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W2905379370 abstract "In 1792, James Gregory (1753–1821), Professor of the Practice of Physic at the University of Edinburgh, became involved in a highly public dispute with a family of man midwives. The row centred on a text attributed to ‘J. Johnson Esq’ entitled A Guide for Gentlemen Studying Medicine at the University of Edinburgh (1792). According to Gregory, this was ‘a knavish pamphlet, published under a false name . . . intended to promote the pecuniary interest of one man, and to injure the fame and fortune of another, both of them my colleagues in this University’.11 James Gregory, Additional Memorial to the Managers of the Royal Infirmary (Edinburgh, 1803), p. 310. Gregory suspected the author to be the Professor of Midwifery, Alexander Hamilton (bap. 1739, d. 1802), and although the Senate of the university cleared Alexander of any wrongdoing, Gregory's attention then turned to his son, James Hamilton (1767–1839). According to the established account of events, in 1793 Gregory came across James Hamilton in the precincts of the university and, after a brief exchange of words, thrashed him with his cane. Gregory was subsequently called before the Commissary Court where he was ordered to pay £100 in damages, as well as a fine and expenses. Unrepentant, he claimed that he would gladly pay another £100 for the pleasure of doing it again.22 Robert Chisholm, The Life of Robert Chisholm, Bart, I: Autobiography (Edinburgh, 1885), p. 86; Agnes Grainger Stewart, The Academic Gregories (Edinburgh, 1901), p. 136. As this episode suggests, James Gregory was not averse to engaging in public quarrels with his medical colleagues. Even in the highly fractious world of medicine in late Georgian Edinburgh, he was notorious for his belligerence. Henry Cockburn (1779–1854), the celebrated Whig jurist, claimed that, whatever his virtues, ‘a disposition towards personal attack was his besetting sin’.33 Henry Cockburn, Memorials of his Time (New York, 1856), p. 106. In 1809, Gregory was even suspended from the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh for refusing to apologize for publishing an account of its internal proceedings.44 Paul Lawrence, ‘Gregory, James (1753–1821)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004) [hereafter: ODNB] <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11466> [accessed 14 Oct. 2018]; Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, Narrative of the Conduct of James Gregory towards the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1809). However, of all the conflicts in which he was involved, none was more protracted, more heated, nor, indeed, more historically significant, than the ‘medical war’ between himself and the surgeon-anatomist John Bell (1763–1820), which began in 1800 and lasted for up to ten years. This row, which stemmed from a plan to alter the mode of attendance at the Royal Infirmary for members of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, played out across the world of print and gave rise to over a thousand pages of ill-tempered screed. To date, most scholarly accounts of the life and works of John Bell have tended to view him primarily as the erstwhile mentor of his more famous younger brother, Charles Bell (1774–1842).55 For a biographical account see E. W. Wallis, ‘John Bell, 1763–1820’, Medical History, 8/1 (1964), pp. 63–9; K. Grudzien Baston, ‘Bell, John (1763–1820), ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/2013> [accessed 14 Oct. 2018]; M. H. Kaufman, ‘John Bell (1763–1820), the “father” of surgical anatomy’, Journal of Medical Biography, 13/2 (2005), pp. 73–81. Thus, while a number of historians have referred to the ‘war’ between Gregory and Bell, most have done so only briefly, either as context for Charles's subsequent career, or as part of a general account of medical politics in Edinburgh at the turn of the nineteenth century.66 For recent references to John's dispute with Gregory in relation to his brother, see Carin Berkowitz, Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform (Chicago, 2015), pp. 5–6, and Michael J. Aminoff, Sir Charles Bell: His Life, Art, Neurological Concepts and Controversial Legacy (Oxford, 2017), pp. 8–10. The only work that appears to have dealt with the dispute in any detail is an unpublished paper by Michael Barfoot. Indeed, in their reference to the matter, Christopher Lawrence, Stephen Jacyna and Guenter Risse all take Barfoot as their primary authority.77 Christopher Lawrence, ‘The Edinburgh Medical School and the end of the “Old Thing” 1790–1830’, History of Universities, 1 (1988), pp. 259–86, at p. 267, n. 42; L. S. Jaycna, ‘Robert Carswell and William Thomson at the Hôtel Dieu of Lyons: Scottish views of French medicine’, in Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), British Medicine in an Age of Reform (London, 1991), pp. 110–34, at p, 116, n. 19; idem, Philosophic Whigs: Medicine, Science and Citizenship in Edinburgh 1789–1848 (London, 1994), p. 56, n. 29; Guenter