Sir Charles Bell and the Bridgewater Treatises / by Benjamin Spector.

  • Spector, Benjamin, 1893-1976
Date:
1942
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Sir Charles Bell and the Bridgewater Treatises / by Benjamin Spector. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    lines of intellectual endeavors; namely, his power in rendering intel- ligible the workings of the human body and his equally strong interest in the religious aspect of natural philosophy. Sir Charles Bell was born in 1774. He was the son of a clergyman. After informal pre- liminary studies he attended the University of Edinburgh for two years, and then began the study of anatomy as an apprentice to his brother, John Bell, a distinguished anatomist and surgeon. Already in these early days he exhibited strong mechanical and artistic abilities in the dissecting room and at the operating table, and at the age of 25 he became a fellow of the Royal Society in Edinburgh. Beginning with the year 1798 he published from time to time the results of his physiological and clinical studies. In the course of time he took over the direction of the Hunterian School of Medicine in Windmill Street, then a world center for medical education. Today, all medical students know of Sir Charles Bell under the Eponyms of Bell’s Law of the Structural and Functional Discreteness of the Motor and Sensory nerves; the External Respiratory nerve of Bell; and the familiar lesion of the facial nerve known as Bell’s Palsy.° Let us recall that Charles Bell was born in the latter part of the Eighteenth century when things were relatively stable and tranquil. The mental outlook of this century may perhaps be best described by the word “ Unhistorical.”” The times had a deistic flavor and the philosophy of hedonism prevailed.*® It was the pre-Darwinian period emphasized so well by Bell himself in a passage in “ The Hand” in which he says that “ everything declares the Diversity of Species to have its origin in distinct creations . . .”’ “ In fact, whatever science there was played a significant part in having Nature Divinized, for was it not science itself which everywhere revealed Order, Law and Design! ’’ Then, too, the intellectual atmosphere was colored by the theological point of view of such natural philosophers as Locke, Grew, Ray and Linnaeus. That Bell came under the influence of some of these factors is evidenced in the following two letters. For instance, his natural piety is indicated under date of November ® Medical Classics, Vol. 1, 1936-37, p. 81, Ed. E. C. Kelly. 7° Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics. Ed. J. Hastings, Vol. XII, pp. 315-232, 1922. 11 Charles Bell, The Hand, Its Mechanism and Vital Endowments, Envincing Design, Seventh Edition. Revised by Alexander Shaw, Lond., 1865, p. 113.
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