Tag: University of Edinburgh

On an Astute Doctor

Joseph Bell comes to us as another of those people we know about but don’t readily know who he is specifically. Bell was a Scottish physician who was most active in the late 1800s in and around Edinburgh. His reputation and ability was such that, when Queen Victoria visited Scotland (which was often since she loved it so), Bell acted as her personal doctor there. For most of his career, however, Bell was a lecturer and mentor at the University of Edinburgh’s school of medicine.

Born in 1837, Bell grew up in a family of doctors at a time when the medical profession was undergoing radical changes. The old, traditional, and often-unscientific and unhygienic medical methods were being discarded in favor of scientific theories and cleaner, safer, practices. And the University of Edinburgh was on the forefront of this new, better, and more scientific approach to the practice of medicine. For example, the school pioneered such advances as the use of chloroform in surgery (Dr. James Simpson) as well as the adoption of antiseptics in medicine (Dr. Joseph Lister–the creator of Listerine).

Bell attended Edinburgh’s medical school and quickly earned a reputation as a thorough, keen observer of a patient’s symptoms. He was one of the first to consider a patient’s lifestyle and personal history as being a key to unlocking the secrets of a diagnosis, looking into the person’s background to help determine what the cause of a particular ailment might be. He receives credit for employing medicine in the solution of crimes, something we call forensic pathology today. A corpse, he said, could tell an keen investigator as much if not more than a living person can. In fact, the Edinburgh Police Force consulted with Bell on several important cases over the years.

One of Bell’s favorite things to do was to attempt to “read” a person simply by observing them. He would take students to the streets of the Scottish capital and point out passersby. For example, Bell might point out one person and tell his students that the man who had walked past them had recently come from China, or that the woman crossing the street towards them was the wife of a sailor. The students would then chase down the person and ask them if Bell’s instant diagnosis were correct. And the students found that Bell was almost perfect in those little exercises. The key, he said, was to be aware of the little things. The man who Bell had said had come fresh from China had a new tattoo on his hand that one could only get in Shanghai, for example. Bell even had the ability to tell a person’s occupation simply by looking at a person’s hands.

Such a teacher who was an astute observer of people and the little tells that could help a doctor in a diagnosis was certain to leave an impression on his students. One such student who was lucky to win a position as an assistant to Bell at the university went on to immortalize some of Bell’s characteristics in a series of stories in popular magazines of the time. In fact, a fictional character this student created, based in part on Bell, is one of literature’s most notable.

Of course, the student who admired and was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell was Arthur Conan Doyle, and his character is the immortal detective, Sherlock Holmes.

On Two Failed Medical Careers

Robert wanted his son to be a doctor, a physician, like he was. In fact, he wanted both of his sons, Ras (short for Erasmus) and Charlie to study medicine. So, in the autumn of 1825, Robert sent the pair of young men to the most prestigious medical school in the United Kingdom and, in fact, also Robert’s own alma mater: The University of Edinburgh. The reputation of the school was beyond dispute. Almost all of the modern medical world passed through the medical school in the Scottish capital city. And Robert wished that his sons would have the best education possible–as he himself had.

So, the brothers (Ras was a few years older than Charlie) took some rooms only a few steps away from the medical college on what was then Lothian Street, south of the Royal Mile and near what is today the Scottish National Museum. The rooms, the boys found were bright and airy and not at all stuffy as much of the student rooms in Edinburgh tended to be. At first, all seemed well; the boys loved Edinburgh, and they attended their lectures and classes and conducted themselves like the young, gentlemanly students they were.

However, as I mentioned, Ras was older than Charlie, and he had already been studying medicine at Cambridge in England for some time. By the time the spring of 1826 rolled around, Ras was pretty much finished with the Edinburgh part of his training. It was time for him to go to London to complete his medical education at the anatomy school there. That left Charlie alone in the Scottish city. And it was that spring that Charlie decided he didn’t like the study of medicine. Writing to one of his sisters, he complained that the lectures were boring him to the point of madness. He stopped attending his required beginning anatomy labs. He began hanging out in the natural sciences departments of the university, and he started to learn about botany and what today we would call earth science.

All of this disappointed Charlie’s father. The hopes he had for his son to follow in his footsteps as a physician were fading, fast. Now, it didn’t help that Robert’s youngest son was only 16 when he left home to go to university and then was a still-young 17 when Ras left him alone in Edinburgh. So, it quite possible that homesickness played a part in Charlie’s decision to quit the medical school at Edinburgh after less than two years there. He talked often of going into the clergy as his family had a long history of ministers as well as physicians. Ras, for his part, was a sickly young man most of the time; his delicate constitution proved too fragile for medicine. Thus, it was with great sadness on his father’s part that Ras also quit his medical studies at the precise moment that he was about to finish them. Neither son, then, followed in Robert’s footsteps.

Of course, Charlie wouldn’t become a minister, either. No, the interest he found in the natural sciences at university soon put Charles Darwin aboard the ship The Beagle and on the way to changing how we view our natural world.