this critic’ is also said to be ‘the same who vents his spleen in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal’ and a known ‘understrapper’ to Jeffrey, whether Thomson has correctly identified Duncan is unclear, as Duncan does not appear to have been an active extramural or university lecturer at this point.44 Regardless, it is clear from Ring’s pamphlet that the critical authority of the Edinburgh Review was being undermined by the palpable self-interest of many of its medical articles. Writing in 1814, the physician Joseph Adams reflects that:that jealous partiality with which an author magnifies any little original remark or hint of a theory into a doctrine of disproportionate magnitude, and dwells upon it with a degree of complacency and copiousness, which he often obliged to compensate, by retrenching some of the most important parts of the subject.41
According to Henry Cockburn, Thomson himself ‘left the Review from offense, in its infancy’.46 While the nature of this offence is unknown, Adams notes that an ‘eminent physician’ informed him ‘that the managers had determined to omit noticing any such [medical] publications, as they could not depend on the candour of any one to review them.’47 Duncan’s Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal instead became a comparatively more ‘polite and dispassionate’ periodical context in which to notice the latest medical publications, and it included contributions from medical writers across the political spectrum, while often providing a platform for Duncan’s own reforming causes, including his promotion of the rising field of medical jurisprudence.48the manner in which medicine was treated in the early numbers, produced a very general disgust among the most respectable part of the faculty. My late friend, Dr. David Pitcairn, on my first return to England, recommended the Edinburgh Review to my perusal, regretting at the same time, that the medical articles did it no credit.45
As Roy Porter has noted, in the nineteenth century ‘the medical press was a prime medium for the attainment of greater collective professional self-consciousness and identity’.49 The Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, in particular, built upon its literary cousin’s rhetoric of professional critical authority. Its ‘Advertisement’ echoes that of the Edinburgh in declaring their intended selectivity: they announce that in selecting which texts to review in the ‘Critical Analysis’ section,
Perhaps the professionalizing rhetoric of the Edinburgh Review could only be realized if medical contributors redirected medical discourse to a less controversial periodical context. However, physiological and anatomical topics continued to be covered with polemical charge. Adams’s reflections on the negative reception of many of the early medical articles introduce his pamphlet, An Illustration of Mr. Hunter’s Doctrine, particularly concerning the Life of the Blood, in Answer to the Edinburgh Review of Mr. Abernethy’s Lectures (1814), which, according to the advertisement, was printed in order to be bound within copies of the review of Abernethy’s lectures. The author of the review that brought forth this response also makes an appearance in the ‘Chaldee’.the Editors will be chiefly regulated by the importance of the subject, the excellence of the manner in which it is treated, and the rarity or expense of the work; and it is their wish rather to bring into notice real improvements, and to encourage diffident abilities, than to discover imperfections, and to expose errors.50
Within the second chapter of the ‘Chaldee’, a man who’s ‘name is as ebony’ (Blackwood) calls his friends together to war against the ‘man who was craft y in counsel’ (Constable).51 After he rejoices in the number who have gathered in his aid:
The lines which follow contain the clue to the identity of this man: ‘(Now this physician was a mild man, neither was there any gall within him, yet he went not)’. The play on the word ‘gall’ is a reference to Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828), the father of phrenology, the nineteenth-century science of reading mental character from the skull. The ‘mild’ physician is John Gordon (1786–1818), who is most famed as the contributor of the anti-phrenological Edinburgh Review article that brought J. G. Spurzheim (1776–1832) to Scotland to defend he and Gall’s new science of the mind.53 While John Strachan reads this reference as a straightforward slight to Gordon, Gordon is in fact a more curious case in that he is portrayed as being in demand as an ally to both Blackwood and Constable .54 While he did contribute an article on a ‘Narrow Escape of the Blind and Deaf Boy, James Mitchell, from Drowning’ to the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine in June 1817, indeed, ‘he went not’ to Blackwood’s . As Lawrence notes, Gordon was an extramural medical lecturer in Edinburgh who, like his mentor, John Thomson, was ‘almost certainly a Whig’.55he sent away a swift messenger for a physician, which healeth all manner of bruises, and wounds, and putrifying sores, lest that he should go for to heal up the wounds of the man which is craft y, or of his two beasts.52