Risse, New Medical Challenges During the Scottish Enlightenment (Amsterdam, 2005), p. 51, n. 168. There is now no conceivable way of recovering the substance of Barfoot's argument. However, in his indispensable essay ‘The Edinburgh Medical School and the End of the “Old Thing” 1790–1830’ (1988), Lawrence offers a suggestive insight, stating that Barfoot saw Bell's writings as ‘an attack on elitism and patronage and a defence of equality in the medical world, and Gregory's the reverse’.88 Lawrence, ‘Edinburgh Medical School’, p. 267. Risse also develops Barfoot's observations, arguing that this dispute ‘revealed the critical importance of access to the now famous Infirmary for the fortunes of Edinburgh medicine and surgery – the former basking in worldwide recognition, the latter still mired in mediocrity but strenuously aiming to improve its image and scope of practice’.99 Risse, New Medical Challenges, pp. 50–1. For the most part, then, historians have understood this episode in terms of intra-professional and institutional politics. Quite right too; as we shall see, the Gregory–Bell dispute spans three distinct yet interrelated historiographical fields: firstly, the political culture of medicine in Edinburgh during this period; secondly, the relations between physicians and surgeons at a time when the latter were growing in number and increasingly asserting their status; and thirdly, as I have explored elsewhere, the contested politics of charitable medical institutions in the early nineteenth century.1010 Michael Brown, ‘Medicine, reform and the “end” of charity in early nineteenth-century England’, English Historical Review, 124/511 (2009), pp. 1353–88. However, one aspect of the dispute which has yet to be considered is its longer-term implications for surgery and surgical identity. Gregory's published contributions to the row have a legalistic quality. His 513-page Additional Memorial to the Managers of the Royal Infirmary (1803), for example, exhibits a forensic attention to the minutiae of Bell's writings which more than borders on the tedious. By contrast, though Bell was praised by Gregory for his ‘extraordinary talents’ as an ‘Advocate’ for his fellow surgeons, his publications possess a superior literary quality, so that even Gregory admitted that reading them was ‘an agreeable amusement’.1111 Gregory, Additional Memorial, pp. 102, 303. More than this, in contrast to Gregory, Bell ranged widely. Rather than a mere statement of his position, and that of his fellow surgeons, on the important, yet inherently parochial, matter of access to the Infirmary, Bell's writings developed into an expansive yet coherent statement of surgical identity and ideology. This culminated in his publication of Letters on Professional Character and Manners: On the Education of a Surgeon, and the Duties and Qualifications of a Physician: Addressed to James Gregory (1810), a work which not only set out his vision of surgical identity, but did so in explicit contrast to that of the physician. Furthermore, it was against the backdrop of this conflict that Bell produced his magnum opus, The Principles of Surgery (1801–6), a work that would continue to be read as a standard text for decades to come. This dispute, and John Bell's contribution to it, is thus highly worthy of scholarly analysis, not only because he was regarded as ‘the only true surgeon in Edinburgh’1212 John Struthers, Historical Sketch of the Edinburgh Anatomical School (Edinburgh, 1867), p. 41. and ‘the best surgeon that Scotland had then produced’,1313 Cockburn, Memorials of his Time, p. 106. but also because, some thirty years after their publication, Bell's writings were still functioning as a touchstone for surgical identity, or what were then called ‘surgical morals’.1414 For example, see James Wardrop, ‘Lectures on surgery’, The Lancet, 20/514 (6 July 1833), pp. 453–9, at p. 454. Indeed, it would not be unreasonable to suggest that Bell was one of the most important influences on surgical culture in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. This article contends that what made Bell's work so appealing to large numbers of surgeons in the late Georgian period was its articulation of a culturally resonant professional identity shaped, to a profound degree, by feeling and emotion. As Thomas Dixon has argued, the term ‘emotion’ has a complex history. In the eighteenth century it functioned ‘either as an undefined and general term for any kind of mental feeling or agitation, or sometimes as a stylistic variant for central theoretical terms such as “passion” and “affection”’.1515 Thomas Dixon, ‘“Emotion”: the history of a keyword in crisis’, Emotion Review, 4/338 (2012), pp. 338–44, at p. 340; see also idem, From Passions to Emotions: The Construction of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge, 2003). Dixon regards Charles Bell as the ‘coinventor’, along with Thomas Brown (1778–1820), of the ‘modern’ concept of emotion.1616 Dixon, ‘“Emotion”’, p. 341. However, as with so much of Charles Bell's work, it