Looking at Sir James Young Simpson

As today is the 200th anniversay of the birth of Sir James Young Simpson, we did think of marking the day by highlighting the works in our collections written by him, which reflect not just his pioneering work in the use of anaesthetics, but also the range of his other interests.

However, whilst considering Simpson's striking features - his wild hair, his shaggy sideburns - we realised the Library also holds a number of interesting visual portrayals of the man.

Take this one for instance: a photograph of a younger Simpson by the early Scottish photographer, James G Tunny:





Although undated, other contemporary images of Simpson would seems to date this photograph to the late 1840s, around the time Simpson had started to investigate the properties of chloroform.

The length of time it would have taken to have captured this image of Simpson, is contrasted by an earlier visual depiction in our holdings. This comes from the notebook of an 1830s Edinburgh medical student, Thomas Graham, who in between note-taking during lectures assayed some rough sketches of his lecturers. So, in profile, here we have James Young Simpson, teacher of pathology (alongside Dr James Home and possibly James Hamilton Junior).



One last illustration of Simpson also depicts his career as a teacher: from 1862, by which time Simpson had been garlanded by accolades, here we have him invigilating an exam, a figure - albeit for comic effect - now grown in size as well as prestige.

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Also shown are the stressed students: "ye unfortunate undergraduates are in ye agonies of composition" runs the text, which reminds us that 7th June may be the anniversary of Simpson's birth, but it's also a time of year when students - not just medical ones - are still suffering the torments visualized here.

Images:
- Sir James Young Simpson. Wood engraving by R. Taylor, 1870, after J. Moffat. (Wellcome Library no. 8772i)
- Sir James Young Simpson. Photograph by J.G. Tunny. (Wellcome Library no. 13565i)
- Illustrations of three men from the notebook of Thomas Graham, 1836-1838 (MS.8415)
- Sir James Young Simpson. Pen drawing by [E.A.G. S.], 1862. (Wellcome Library no. 8773i)

Sir James Young Simpson is also the subject of a new exhibition at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Surgeons' Hall Museums.

Robert Louis Stevenson

"For fourteen years I have not had a day's real health; I have wakened sick and gone to bed weary; and I have done my work unflinchingly. I have written in bed, and written out of it, written in hemorrhages [sic], written in sickness, written torn by coughing, written when my head swam for weakness; and for so long, it seems to me I have won my wager and recovered my glove" [1]

The quote comes from a letter written in September 1893 by the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson, born on this day 160 years ago. It summarises the dedication Stevenson had to his life as a writer, which he maintained despite his long-standing ill-health. And whilst we would not aim to reduce Stevenson's career to one purely shaped by illness, the anniversary of his birth affords us an opportunity to mention a number of instances - represented in the collections of the Wellcome Library - where medicine is reflected in his work.

Take The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde: the first commercial success of Stevenson's career and arguably his most famous work. Conceived by Stevenson as tale in the Gothic tradition, the story is now interpreted as a discussion on personality and primitivism, a work influenced by the evolutionary theories of Darwin and prefiguring the work of Freud on the unconscious. But consider too the nature of the transformative agent Jekyll takes - this has been interpreted as an underlying comment on nineteenth century attitudes to drugs and cocaine in particular. Others have seen the spatial arrangement of Jekyll's home as being influenced by the eighteenth century surgeon John Hunter and his property in London's Leicester Square, which served as both his residence and teaching museum.

A clearer medical influence comes from Stevenson's birthplace. Growing up in mid-nineteenth century Edinburgh, the murders carried out by William Burke and William Hare - committed in order to procure bodies for the anatomy lecturer Dr Robert Knox - were still very recent to Stevenson and formed the basis for his early story The Body-Snatcher.

Stevenson's health - contemporary opinion was that he suffered from a tubercular complaint - necessitated a great deal of travel to seek warmer climates for his health. It's ultimately this need which led to Stevenson's life of almost constant upheaval and how he and his family eventually settled in Samoa. But as our quote above indicates - and his astonishingly wide-ranging output shows - Stevenson was not a writer whose illness restricted his creative sensibilities.

Image: Execution of William Burke, from The Sack-'em-up-Men by J.M. Ball


[1] Robert Louis Stevenson to George Meredith, 5 September 1893. Quoted in Selected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson (ed. Ernest Mehew), Yale University Press (1997)

Robert Whytt portrayed from the life

Robert Whytt. Oil painting by G.B. Bellucci, 1738.