Gordon has received little critical attention beyond his role in the phrenological controversies, but in briefly examining his wider physiological and anatomical works, Lawrence concludes that his work ‘served the interests of a traditional establishment’ as, in his lectures he ‘dilated on the role of the Creator, and the “immaterial and spiritual mind”’.56 Similarly, Rick Rylance cites Gordon’s review of Sir Everard Home’s Observations on the Function of the Brain (1815) for the Edinburgh Review as indicative of ‘traditionalist attitudes on psychological questions’, noting the article as striking for ‘the extraordinary and lengthy vehemence of Gordon’s denial, based on purported clinical evidence, that the brain had any role at all in the workings of the mind’.57 However, while his review begins with the acknowledgement that ‘[m]etaphysicians rest satisfied with the truth of the principle, that the mental phenomena are ultimately dependent, on something essentially distinct from mere Matter’, rather than a prolonged exposition of this principle, the article forwards a far more radical hypothesis.58
In his review Gordon quotes numerous cases in which the brain is severely damaged yet sensibility (or, ‘susceptibility of sensation’) remains unimpaired, inferring that it is at least possible that ‘the brain is not at all concerned in the changes which precede Sensation’.59 He concludes that the most probable explanation is ‘that these changes are altogether independent of the central mass, and are confined entirely to the nerves’.60 While his focus in this article is upon sensation, he notes that ‘the same train of reasoning may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the phenomena of Thought and Volition’.61 Gordon returns to this subject in his Outlines of Lectures on Human Physiology (1817) when addressing ‘[r]easons for believing that every Idea is preceded by, and dependent upon, some corporeal change’ and ‘[q]uestions as to the seat of this change’. He discusses the theory of the Jacobin physician and natural philosopher, Erasmus Darwin (1731–1802) – that the change in fact takes place ‘in the extremities of the Nerves’. However, in stark contrast to his statements in the Edinburgh Review, this is followed by a presentation of objections and discussion of the hypothesis held ‘[b]y most other physiologists’ that these changes occur, not in the nerves, but in the brain.62
Compared to his published lectures, Gordon takes a far more controversial stance in the Edinburgh, forwarding, in fact, a radically decentralized understanding of the nervous system, if only ‘for the sake of exciting investigation’.63 This article is directly linked to his attack on Gall and Spurzheim’s phrenology just a few months later, as their theory of cerebral localization is countered by Gordon’s utilization of multiple cases to evidence that even the fundamental hypothesis that the brain itself, rather than the nerves, is the seat of the intellect is still ‘involved in the utmost obscurity’.64 Rather than being traditional, these two articles are controversial, and as John van Wyhe has pointed out, part of Gordon’s personal attack on Spurzheim, designed to discredit a rival anatomist.65 Such personal polemics have also been read as the root of the later Blackwoodian attack on phrenology, and as such, Gordon would have been in good company had he answered his Chaldean calling.66 However, the Edinburgh provided a context for him to build upon the physiological teachings of the surgeon, Whig political and historical writer, John Allen (1771–1843), a key ideologue of the Edinburgh and an early influence on several of its contributors.67
Allen is said ‘to have lived two quite discrete lives’: as an extramural lecturer in physiology in Edinburgh until 1802 and then as an esteemed member of the Holland House set, ‘that early nineteenth-century centre of Whig politics’.68 Jacyna has persuasively argued that, in fact, a common thread runs between his physiological and social theories:
Allen’s ‘Lectures on Animal Oeconomy’ (1794–1802) were the first lectures wholly dedicated to an emerging, more systematic ‘scientific’ physiology to be delivered in Edinburgh. According to Jacyna, in these lectures he forwarded ‘a view of the body as de-centralized but coherent’, emphasizing the chemical ‘self-regulating mechanisms’ of the animal economy rather than the nervous system.70 This was a significant deviation from the nervous physiology of Cullen with its emphasis on the nervous system as the ‘central integrating organ’.71 While noting that Allen himself does not make the connection to Whig politics explicit, Jacyna argues that ‘Allen’s deposition of the brain and nerves from the pre-eminent place they had occupied in earlier Scottish physiology can now be seen more clearly as an attempt to demonstrate the redundancy of central control’.72 Among those who are listed as attending his lectures are Gordon and