Clopton Havers, M.D. (died 1702), was the author of a standard work on the bones, certain canals of which were called after him Haversian canals.
James Douglas, M.D. (1675-1742), was an excellent anatomist, who was one of the first to demonstrate from anatomy that the high operation for stone might be safely performed. He was a skilful accoucheur, an accomplished botanist, and a man of letters. Pope mentions him in the Dunciad, and in a note describes him as a physician of great learning and no less taste. He wrote several works, the most famous of which is Myographiæ Comparatæ Specimen; or a comparative description of all the muscles in a man and in a quadruped; added is an account of the muscles peculiar to a woman. London, 1707.
William Cullen, M.D. (1710-1790), was the first professor in Great Britain to deliver his lectures in the English language.[1001] He was appointed lecturer on chemistry at Glasgow University in 1746, and in 1751 was chosen regius professor of medicine. In 1756 he became professor of chemistry in the University of Edinburgh; in 1760 he was made lecturer on materia medica. Dr. Cullen earned great distinction as a lecturer on medicine; he opposed the teaching of Boerhaave and the principles of the humoral pathology, founding his own teaching on that of Hoffman. His system was to a great extent based on the new physiological doctrine of irritability as taught by Haller.
He attached great importance to nervous action in the induction of disease, considering even gout as a neurosis.
His First Lines of the Practice of Physic was long exceedingly popular, but his fame as a medical writer rests on his Nosology, or Classification of Diseases. In all his labours Dr. Cullen aimed at the practical rather than the theoretical. “My business is not,” he remarks,[1002] “so much to explain how this and that happens, as to examine what is truly matter of fact.” “My anxiety is not so much to find out how it happens as to find out what happens.” Cullen invented no ingenious hypothesis, rather he new-modelled the whole practice of medicine; “he defined and arranged diseases with an unrivalled accuracy, and reduced their treatment to a simplicity formerly unknown.”[1003]
James Gregory, M.D. (1758-1822), exercised the greatest influence on the progress of medicine in England. As the successor of Cullen, and as the author of the famous Conspectus Medicinæ Theoreticæ, the name of Gregory, borne by many ornaments of British science, became still more distinguished.
Sir Gilbert Blane, M.D. (born 1747), rendered important medical services to the State by his researches on the diseases incident to seamen. He banished scurvy from the fleet by his arrangements for provisioning ships on foreign stations, particularly by making lemon juice a regular ingredient of diet.
Sir William Watson, M.D. (1715-1787), was a devoted botanist and student of electricity. His electrical researches raised him to a position of European fame. He was the first in England who succeeded in igniting spirit of wine by electricity; he was the first to note the different colour of the spark, as drawn from different bodies; and his researches in the power and accumulation of electricity, the nature of its conductors, etc., qualified him to take part in the experiments carried out in 1747 and 1748, by which the “electric current was extended to four miles in order to prove the velocity of its transmission.”[1004] The doctor’s house in Aldersgate Street was long the resort of the most distinguished men of science in Europe. He was not less the benign and generous friend to the poor and suffering, than the ardent investigator of the secrets of Nature. His work Experiments and Observations on Electricity is quite a remarkable production considering the age in which it was published (1768).
Robert Willan, M.D. (1757-1812), was the founder of the science of skin diseases in England. His attention was directed in 1784 to the elementary forms of eruption, and on this basis he erected his magnum opus, The Description and Treatment of Cutaneous Diseases (1798).
John Brown (1735-1788), was a systematizer of medicine, whose popularity was even continental. He endeavoured to explain the processes of life and disease and the principles of cure upon one simple idea, the property of “excitability.” The “exciting powers” are the external forces, and the functions of the body are stimulants, so that “the whole phenomena of life, health as well as disease, consist in stimulus and nothing else.” Diseases he divided as sthenic, attended with preternatural excitement, and asthenic, characterized by debility.