is clear that, whatever the difficulties of their relationship, he owed much to the influence of his older brother and mentor, John. As we shall see, emotion saturates Bell's writing and underpins his conception and idealization of surgery and the surgeon, yet it has passed largely without comment, certainly without analysis. To be sure, some of his biographers have suggested that Bell was a man who united ‘compassion’ with ‘moral courage’ or that he ‘was a kind, generous, and compassionate man’, but none have sought to interrogate the role of emotional expression in shaping his public identity, nor have they sought to situate his surgical persona within a broader social, cultural and political context.1717 Wallis, ‘John Bell’, p. 68; Baston, ‘Bell, John’. The history of emotion is now a well-established field of study but it is only in relatively recent years that historians of medicine and science have begun to take emotions seriously in their consideration of professional practice, identity and representation.1818 For example, see Rob Boddice, The Science of Sympathy: Morality, Evolution, and Victorian Civilization (Urbana, IL, 2016). As we have seen, historians of medicine have long been sensitive to the political dynamics of professional relations. Historians of emotion have likewise drawn attention to the politics of feeling, while literary scholars and cultural historians have scrutinized the politics of sensibility in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1919 On the politics of emotion, see William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001). On the politics of sensibility, see G. J. Barkar-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992); Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge, 1996). However, these bodies of scholarship have rarely spoken to one another. What this article seeks to do, therefore, is to excavate the cultural and political meanings of the Gregory–Bell dispute through an analytically inclusive approach. It will demonstrate that this dispute can best be understood by mapping the rivalry between physicians and surgeons in late Georgian Edinburgh onto emergent fault lines within the predominant ‘emotional regime’ of the period. Bell's construction of the surgeon as man of feeling, it argues, tapped into wider debates about sincerity, sentiment and sensibility that first took shape in the 1780s and which came to the fore in the fraught, post-Revolutionary years of the 1790s. In these debates, the tropes of sensibility were themselves deployed as a critique of affected, theatrical or disingenuous emotional expression of a kind that threatened to undermine the credibility of authentic experience and sensation.2020 Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, pp. 220–1. In the context of the Gregory–Bell dispute, this critique of affectation centred on the meanings assigned to embodied knowledge and practice. In his work on the history of emotion as a concept, Thomas Dixon mistakenly refers to Charles Bell as a physician, rather than a surgeon. This is intriguing, because those embodied, physiological qualities, such as the motion of the heart and lungs, which Bell brought to the ‘modern’ concept of the emotions, were a direct product of his surgical world-view.2121 Dixon, ‘“Emotion”’, p. 341. In this sense, too, we can see a prefiguration in the work of his older brother. For John Bell, this article suggests, sincere emotions were rooted in embodied experience. Traditionally, the social status of the physician, though by no means assured, was sustained by his relative distance from manual work. By contrast, the surgeon remained inextricably associated with praxis and craft skill. Gregory played on this distinction, expressing his distaste for surgical operations and anatomical dissection and repeatedly alluding to surgery's roots in trade. Bell, on the other hand, sought to turn such prejudices on their head, asserting that it was precisely through embodied experience and an exposure to the physical suffering and mental distress of his patients that the surgeon came to be formed as a man of honest, heartfelt sensibility, an emotional sincerity that he situated in marked contrast to the ornamental manners of the physician, who was professionally isolated from such visceral experiences. This had profound social and political connotations. As Barfoot has suggested, and as we shall explore in more detail, Gregory's conception of medicine and its relation to surgery was rooted in a fundamentally aristocratic conception of social worth. Bell's representation of surgery, by contrast, whatever his actual political views, resonated with a more democratic and reformist vision in which the ‘manly simplicity’ of the aspirant professional stood in opposition to the lordly affectations and dissimulation of the established elites. The medical world of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Edinburgh has been so well documented by historians that little more needs to be said here, save as context.2222 