Thomson, along with Francis Horner (1778–1817), Thomas Brown (1778–1820) and Henry Reeve (1780–1814) – all contributors to the Edinburgh Review.73 Schoenfield has noted the influence of Allen’s physiological reasoning on Horner’s political economy as exposed in the Edinburgh – ‘the continuity between the biological and the economic’ and his emphasis on ‘economics as a material science’.74 Gordon, in particular, carried on Allen’s legacy in Edinburgh after his departure for Holland House (necessitated by the unwelcome reception of his politics in Edinburgh). Daniel Ellis, Gordon’s biographer, notes that his decision to offer a separate series of extramural lectures on physiology in 1813, previously taught in conjunction with anatomy, was influenced by the success of Allen’s lectures, which ‘excited greater interest among the medical students of this school, than any given at that period, either within or without the walls of the University’.75In his 1790 dissertation to the Royal Medical Society he sought to explicate the workings of the human mind without any reference to an immaterial principle. In his lectures on physiology he constructed an account of vitality which dispensed with any form of superadded vital principle as the condition of life and organization. In his political writings, he propounded a naturalistic concept of monarchy which denied that any divine efflation was mingled with the corporeal reality of the king.69
Gordon’s motivations for contributing to the Edinburgh are clearly, in part, a self-promotional move by an aspiring extra-mural lecturer, competing in a fiercely competitive marketplace wherein medical students might chose between university lecturers, such as Monro, tertius, and Duncan, Sr, and extramural teachers, like Gordon, Thomson and even the infamous Dr Robert Knox. Contributing to periodicals, even quasi-anonymously, could be advantageous to men of science in developing ‘their reputations among the cultural élite’ (and Gordon, for example, was widely considered to be the contributor of the anti-phrenological article despite neither himself nor his biographer ever confirming this attribution).76 Conversely, anonymous contribution to popular periodicals could also provide a certain freedom from culpability in which, particularly in the case of the Edinburgh, the individual might be subsumed within the collective, authoritative ‘we’ carefully cultivated by Jeffrey.77
It is from this collective, authoritative stance that Gordon precedes the surgeon, William Lawrence (1783–1867), in attacking John Abernethy’s lectures on the vital principle. The review is unremittingly harsh, referring to the lectures as ‘a collection of bad arguments, in defence of one of the most untenable speculations in physiology; interspersed with not a little bombast about genius, and electricity, and Sir Isaac Newton’.78 In his vitriolic reaction against any form of speculation, he joins in the chorus of past articles in the Edinburgh, which set out the proper methodology and domain of both the physical and mental sciences. Perhaps most poignantly, in a review of the second edition of William Heberden’s Commentary on the History and Cure of Diseases (1804), Thomson declares: ‘The questions concerning vitality bear the same relation to the study of physiology, and the practice of medicine, as the metaphysical discussions concerning the materiality, or immateriality of the soul, to the phenomena of mind’.79 Further, the physiological reasoning, which Gordon presents as a more plausible alternative to Abernethy’s vital principle, is in tune with Allen’s influential teachings. In relations to secretion, Gordon writes:
According to Jacyna, the root of Allen’s radical physiology was his denial of the need for a super attending vital principle in controlling chemical affinities, and in this case Gordon’s published lectures on physiology do appear to collude with his statements in the Edinburgh. Ellis relates that in his discussion of the conversions of blood:Although, however, it is yet to be ascertained, to what diversity of chemical influence the blood is subject, in the different organs of the body, we see no reason whatever to doubt, that its conversions are accomplished solely by the operation of those affinities which regulate chemical combination among the particles of matter in general. We are aware, that many sensible persons have imagined, that there is something in living bodies which controls the usual chemical affinities, and forces the elements of these bodies into combinations altogether different from what such affinities would produce; but we own we have often been surprised at the sort of reasoning employed in support of this theory.80
