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Scottish Medicine: An Illustrated History

One tends to approach with some apprehension a book of multiple authorship: the old definition of a camel is too evocative to be ignored. In the case of Scottish Medicine, the apprehension is soon dispelled, for here are five Scots, each of them illustrious in medicine, who deal with the state of medicine in their country in successive periods of time. Their approaches to their period are varied enough to shift the perspective from chapter to chapter, in a way that refreshes by its variation. David Wright, who contributes the first chapter, Nomad to Nation, Nation to Reformation, is a retired anaesthetist, who has been president of two Societies of the History of Medicine (the Scottish and the British) as well as being the English Language Editor of the discipline’s international journal, Vesalius. He is able to show how modern archaeology can, from a scattering of finds, piece together a cohesive picture of the medical beliefs and practices of Scottish prehistory, leading into his account of the situation of mediaeval Scotland. Helen Dingwall is a professional medical historian and a former senior lecturer in the University of Stirling. Her chapter encompasses the ‘period of transition c.1600–1750’ extending from Renaissance to Enlightenment, and it is pleasant to find that the somewhat arid style of her quincentennial history of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh from 2005 has been left behind. Indeed, she tells a good story, generously illustrated, of the birth and evolution of many institutions that survive to this day. Of Iain Mactintyre’s skills as a storyteller, his Australasian colleagues are well aware. A former vice-president of the Edinburgh College, and a frequent visitor to meetings of the Australasian College, he is ‘verra weel respectit’ for the set of biographical sketches that he and his old friend Iain MacLaren assembled at the time of the Quincentenary: Surgeons’ Lives. Many of the characters from that book (and many of them were characters) appear in the pages of his chapter, Enlightenment and Science c.1750–1850, but so of course do others who did not qualify for the earlier book, and they are equally well delineated (as befits the writing of a man who is now history editor of the College of Physicians’ journal in Edinburgh). The two final chapters record the entry of the state and its bureaucracy into medicine. Indeed, Morrice McCrae entitles his chapter Intervention by the State c.1840–1940. He is historian of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (and also of the New Club!), a former paediatrician who (like Lord Lister) moved from Glasgow to Edinburgh, but was wise enough not to stray to London. His fellowmigrant, David Hamilton, contributes the final chapter, Health and Health Care from the mid-Twentieth Century. Formerly a transplant surgeon at Glasgow Royal Infirmary, and the first director of the Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine at Glasgow University, he is now an honorary senior lecturer at the Bute Medical School of the University of St. Andrews. The book that these experts have put together is beautifully presented, with large pages, much colour in its illustrations, a comprehensive timeline at the front and an equally comprehensive bibliography at the end, along with useful detail of the sources of the illustrations. If one is to be critical of anything, it would be the format, in the main body of the text, of the captions to certain of these, which can be annoyingly repetitive: thus