CHAPTER VI.
Medical Men. Sandy Wood. Knox. Nairn and Sir William Gull. A broken leg in Canna. Changes in the professoriate and students in the Scottish Universities. A St. Andrews Professor. A Glasgow Professor. Some Edinburgh Professors—Pillans, Blackie, Christison, Maclagan, Playfair, Chalmers, Tait. Scottish Schoolmasters.
Among the professions that of medicine has long held a high place in Scotland. Its reputation at home and abroad has been maintained for a century and a half by a brilliant succession of teachers and practitioners. The schools of medicine in Edinburgh and Glasgow continue to attract students from all quarters of the British Islands, and from our colonies. Every year hundreds of medical graduates are sent out from the Universities, and they are now to be found at work in almost every corner of the wide globe.
LANG SANDY WOOD
At the beginning of the eighteenth century one of the noted medical characters in Edinburgh was the surgeon eulogised by Byron in the couplet:
Oh! for an hour of him who knew no feud,
The octogenarian chief, the kind old Sandy Wood.
He was greatly admired for his medical skill, and beloved for his kindly nature. His popularity saved him once from instant death. During a riot, the mob, mistaking him for the provost, were preparing to pitch him over the North Bridge, when he shouted out to them, ‘I’m lang Sandy Wood; tak’ me to a lamp and ye’ll see.’ He used to take a constitutional walk to Restalrig in the evenings, and frequently met a tailor carrying a bundle, whom he invariably saluted with, ‘Weel, Tam, are ye gaun hame wi’ your wark?’ The tailor rather resented this monotonous enquiry, and one day he had his revenge. Noticing the tall figure of the well-known surgeon walking at the end of a funeral procession, he instantly made up to him to ask, ‘Weel, doctor, are ye gaun hame wi’ your wark?’
Rather later came the times of Burke and Hare, with the terrors of the resurrectionists. A prominent individual in Edinburgh at that time was Robert Knox the anatomist, to whose dissecting room the bodies of the victims murdered in the West Port were sold. He was for many years a successful lecturer, but afterwards got into difficulties, when he tried to retrieve his position by announcing courses of lectures, or a single lecture on a sensational subject. When one of the teachers in the medical school, who had introduced the practice of illustrating his lectures with models, was discoursing on the anatomy of the ear, Knox posted up a notice that on a certain day he too would give a lecture on the human ear, illustrated with the modern methods of demonstration. When the day came, the lecture-room was crowded with students on the outlook for amusement. The lecturer began his demonstration by holding up an ear, which he had obtained from a human subject, and pointing out the leading features in its structure. At a particular part of his lecture he gave a signal, and the door behind him was opened by two men who carried in a monstrous and grotesquely shaped model of an ear. It was set down on the table, and in a little while Knox, holding up the ear he had already exhibited, said, ‘This, gentlemen, is the human ear according to God Almighty, and that (pointing to the huge model), and that is the human ear according to Dr. ——.’
EXTRA MURAL MEDICAL SCHOOLS