Thomas Trotter, M. D / by Sir Humphry Rolleston.

  • Humphry Rolleston
Date:
[1919?]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Thomas Trotter, M. D / by Sir Humphry Rolleston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    became a member of our profession was not a success in practice, being regarded by the students of St, George’s Hospital as “ a great philosopher but a bad physician.” In discussing the relation between ability and success, he makes the rather remarkable statement that “ however inadequate the possession of superior talents alone may be to ensure the confidence of the public, it must be a mistaken opinion, although it has been asserted by persons of no ordinary observation, that a man of great abilities is morally incapable of being a good physician.”1 Trotter’s Attitude to Beane and Lind. These remarks are by way of introducing and perhaps justifying the choice o Thomas Trotter, Physician to the Fleet, a would-be reformer of the Medica1 Department of the Navy, and poetaster, as the subject of this short contribution* * Though included in the Dictionary of National Biography he is practically forgotten, and it is only too obvious from his writings that he was not satisfied with his lot ; thus more than once he rather querulously complains of the opposi¬ tion and hostility offered to his measures of reform in the Navy. He was over¬ shadowed by his senior contemporary, Sir Gilbert Blane, whom in company with the elder Lind he not infrequently criticized and more rarely praised. Blane attained a lasting position of authority in the naval medical world after less than four years’ (1779-1783) service afloat, thereby gaining a pension of ten shillings a day, subsequently raised in 1802, on the conclusion of his work on the Board of the Sick and Hurt, to £1 a day, and spent the rest of his life in London engaged in a lucrative practice and moving in the highest medical circles of the day. Though Trotter often refers directly or indirectly to Blane, he does not appear to have obtained any public recognition in return; and moreover, when he retired in 1802 his pension (£200) was much less than that awarded to his elder Scottish colleague, although they began their sea service about the same time : Blane in the first instance (1779) as private physician to Sir George Rodney, who very shortly afterwards appointed him official Physician to the Fleet, and Trotter in 1778 as Surgeon’s Mate, a start prophetic of their future positions. It is perhaps only extremely human of Trotter that he did not love his more successful colleague. Thus Trotter attacked Blane indirectly in his letter to Lord St. Vincent, containing among his “ proposals for meliorating the establishment of medical officers” the recommendation that no surgeon should be promoted to the rank of physician under five years’ service, and that their degrees should be obtained in a regular manner from the universities where they have studied the usual number of terms.2 In his list of three physicians who have fulfilled the last condition his own name appears, but not that of Blane, and he adds a note that all the others, including all the Commissioners of Sick and Hurt (Blane was a member at this date, 1801) have obtained their M.D. degrees by proxy elsewhere. Blane, it may he noted, was made Physician to the Fleet after a few months’ service, and took his M.D. degree at Glasgow after being educated at Edinburgh. Trotter also inveighed against naval medical officers engaging in private practice, then allowed but forbidden the next year, and evidently has an eye on Blane in his dictum that “nothing can be more indecent than a member of a public board traversing the Metropolis in the private practice of his profession. ... It appears to me that the man who decoys a Commissioner of the Sick and Hurt, a Physician of the Fleet or Naval Hospital, to give advice for a guinea, is guilty of something that approaches near bribery and liable to prosecution.” These pronouncements were hardly likely to curry favour with the powers of the Commissioners of the f 1 Young, T.: Preliminary Essay on the Study of Physic,” p. 2, 1813.
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