Unsurprisingly, Blackwood’s (along with the Quarterly Review) would take the opposite side of the debate surrounding the vital principle.82 In a later Blackwoodian review of Sir Benjamin Brodie’s ‘Introductory Lecture’ to the Royal College of Surgeons in May 1820, Brodie is praised for his attempt to ‘prove that the laws which govern life differ from those “which govern the changes of inorganic matter”’.83 Many of the medical authors who contributed to Blackwood’s were proponents of the ‘vital principle’ (and also devoted Tories), such as the social reformer and physician, William Pulteney Alison (1790–1859), who, unhindered by the complications of political nonconformity (and with familial connections to the Gregory dynasty), went on to hold the esteemed chair of the Practice of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh.84 However, as Gordon’s example illustrates, medical authors whose politics did not necessarily conform to the magazine’s might also be attractive as potential contributors, particularly if they had the cultural currency of Gordon.[i]n every instance, the conversion was attributed to Chemical change, but of the precise nature of this change, nothing, it was said, is known. A brief view of the hypotheses suggested to explain Secretion, as those of Electricity, Nervous Influence, and a supposed Vital Principle, was exhibited – all of which were considered unsatisfactory.81
The following year, in June 1818, Gordon died prematurely of typhus fever. However, even in his death Gordon remained curiously between two politicized publishing worlds. In December 1819 the surgeon and prolific Blackwoodian author, David Macbeth Moir (1798–1851), published a tribute to Gordon in Blackwood’s, decrying the lack of a full account of his life and writings:
Moir’s article is said ‘to have had some effect in inducing the ingenious Mr. Ellis to attempt the biography of one, who died too young for science and the honour of his country’.86Can not Mr Jeffrey – can not Dr Thomson – can not Dr Brewster – can not the biographer of Woodhouselee – can not he who has so eloquently pourtrayed the characters of Reid and Robertson – or can neither of these do justice to the memory of their departed friend?85
In contrast, Duncan, Jr, appears to have answered his Chaldean calling and remained clearly allied to Constable. In November 1817 an article most probably by Duncan criticizing the Blackwoodian series, the ‘Medical Reports of Edinburgh’, appeared within their primary competitor, Constable’s Edinburgh Magazine.87 The opening of the article declares:
According to the ‘Introduction’ to the medical reports in June 1817, their purpose was to provide a basic account of the epidemic diseases currently prevalent in Edinburgh.89 In this declaration the reports build upon a tradition of city-specific medical reports in literary magazines. For example, Dr Robert Willan’s London medical reports were published in the Monthly Magazine and the Medical and Physical Journal from 1796 to 1800, and then subsequently collected together and published as Reports on the Diseases of London (1801).90 Numerous medical contributors, including John Reid (1776–1822), David Uwins (1780– 1837) and George Gregory (1790–1853) provided similar medical reports for the Monthly Magazine through the 1820s. Duncan objected to this genre of popular medical writing, but ‘far from thinking the profession should be wrapt up in mystery’, for the sake of both delicacy and the prevention of ‘unnecessary alarm’, he asserts that ‘[p]opular medical instruction, should be confined to what may be called preventative medicine’.91 Duncan particularly decries the Blackwoodian reports for causing such ‘unnecessary alarm’ regarding the prevalence of epidemic fever in Edinburgh during the winter of 1817–18.MR EDITOR, I SHOULD very willingly comply with your request to contribute a periodical report upon the diseases prevalent in Edinburgh … if I could satisfy myself that such a report would be either useful or fit for a Magazine, which is intended for general readers’.88
Following a final defensive report in February 1818, which rebuked Duncan’s accusations, the ‘Medical Reports of Edinburgh’ were discontinued and are, in fact, representative of the type of traditional magazine material which Blackwood’s quickly discarded as it became increasingly experimental.92 While Dawson, Noakes and Topham argue that ‘[t]he breakdown of the ideal of a bourgeois public sphere and the developing sense of distinct literary and scientific spheres, was, if anything, more evident in the monthly magazines’, they cite the founding of Blackwood’s as the moment in which a new type of ‘self-consciously literary’ magazine was born, which discarded the categorization of articles previously typical to British monthly magazines.93 As such, medical themes and representations diff use throughout the magazine – imaginative and discursive writings engage with contemporary medicine in a range of ways, medical reviews take on a more literary form, and ‘reports of advances in medical – or more particularly, coroner’s – science’ appear in the infamous Noctes Ambrosianae dialogues.94 However, beyond the important innovations of form and genre, Blackwood’s also provided a fresh, and this time, a conservative ideological context, on which a new circle of particularly ‘medico-literary’ innovators might draw.95 The ‘horn’ had certainly ‘ruled the nations’ long enough.