Lawrence, ‘Edinburgh Medical School’; Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs. What is important to note, is that the highly factious nature of the Edinburgh medical community owed much to the presence of the university medical school which, controlled as it was by the town council, was immersed in local civic politics.2323 Christopher Lawrence, ‘Medicine as culture: Edinburgh and the Scottish Enlightenment’, PhD, University of London (1984), p. 27. The medical school had been formally established in 1726 by the Lord Provost George Drummond (1687–1766) and the surgeon John Monro (bap. 1670, d. 1740) with the intention of imitating the medical teaching of Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738), under whom Monro had studied at the University of Leiden. Although it lost its distinctly Boerhaavian flavour within a generation, the Edinburgh medical school continued to provide a systematic and comprehensive education which distinguished it from other universities in the British Isles. Its ‘Golden Age’ was marked by the tenure of William Cullen (1710–90), first as Professor of Chemistry (1755–66) and subsequently of the Institutes (theory) (1766–73) and Practice of Medicine (1773–89).2424 Ibid., pp. 314–21. Other luminaries of the era included Joseph Black (1728–99), Alexander Monro secundus (1733–1817) and John Gregory (1724–73). One of the singular features of Edinburgh medical education was clinical instruction, a model of teaching imported from Leiden. To that end, a small six-bedroom infirmary was opened in 1729 followed in 1741 by a much larger purpose-built structure, now known as the Royal Infirmary, in Thomson's Yards.2525 Ibid., pp. 103–11; Guenter Risse, Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland: Care and Teaching at the Royal Hospital of Edinburgh (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 25–33. The situation of this building, almost exactly halfway between the College and Surgeon's Hall, served as a neat metaphor for the contested politics of its foundation. In what would appear to have been an attempt by Alexander Monro primus (1697–1767) to monopolize the surgical department of the Infirmary, the Charter of 1736 stated that the patients would be ‘entertained and taken care of by the Royal College of Physicians and some of the most skilful surgeons’.2626 Quoted in Helen M. Dingwall, ‘A Famous and Flourishing Society’: The History of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, 1505–2005 (Edinburgh, 2005), p. 98. Emphasis added. Slighted by their effective exclusion from the Infirmary, the Incorporation of Surgeons established their own hospital in the same year. However, under the leadership of Deacon John Kennedy, they soon approached the managers of the Infirmary and offered to merge the two institutions, promising to transfer all subscriptions and pay some £500 in return for the members of the Incorporation being allowed to attend the Infirmary by right; this offer was accepted in 1738.2727 Lawrence, ‘Medicine as culture’, pp. 111–17; Dingwall, Famous and Flourishing, pp. 97–9. It is important to note the wording employed by the Incorporation in their appeal to the managers; they claimed that the system of universal attendance was necessary ‘in order to preserve an equality among the surgeons of Edinburgh’.2828 Quoted in Lawrence, ‘Medicine as culture’, p. 115. For its opponents, this language was suggestive of the Incorporation's guild mentality, but it might just as well be interpreted as a collective desire on the part of surgeons to defend their interests against the dominance of the Royal College of Physicians. By this time the Incorporation of Surgeons was in a somewhat anomalous position. In 1722 the surgeons had split from the barbers (twenty-three years before their London colleagues) but they retained strong ties to the town council and would keep formal membership of the Edinburgh Trades long after the Charter of 1778 had made them the Royal College of Surgeons. While this association with the Council was useful, given the hegemonic influence it exercised over civic affairs, it was also a potential impediment to their desire to be regarded as learned gentlemen, rather than tradesmen. Although formal membership of the Incorporation/Royal College fluctuated across the century, by the later 1700s the number of surgeons in Edinburgh was increasing. More importantly, perhaps, surgical knowledge was also on the rise. During the long years of war with France (1793–1815), there was increased demand from the army and navy for medical practitioners. What each regiment or ship-of-the-line needed was not a physician but a surgeon, or rather surgeon-apothecary, capable both of performing operations and of attending to the quotidian medical needs of the men.2929 See Marcus Ackroyd, et al., Advancing with the Army: Medicine, the Professions, and Social Mobility in the British Isles 1790–1850 (Oxford, 2006); Catherine Kelly, War and the Militarization of British Army Medicine, 1793–1830 (London, 2011). As