Sir Hans Sloane: collector, scientist, antiquary

Henry Cockburn who claimed in 1856 that in the 1790s the Whigs in Edinburgh were few and embattled, fighting for their views and careers against the dominant Tories who exploited the fears aroused in Britain by the execution of Louis XIV and the Terror. Cockburn identified John Allen and John Thomson, of the medical profession, as active and fearless in the Whig cause. Though much has been written about the early Edinburgh Reviewers and about Dugald Stewart and John Playfair, their Whig mentors in the University, Allen and Thomson have been unjustly neglected. Jacyna's book is mainly devoted to the careers in Edinburgh of John Thomson (1765-1846) and his family, with one chapter about John Allen, a close friend of Thomson, a physiologist, and in the early 1790s a Friend of the People. They are characterized as philosophical Whigs who believed in citizenship, freedom, liberty, reason and science. Jacyna shows that Allen, with his reputed atheism and his public materialism, found it possible to survive as a lecturer in physiology in hostile and Tory Edinburgh only from 1794 to 1802, when he joined the Holland House coterie in London and abandoned medicine. In contrast, Thomson not only survived in Edinburgh: he prospered to the tune of suggesting and occupying three medical chairs, namely, surgery at the College of Surgeons (1804-21), military surgery (1806-22) and general pathology (1831-42) at the University. Much of Jacyna's book is devoted to the ways in which Thomson acted as an entrepreneur in a political environment that was often hostile and a medical one that was acrimoniously competitive. Jacyna argues convincingly that Thomson's Whiggery crucially benefited his career: he owed both his University posts to his Whig chums in government who created Regius chairs for him. Apropos Whig science in Edinburgh, Jacyna confesses that he cannot identify any particular doctrine as characteristic; but, in the case of Thomson, he sees the Whiggery as most manifest in Thomson's debts in his teaching to Stewart's philosophy of mind. Jacyna sells the Thomson medical dynasty a little short in two respects. His terminus date is 1848 when Allen Thomson, John's second surviving son named after John Allen, left Edinburgh University, where he was a professor of physiology, for the chair of anatomy at Glasgow. There Allen joined his elder brother William (1802-52) who was professor of the practice of medicine. Though Jacyna is illuminating on the Thomson sons before they went to Glasgow, he says little about their activities there. In Edinburgh in the 1 820s John Thomson was mentor to two adopted medical sons, Robert Carswell and John William Turner. The former became the first professor of pathological anatomy at University College, London, a hot-bed of Edinburgh Whiggery. In 1831 Turner became the first occupant of the Regius chair of surgery at Edinburgh University, a post created by Thomson's influence with the Whig government. As with the two Thomson sons, Jacyna says little about the peaks of the careers of Carswell and Turner. That said, one welcomes the care and competence with which Jacyna has drawn on a wide range of unpublished and published sources (both modern and ancient) to produce a dependable and perceptive account of an important Scottish medical family.