This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust [097597/Z/11/Z].
For background information on the ‘Chaldee’, see Hogg J. Contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 2 vols, vol. 1: 1817–1828. Richardson T, editor. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; 2008. pp. 409–411., on p. 417 Edinburgh Review and the Whig party and disposition, see Christie W. The Edinburgh Review and the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain. London: Pickering & Chatto; 2009. pp. 51–58..
Oliphant M. Annals of a Publishing House: William Blackwood and his Sons, their Magazine and Friends, 3 vols. Vol. 1. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons; 1897. p. 117..
Jacyna LS. Philosophic Whigs: Medicine, Science, and Citizenship in Edinburgh, 1789–1848. London and New York: Routledge; 1994. p. 6..
Rosner L. Medical Education in the Age of Improvement, Edinburgh Students and Apprentices, 1760–1826. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; 1991. p. 176.; Lawrence C. ‘The Edinburgh Medical School and the End of the “Old Thing”, 1790–1830’ History of Universities, 7. 1988:259–286., on p. 261.
Lawrence, ‘The Edinburgh Medical School’, p. 268.
Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, pp. 1–8.
Duncan I. Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2007. p. 26..
Christie W. ‘The Modern Athenians: The Edinburgh Review in the Knowledge Economy of the Early Nineteenth Century’ Studies in Scottish Literature. 2013;39:115–138., on p. 138.
Hogg J. Contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 2 vols, vol 1: 1817–1828. Richardson T, editor. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; 2008. pp. 42–43..
On Duncan, Sr, see Chalmers J, editor. Andrew Duncan Senior, Physician of the Enlightenment. Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland; 2010. .
McCrae M. Andrew Duncan and the Health of Nations. Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. 2003;33:2–11. [PubMed: 14756133].
Bettany GT. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2004. Duncan, Andrew (1773–1832)’, rev. Brenda M.
White.) at http://www
For example, see On the Necessity of a Public Lunatic Asylum in Edinburgh. Scots Magazine. 1804 April;66:272.; Address to the Public, Respecting the Establishment of a Lunatic Asylum at Edinburgh. Scots Magazine. 1807 August;69:817–820.; Some Account of the Plan for Establishing a Lunatic Asylum at Edinburgh. Scots Magazine. 1808 January;70:9–11.; Description of the Plan of the Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum. Scots Magazine. 1808 March;70:163..
Porter R. Lay Medical Knowledge in the Eighteenth Century: The Evidence of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Medical History, 29. 1985:138–168. [PMC free article: PMC1139505] [PubMed: 3884933], on p. 142.
On the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, see Comrie J. History of Scottish Medicine, 2nd edn, 2 vols . Vol. 2. London: Wellcome History of Medicine Museum; 1932. pp. 507–511.; Loudon J, Loudon I. Medicine, Politics and the Medical Periodical 1800–50’ In: Bynum WF, Lock S, Porter R, editors. Medical Journals and Medical Knowledge. London and New York: Routledge; 1992. pp. 49–69..
Hamilton D. The Healers: A History of Medicine in Scotland. Edinburgh: Canongate; 1981. p. 196..