Lawrence has suggested, the medical school could not, and did not, respond to this state of affairs. For one thing, the Professor of Anatomy, Alexander Monro tertius (1773–1859) was a physician and taught anatomy in a deeply traditional manner which focused on form and function. By contrast, a number of lecturers in Edinburgh were offering extramural courses which viewed the body through the eyes of the surgeon and which catered to his needs.3030 Lawrence, ‘Edinburgh Medical School’, pp. 265–7. It has been suggested that Charles Bell was the originator of surgical anatomy in Britain but, once again, it is clear that he owed much to his brother.3131 Berkowitz, Charles Bell. John Bell was one of the most popular extramural lecturers in the city and, as we have heard, was considered to be ‘the only true surgeon in Edinburgh’3232 Struthers, Historical Sketch, p. 41. in that he taught surgery as an applied science.3333 Lawrence, ‘Edinburgh Medical School’, p. 267. ‘ANATOMY’, he claimed, ‘serves to a Surgeon, as the sole theory of his profession, and guides him in all the practice of his art.’3434 John Bell, Letters on Professional Character and Manners: On the Education of a Surgeon, and the Duties and Qualifications of a Physician: Addressed to James Gregory, M.D. Professor of the Practice of Medicine in the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1810), p. 548. The difference betwixt your description and that of a bold operator, is just that which distinguishes an assassin from a brave man! You write bloodily, though not boldly: you speak not like a regular surgeon . . . but like a desperate man, careless of everything, and afraid only of being affronted, or, in other words, ‘embarrassed’ in the midst of a public exhibition! You write like one who had been often caught and entangled in difficulties from which he had no other way of disengaging himself than by a slap-dash stroke of the knife . . . You are enfuriated [sic] by opposition! the words adhesion, stricture, gut, and sac, excite proportioned fury! and you exclaim, tear, cut, clip, destroy – Tear the adhesions, cut every thing; – surgery consists in cutting! and the best surgery is to cut every thing!!!3939 Dawplucker [Bell], Number Second, pp. 53–5. Quite how Bell came to be involved in this dispute is not entirely clear. The evidence suggests that he was a ‘pugnacious’ and quarrelsome man; ‘No formidable insect delighted in his sting so much as he did’, wrote Cockburn.4040 Henry Cockburn, Journal of Henry Cockburn: Being a Continuation of the Memorials of his Time, 1831–1854, II (Edinburgh, 1874), p. 203. However, there may also have been a political dimension. As Lawrence has stated of Edinburgh, ‘the French wars saw the apogee of the ascendancy of Henry Dundas, and the almost total support by the traditional elite for Tory policies . . . Scots Whigs were in a minority both in parliament and in Scotland’.4141 Lawrence, ‘Edinburgh Medical School’, p. 261. And yet a Whig faction was making increasing inroads into the city and university, leading to conflict over much-coveted public offices.4242 Jacyna, Philosophic Whigs, pp. 2–5. Charles Bell has been described by some historians as a conservative Whig, but, within the particular context of Scottish politics, John's inclinations are not quite so clear cut.4343 Berkowitz, Charles Bell, pp. 14–15, citing Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago, 1989), p. 93. The fact that his father, Rev. William Bell (1704–79), left the Church of Scotland for the Episcopal Church at a time when it was indelibly associated with Jacobitism suggests Tory sympathies,4444 For an account of William's conversion, see Charles Bell, Letters of Charles Bell (London, 1870), pp. 4–7. while John's membership of the Highland Society of Scotland points in a similar direction.4545 Caledonian Mercury, 2 July 1801, p. 3. And it is perhaps no coincidence that his key surgical opponents included such prominent Whigs as John Thomson and John Allen.4646 Gregory, Additional Memorial, pp. 80, 101. However, as Lawrence has pointed out, the medical politics of Edinburgh in this period cannot always be conveniently mapped onto party politics and, as the example of Bell's contemporary, Robert Burns (1759–96), demonstrates, disentangling Jacobitism from broader political principles can be tricky.4747 Lawrence, ‘Edinburgh Medical School’, p. 268; Colin Kidd, ‘Burns and politics’, in Gerrard Carruthers (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns (Edinburgh, 2009), pp. 61–73. Certainly, Bell's possible Toryism does not sit comfortably with his seemingly democratic take on medicine and surgery. If being the son of an impoverished and marginalized clergyman made John Bell something of an outsider, then James Gregory was the quintessential insider. He was born in 1753 to John Gregory, physician and sometime lecturer in philosophy at King's College, Aberdeen. His father was appointed Professor of the Practice of Physic at Edinburgh in 1766, becoming celebrated for both his medical and moral