My trip to London and Edinburgh was such an amazing experience and something that I will never forget. I was super nervous going on this trip being one of the only guys and not knowing anybody and I never have gone this far out of the country before but luckily I caught on very quickly and I learned what it was like to study abroad. While the trip was a lot of fun it was still a learning experience and was also a class trip and not just a total vacation, although it did feel like it. Learning about 18th century Britain was super fascinating to me. What was especially fascinating to me was how medicine was for 18th century England and Scotland. Learning how the doctors and surgeons learned surgery and medicine was super cool to learn in class and was super cool to learn while I was out there.
It’s crazy to think that Scotland and England so close and still part of the same place had such different views on medical practices and views on how medicine should be studied and advanced. London followed most of Europe’s standards for learning about medicine and surgery they would hold large lectures with tons of students and like classrooms today someone experienced and someone with knowledge in the field would explain the human body and talk about where parts of the body were and what their functions were and how to handle a body in certain situations. Scotland was using that practice but a little later on they were holding large lectures where the body was actually being dissected in front of the students and they were showing the students where certain body parts were and how to perform surgery first hand. A cool fact that I learned while on the trip was our tour guide for the blood and guts tour was telling us that the doctors in Edinburgh would pay grave robbers money to go fetch them a body from the graveyard so they could use it for dissection, so even though the bodies were being used for science and for the good of humanity the bodies weren’t being fetched in a good way. The tour guide was also telling us that a lot of these grave robbers would actually just kill people and bring the bodies in because it was easier than grave robbing once Edinburgh made rules against it. I found this story to be interesting because I did always wonder how these schools were getting in all of these bodies especially with how much dissections was going on each day. Another way that people would fetch bodies for dissection was they would use the bodies of criminals that have been executed or died but as time went on, their was less people being executed so that’s why grave robbing and murder happened. But anyways this new form of figuring out medicine and surgery I think really helped Scotland advance more than England in the medical field. Like what Broman said in his article The Medical Sciences, “No matter how progressive a medical faculty believed itself to be, medical education in the eighteenth century was largely, if not exclusively, a matter of lecture and explanatory comment.” These professors would build their course around ancient medical texts and they were super dated obviously.
Our tour guide for the blood and guts tour was telling us this story about how a doctor in Edinburgh was dissecting these bodies and he kept on noticing this weird looking organ and he thought that the body had some sort of defect in it and then he kept dissecting more and more bodies until he realized that this wasn’t a coincidence or some sort of defect but was an organ that is in every body and this is what is known as our spleen. I am telling you this story because I think that it is important to realize that texts and lectures can only tell you so much especially when the texts are old. It would be like us today using textbooks that are hundreds of years old in our medical schools and then the doctors first surgeries are their actual patients.
Another advance that Scotland was making over England in the medical field was courtesy. What I mean by this is that the Scottish were teaching their students to treat their patients like humans and not just as their work. Before these doctors weren’t really treating their patients with a lot of kindness but just doing their work on them and sending them on their way but the Scottish taught their students to be kind to their patients and treat them like you would want to be treated. I think that this just shows though the kind of people that the Scottish are and I think this is still goes on today with how nice the Scottish are compared to the English.
The Surgeon’s Museum that we went to as a class I thought was very cool because they had literally all of the body parts that you could imagine in there, anywhere from the heart to the brain, head to toe. They also had so many different diseases and tumors that you can see which I also thought was very cool. I bring this up because I think that this is very important to my topic of dissection because these students that were dissecting cadavers and learning from the surgeon was getting to see first-hand what these tumors or abnormalities actually looked like, because when you just focus on readings and lecture you don’t get a sense of what it looks like or anything like that. In the Surgeon’s Museum you get to see first-hand what these defects look like and what the students should look for in the body in class and then eventually on their actual patients.
Now I am not saying that England wasn’t making any medical advances or anything like that because they did, I am just saying I don’t think their advances were like that of Scotland’s due to the methods of medical practice going on in England compared to Scotland. England did make some very good discoveries though themselves in the field of medicine. While in the British Museum in London I saw the little exhibit on Carl Linneaus who was a botanist and a scientist, I learned how he had a huge impact on medicine in England. I learned that he is the one who came up with identifying, naming, and classifying organisms. I also learned that he studied plants, animals, and minerals in medicine and that he did a lot of work at the botanical gardens. Linneaus also then became a lecturer in botany which is important to human life because he helped with a lot of the modern medicine today and with how we use plants for medicine now.
One issue with England and their practice of medicine is I believe that they were behind in the advancements of medicine due to them focusing strictly on lecture and comment. I say this because they had some pretty far-fetched ideas about why and how people get sick. For example in Defoes A Journal of the Plague Year, he talks about how people of England had no idea how the plague was happening and they thought that God was punishing them. So the English still due to their lack of knowledge of medicine and understanding still tied in religion in with everything in medicine and thought that it was God giving these diseases and that there was nothing they could do to stop it.
So based on the facts that I learned in class about England and Scotland and how they handled medicine in the 18th century and before, and also by what I learned in Edinburgh and London I have come to the conclusion that Scotland’s ways of doing medicine was more effective and successful than Englands. I do still however think England has made some great medical advances just like the Botanical Gardens and the works of Carl Linneaus but I still think that overall Scotland has the edge on England in the medical field at that time.
IUSB London Edinburgh 