Dawson G, Noakes R, Topham JR. Introduction. In: Cantor G, et al., editors. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, Reading the Magazine of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2004. pp. 1–37., on pp. 11, 4.
For example, see Young T. Dr Jones’s Account of the Eau Médicinale. Quarterly Review. 1810 May;3:368–374.; Young T. Dr. Young’s Introduction to Medical Literature. Quarterly Review. 1813 March;9:117–125.; Young T. Blackall on Dropsies. Quarterly Review. 1813 July;9:466–471..
As quoted in Clive J. Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802–1815. London: Faber and Faber; 1957. p. 196..
Jacyna LS. Philosophic Whigs: Medicine, Science, and Citizenship in Edinburgh, 1789–1848. London and New York: Routledge; 1994. pp. 78–112..
Crowther MA, White B. On Soul and Conscience: The Medical Expert and Crime. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press; 1988. p. 9..
Cockburn H. Life of Lord Jeffrey with a Selection from his Correspondence, 2nd edn, 2 vols . Vol. 1. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black; 1852. p. 54.; Cantor GN. The Academy of Physics at Edinburgh 1797–1800’ Social Studies of Science. 1975;5:109–134., on p. 112.
Cantor, ‘The Academy of Physics’, p. 110.
Cantor, ‘The Academy of Physics’, p. 111. For the source of this quotation in Cantor’s article, see ‘Extracts from the Minutes of the Academy of Physics, Vol. i 1797, 1798, 1799’, in Welsh David. Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Brown, M.D. Edinburgh: W. & C. Tait; London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green; 1825. pp. 498–499..
See Keel O. The Politics of Health and the Institutionalization of Clinical Practices in Europe in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century. In: Bynum WF, Porter R, editors. William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1985. pp. 207–256..
Thomson J. Morveau on the Means of Purifying Infected Air. Edinburgh Review. 1802 October;1:237–243..
Thomson J. Dr. Haygarth on Infectious Fevers. Edinburgh Review. 1802 October;1:245–252., on p. 248.
Duncan I. Scott’s Shadow: The Novel in Romantic Edinburgh. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2007. p. 26..
Stewart D. Elements of the Philosophy of the Human Mind, 3 vols. Vol. 2. Edinburgh: Archibald Constable and Company; London: T. Cadell and W. Davies; 1792–1827. p. 440.. For further on Cullen and philosophy, see Barfoot M. Philosophy and Method in Cullen’s Medical Teaching. In: Doig A, et al., editors. William Cullen and the Eighteenth Century Medical World. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; 1993. pp. 110–132..
Thomson J. Heberden on the History and Cure of Diseases. Edinburgh Review. 1803 January;1:466–474., on p. 467.
Duncan, Scott’s Shadow, p. 26.
‘Advertisement’, Edinburgh Review, 1, October 1802, pp. 2–3, on p. 2.
Schoenfield M. British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: The “Literary Lower Empire”. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; 2009. p. 75..
Schoenfield, British Periodicals and Romantic Identity, p. 52.
Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 86.
Thomson W, Craigie D. Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal. 1847;67:131–193. [PMC free article: PMC5807802] [PubMed: 30331256], on p. 162.
Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 89.
Thomson J. Dr. Monro on Hernia. Edinburgh Review. 1803 October;3:136–1446., on p. 144.
Monro A. Observations on Crural Hernia. Edinburgh: Printed for T. N. Longman and O. Rees, Longman and W. Laing; 1803. pp. 66–67.; Thomson J. Camperi Icones Herniarum. Edinburgh Review. 1803 January;1:460–466..
[Thomson], ‘Dr. Monro on Hernia’, p. 137.
Ring J. The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review, alias the Stinkpot of Literature. London: Printed for H. D. Symonds and John Hatchard; 1807. p. 1.
Ring, The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review, p. 32.
Ring, The Beauties of the Edinburgh Review, p. 38. John Comrie’s list of ‘Professors and Lecturers in the Edinburgh Medical School up to 1870’ does not include Duncan as a lecturer at this time. Comrie, The History of Scottish Medicine, vol. 2, pp. 628–31.