writings.4848 Paul Lawrence, Gregory [Gregorie], John (1724–1733), ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/11457> [accessed 14 Oct. 2018]. James Gregory had moved with his father to Edinburgh in 1764, aged eleven, and initially studied for a degree in the arts. After a brief stint at Christ Church, Oxford, he returned to Edinburgh in 1767 to study medicine. During the course of his studies his father died and James took up his post as a temporary professor. He graduated MD in 1774 and, after two years spent studying on the Continent, returned to Edinburgh once more to take up the now vacant post of Professor of the Institutes of Medicine.4949 Lawrence, ‘Gregory, James’. He was a mere twenty-three years old, a shining example of the nepotism for which Scottish universities, and the Edinburgh medical school in particular, were infamous.5050 Roger L. Emerson, Academic Patronage in the Scottish Enlightenment: Glasgow, Edinburgh and St Andrews Universities (Edinburgh, 2008). It was perhaps the entitlement and security which came from such privileged connections that gave Gregory the confidence to engage in as many feuds as he did. In 1798 he was elected President of the Royal College of Physicians, a post which gave him an automatic seat on the governing council of the Royal Infirmary. By this time the issue of surgical attendance at the Infirmary had still not been resolved. In addition to four salaried posts, created in 1769, the surgeons attended by rotation for a period not normally exceeding two months. However, their subordinate status was evident in the fact they were not allowed to undertake any operation ‘of importance’ without the permission of the physicians-in-ordinary and, as a result, many of the more senior surgeons declined to attend.5151 Risse, Hospital Life, pp. 64–5. In an ostensible desire to regularize the system, the year 1800 saw a number of authors propose significant changes to the covenant of 1738. Two of these men, Benjamin Bell and John Thomson, were, as we have seen, opponents of John Bell.5252 Benjamin Bell, Observations on the Mode of Attendance of the Surgeons of Edinburgh on the Royal Infirmary (Edinburgh, 1800); John Thomson, Outline of a Plan for the Regulation of the Surgical Department of the Royal Infirmary (Edinburgh, 1800). However, it was Gregory, a man who had been on relatively cordial terms with Bell up to this point, whose intervention would initiate a war of words.5353 Gregory, Additional Memorial, p. 32. It implies, that, of the Surgeons in Edinburgh, some may be more and others less skilful. This, I presume, many people would very readily believe without the evidence, either of a ghost or of a Royal Charter . . . it is generally known to be the case with the individuals of many different professions; very remarkably among lawyers and wig-makers, shoemakers and tailors, milliners, cooks, fiddlers, dancing-masters, postilions, and physicians.5555 Ibid., p. 3. Several tropes that would become recurrent themes of Gregory's argument are worth noting here: firstly, the reference to ‘a ghost’, an allusion to the fatal consequences of surgical incompetence; secondly, the rhetorically expedient lumping together of high-status ‘professions’, such as law, with lower status trades such as cookery; and thirdly, the disingenuousness of including physicians in this list. After all, the Charter granted the right to attend the Infirmary to all members of the Royal College of Physicians, not ‘some of the most skilful’. That proviso was reserved for surgeons. This invidious distinction between individual competence and collective authority is essential for understanding both Gregory's argument and the reaction to it. While he repeatedly claimed that the ‘merits or demerits of any individual’ were ‘unnecessary for the object which I have in view’, his refusal to single out individuals meant that his criticisms necessarily fell upon the surgeons as a body. In particular, they fell upon the mostly junior members of the College of Surgeons who, unlike many of their senior brethren, ‘rigorously avail[ed] themselves’ of their right of attendance at the Infirmary. The practice of surgery in the Infirmary was, Gregory claimed, ‘entirely in the hands of the youngest and most inexperienced surgeons’.5656 Ibid., pp. 25, 16, 18. Despite his refusal to name names, Gregory peppered his text with sensational examples of surgical incompetence, particularly in regard to manual dexterity, a quality which, he claimed, could only be gained by experience.5757 Ibid., p. 43. In perhaps the most notable instance, he referred to a surgeon ‘whose hand shook so much’ that ‘he should scarce have undertaken to apply a plaster or a bandage’, yet who regularly performed operations at the Infirmary, including a delicate operation on" @default.
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W2905379370 title "Surgery, Identity and Embodied Emotion: John Bell, James Gregory and the Edinburgh ‘Medical War’" @default.
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