Professorial correspondence [of R. Christison & J.Y. Simpson] relative to the chair of General Pathology / reprinted ... from the public journals of Edinburgh.

  • Christison, Robert, Sir, 1797-1882
Date:
1841
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Professorial correspondence [of R. Christison & J.Y. Simpson] relative to the chair of General Pathology / reprinted ... from the public journals of Edinburgh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    6 Universities of Austria, Holland, Bavaria, and in the two French Univer¬ sities of Paris and Strasbourg. There and elsewhere Professorships and Lectureships have been established either upon General Pathology as a whole, or even, as in many cases, separate Lectureships on the separate subdivision of it. To understand this last statement, allow me to mention, that General Pathology, as taught by Dr Thomson, comprised, as four of its principal subdivisions or departments— 1. Pathogeny; or the general doctrines of the nature, differences, and seats of diseases. 2. Etiology ; Hygiene ; or the general doctrines of their exciting causes. 3. Semeiotics ; or the general doctrines of symptoms ; and 4. Morbid Anatomy; or the organic causes, course, and effects, as ascer¬ tained by dissection. Now, in some continental Universities there are separate courses of lec¬ tures delivered on each of these four departments; while by the opponents to the Chair here, it lias been argued that the four taken and taught together (as was done by Dr Thomson in his lectures), were not sufficient to make one proper course, and that the one course at present in existence should be abolished ! In other continental schools, the two first departments of Gene¬ ral Pathology, or the first and third, are taught together, making thus three Courses or three Professorships, of what in our University constitutes the presently debated one Professorship. The subject is in this last way divided in the University of Paris into three separate Chairs, viz.:—1. Those of General Pathology, held by Andral; 2. Morbid, or Pathological Anatomy, held by Cruveilhier; and, 3. Hygiene, or Etiology, held by Royer- Collard. In other Universities, again, the subject is comprised in two distinct courses. Tlius, in the sixteen Courses of Medical Instruction, laid down by the University of London, we have “ General Pathology and Pathological Anatomy,” and “ Hygiene,” or Etiology, as two separate courses. In University-College, London, there has existed for.several years a Professorship of Morbid Anatomy. The tickets of Dr Carsewell, who till lately held that Professorship, have, in more than one instance, been received by our Medical Faculty here as equivalent to the tickets of our Professor of General Pathology. Further, separate and distinct lec¬ tureships on Morbid Anatomy, similar to Dr Carsewell’s—and hence, I beg you to recollect, similar to what has been officially recognised in some cases by my medical Colleagues in our University as equivalent to our General Pathology—have lately been established in several of the smaller medical schools in London, as in those connected with the hospitals of St. Bartholomew’s, St. Thomas’, Charing-Cross, and perhaps others with which I am unacquainted. To sum up this part of the question—no man is now able to overtake all the subjects formerly allotted to the Professor of the Institutes ; and one of two things must follow, viz., either the Course must be kept divided as at present between two Professorships ; or the Pathology, which has been taught as a separate department of the Institutes for a hundred years back, and as a separate Chair for the last ten years, must be abolished, and that at a time when the increased and increasing importance of the subject is shewn by lectureships on it, or on one or more of its individual branches, springing up everywhere over the Continent, and in the public, nay, even in the private medical schools of London. Is this a fit time for the University of Edinburgh—the first medical school in Europe, as it has been termed—to take such a retrograde step as would sink it in this branch of science below some of the smallest hospital schools of the metropolis. The Chair may possibly, in the meantime (in consequence of the extraor¬ dinary efforts used and using against it) bo repressed and abolished ; but it requires no sagacity to predict, that ere long it must inevitably come to be re-established, unless indeed, by the same edict, the pursuit and extension of Medical and Pathological knowledge over the world could be repressed and abolished also, and all that has been done and gained and written on