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Science and Scottish University Reform: Edinburgh in 1826

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 January 2009

J. B. Morrell
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Extract

In the late eighteenth century, which was for Scotland in many ways an ‘Age of Improvement’, the University of Edinburgh enjoyed a golden age. Under the enlightened principalship of the Reverend William Robertson, the University offered wide, flexible, and mainly secular courses of study which were taught by conspicuously able professors. If we restrict ourselves to scientific chairs, a roll-call of their occupants is distinctly impressive: John Robison (natural philosophy, 1774–1805); John Playfair (mathematics, 1785–1805); John Walker (natural history, 1779–1804); Daniel Rutherford (botany, 1786–1819); James Gregory (theory of medicine, 1776–89); William Cullen (practice of medicine, 1773–90); Alexander Monro secundus (anatomy, 1758–98); and their doyen Joseph Black (chemistry and medicine, 1766–99), ‘so pale, so gentle, so elegant, and so illustrious’. The scientific eminence of the University at that time is, of course, widely acknowledged.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 6 , Issue 1 , June 1972 , pp. 39 - 56
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 1972

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References

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72 Hope apparently gave 22 lectures in all. His introductory lecture was described as ‘more amusing than instructive—he showed very brilliant experiments but did not explain them at all’ by Helen Mackenzie, wife of Lord Joshua Henry Mackenzie, in the note for 15 February 1826 in her diary, National Library of Scotland, MS. 6374, f. 2.

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