Adams J. An Illustration of Mr. Hunter’s Doctrine, Particularly Concerning the Life of the Blood, in Answer to the Edinburgh Review of Mr. Abernethy’s Lectures. London: Printed by W. Thorne, Red Lion Court, Fleet Street; 1814. p. 1..
Cockburn, Life of Jeffrey, p. 143.
Adams, An Illustration of Mr. Hunter’s Doctrine, p. 1.
Loudon J, Loudon I. Medicine, Politics and the Medical Periodical 1800–50. Medical Journals and Medical Knowledge. :60.. On the promotion of medical jurisprudence in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, see Crowther and White, On Soul and Conscience, pp. 9–10.
Porter R. The Rise of Medical Journalism in Britain to 1800. Medical Journals and Medical Knowledge. :6–28., on p. 19.
‘Advertisement’, Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 1:1, January 1805, pp. 1–6, on p. 5.
Hogg J. Contributions to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 2 vols, vol 1: 1817–1828. Richardson T, editor. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press; 2008. p. 32..
Hogg, Contributions to Blackwood’s, p. 37.
van Wyhe J. Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism. Aldershot: Ashgate; 2004. pp. 44–51..
Strachan J. “The Mapp’d out Skulls of Scotia”: Blackwood’s and the Scottish Phrenological Controversy’ In: Finkelstein D, editor. Print Culture and the Blackwood Tradition, 1805–1930. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; 2006. pp. 49–69., on p. 55.
Lawrence C. The Edinburgh Medical School and the End of the “Old Thing”, 1790–1830. History of Universities. 1988;7:259–286., on p. 271.
Lawrence, ‘The Edinburgh Medical School’, p. 272.
Rylance R. The Disturbing Anarchy of Investigation’: Psychological Debate and the Victorian Periodical’ In: Henson L, editor. Culture and Science in the Nineteenth-Century Media. Aldershot: Ashgate; 2004. pp. 239–350., on p. 244.
Gordon J. Functions of the Nervous System. Edinburgh Review. 1815 February;24:439–452., on p. 439.
[Gordon], ‘Functions of the Nervous System’, pp. 440, 448.
[Gordon], ‘Functions of the Nervous System’, p. 452.
[Gordon], ‘Functions of the Nervous System’, p. 440.
Gordon J. Outlines of Lectures on Human Physiology. Edinburgh: William Blackwood; London: T. & G.
Underwood; 1817. p. 12.. On Darwin, see McNeil M. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2004. Darwin, Erasmus (1731–1802)) at http://www
Gordon J. The Doctrines of Gall and Spurzheim. Edinburgh Review. 1815 June;25:227–268., on p. 245. His contemporaries noted the unusual bent to his argument. See, ‘On the Science of Physiognomy’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 6, March 1820, pp. 650–5, on p. 651.
[J. Gordon], ‘The Doctrines of Gall and Spurzheim’, p. 245.
Van Wyhe, Phrenology and the Origins of Victorian Scientific Naturalism, pp. 44–51.
Strachan, ‘“The Mapp’d out Skulls of Scotia”’, pp. 49–69.
For an overview, see Christie W. The Edinburgh Review and the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain. London: Pickering & Chatto; 2009. pp. 39–58..
Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 51.
Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 76.
Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, pp. 67, 71.
Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 67. For further information, see Lawrence C. The Nervous System and Society in the Scottish Enlightenment. In: Barnes B, Shapin S, editors. Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture. London and Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications; 1979. pp. 19–40..
Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 71.
Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, p. 190; Glasgow University Library, MS Gen 1476/A/9250.
Schoenfield M. British Periodicals and Romantic Identity: “Literary Lower Empire”. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; 2009. p. 65..
Ellis D. Memoir of the Life and Writings of John Gordon. Edinburgh: Printed for Archibald Constable and Co.; London: Hurst, Robinson and Co.; 1823. p. 108..