Wellcome Library no. 665664i

Robert Whytt (1714-1766) was both a practising physician in Edinburgh and a professor at Edinburgh University. His extensive writings record his search for answers to questions that are still studied today: what distinguishes life from death, how people stay alive, why they fall ill, and what are the invisible processes involved. The seeming familiarity of some of his discoveries, such as the reflex action, led the neurosurgeon Sir Geoffrey Jefferson (1886–1961) to say that Whytt was "by common consent, the greatest of the early neurophysiologists". [1]

That verdict may today seem rather comical. Whytt lived in the 18th-century, and his ideas are not readily comprehensible today without some reference to his inherited vocabulary. [2] His thoughts about the nervous system came to the fore in a long-standing controversy with Albrecht von Haller over the faculty of sensation: Whytt's idea was that sensation, and indeed life itself, was due to the soul's distribution throughout the body, and its ability to take on different forms and functions in the different organs in which it lodged. Although Whytt has been called "the last of the animists" (French, p. 164), he is distinguished from the animists of the Stahl school, who thought that the soul must be a centralised controlling unit. Can Whytt really be said to have "discovered the reflex action", at least in a sense familiar today, if he saw the phenomenon he was describing as a function of invisible and sometimes non-material "animal fluids" channelling the functions of the Aristotelian soul around the various parts of the body?

As this example shows, despite his extensive writings Whytt is not an easy figure to get to grips with. Even the pronunciation of his name is unclear (it seems to be identical with "white"). There is an excellent monograph on him, written by the late Roger K. French, and published by the Wellcome Institute. However, reading that monograph, one understands why French's adviser, Professor Alistair Crombie, allotted this intractable subject to one of his most talented students (French later became a distinguished historian, particularly of mediaeval thought). It is characteristic of Whytt that he died of a mysterious complex of symptoms said to "correspond to no known disease" (French p. 13)

It is perhaps easier to approach Whytt through his historical context, as a luminary of the Edinburgh enlightenment and through his role in the Edinburgh medical world of his day. Fortunately he left an archive which passed through his descendants until part of it was acquired by the Wellcome Library in 1991. Drafts of his writings allow one to see his thought in action (click on the image on the left to read his manuscript).



Manuscript draft by Robert Whytt, 'The cure of (some of added) the most remarkable (symptoms of deleted) nervous, hypochondriac or hysteric (disorders deleted) symptoms'. Wellcome Library MS 6877/4

Missing from the archive available at that time was the portrait which Whytt commissioned from G.B. Bellucci in 1738 (reproduced above). The portrait remained with his descendants and has been inaccessible to the public for virtually its entire history. Fortunately it has now become possible for the Wellcome Library to acquire the portrait and reunite it with Whytt's papers. The portrait shows the young Whytt in the year in which he became a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, exuding the confidence that led him to lock horns with Haller.

The portrait is signed "Bellucci pinxit An.o 1738" (Bellucci painted it in the year 1738). Giovanni Battista Bellucci (1684–1760) was the son of the Venetian painter Antonio Bellucci (1654–1726), and came to England with his father in 1716. When Antonio returned to Venice in 1722, Giovanni Battista stayed behind and made his career as a portraitist in the British Isles, though today his paintings are hard to find. There is a portrait attributed to him in the Talbot Rice Gallery, University of Edinburgh, as is a painting of Diana in Northampton Museum, Northamptonshire, but the two main collections of his work, in Schloss Pirnitz (Brtnice, now in the Czech Republic) and in Tyninghame House (in East Lothian, Scotland) appear to have been dispersed. [3]

[1] Roger French, Robert Whytt, the soul and medicine, London: Wellcome Institute, 1969
[2] The context is richly described by G.S. Rousseau in Nervous acts: essays on literature, culture, and sensibility, Basingstoke 2004
[3] Zdenek Kazlepka, 'Se ancor del tutto fosse inesperto il mio talento del'arte liberale della dipintura ... Die Maler Giovanni Battista Bellucci und Antonio Lucino in der Korrespondenz mit Antonio Rambaldo, Graf Collalto e San Salvatore (1718-1722)', Römische Historische Mitteilungen, 2006, 48: 395–408