Dawson G, Noakes R, Topham JR. Introduction. In: Cantor G, editor. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, Reading the Magazine of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2004. pp. 1–37., on p. 28. See Ellis, Memoir of the Life and Writings of John Gordon, pp. 96–7.
On Jeffrey’s editorial policy, see Christie, The Edinburgh Review and the Literary Culture of Romantic Britain, pp. 39–44.
Gordon J. Abernethy on the Vital Principle. Edinburgh Review. 1814 September;23:384–398., on p. 384.
Thomson J. Heberden on the History and Cure of Diseases. Edinburgh Review. 1803 January;1:466–474., on p. 474.
[Gordon], ‘Abernethy on the Vital Principle’, p. 389. Owsei Temkin has noted the significance of this review as championing ‘the chemical explanation of life’. See Temkin O. Basic Science, Medicine, and the Romantic Era. Bulletin of the History of Medicine. 1963;38:97–129. [PubMed: 13980539], on p. 98.
Ellis, Memoir of the Life and Writings of John Gordon, p. 139. See also, Gordon, Outlines of Lectures on Physiology, p. 68.
See, for example, [G. D’Oyly], ‘Abernethy, Lawrence, Morgan, Rennell, on the Theories of Life’, 22, July 1819, pp. 1–34. For an excellent overview of the debate on vitality, see Ruston S. Shelley and Vitality. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; 2005. ; repr. 2012), pp. 1–73..
Halls JJ. Brodie’s Introductory Lecture’ Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. 1821 January;8:419–422., on p. 420.
Alison was well known for his advocacy of the ‘vital
principle’ in his lectures at the University of Edinburgh. See,
Jacyna LS. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2004. Alison, William Pulteney (1790–1859)), at http://oxforddnb
Moir DM. Letter relative to Dr. Gordon. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. 1819 December;6:307–309., on p. 307.
Time’s Telescope for 1825; or, A Complete Guide to the Almanack. London: Printed for Sherwood, Jones, and Co., Paternoster Row; 1825. 1798. – David Macbeth Moir Born; pp. 5–11., on p. 6.
This attribution is based on the signature of ‘A D J’. Further, the views on contagious fever are similar to those expressed in an editorial on ‘Epidemic Fever’ in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 14, October 1818, pp. 529–49. Also, Duncan’s father was at this time engaged in a dispute against the New Town Dispensary, which with the Blackwoodian medical reports appear to be associated. On Duncan’s dispute, see Kaufman MH. Edinburgh’s Royal Public Dispensary. In: Chalmers J, editor. Andrew Duncan Senior, Physician of the Enlightenment. Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland; 2010. pp. 56–71..
Duncan A. Report on the Present State of Fever in Edinburgh. Edinburgh Magazine, and Literary Miscellany. 1817 November;:347–354., on p. 347.
Introduction to the Medical Report of Edinburgh. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. 1817 June;1:266–270..
Brunton D. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press; 2004. Willan, Robert (1757–1812)), at http://www
[Duncan], ‘Report on the Present State of Fever in Edinburgh’, p. 347.
For further information on the early Blackwood’s, see Flynn P. Beginning Blackwood’s: The Right Mix of “Duise” and “Utile” Victorian Periodicals Review. 2006 Summer;39:136–157..
Dawson G, Noakes R, Topham JR. Introduction. In: Cantor G, et al., editors. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, Reading the Magazine of Nature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2004. pp. 1–37., on p. 12.
Parker M. Literary Magazines and British Romanticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2000. p. 112.. One example of a medical review which draws upon fictive devices is Wilson J. Clark on Climate. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. 1830 August;28:372–381.. Tim Killick has recently examined how the Blackwoodian ‘tale of terror’ draws upon aspects of sensational medical case histories which appeared in the magazine. Killick T. Blackwood’s and the Boundaries of the Short Story’ In: Morrison R, Roberts DS, editors. Romanticism and Blackwood’s Magazine, ‘An Unprecedented Phenomenon’. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan; 2013. pp. 163–174..
An examination of this circle of Blackwoodian medical contributors is the primary remit of my current research project, and further publications will be forthcoming.
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/
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