Notice of some of the leading events in the life of the late Dr. John Thomson, formerly professor of surgery to the Royal College of Surgeons, and of Military Surgery in the University of Edinburgh, and more recently professor of general pathology in the University.

Date:
1847
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Notice of some of the leading events in the life of the late Dr. John Thomson, formerly professor of surgery to the Royal College of Surgeons, and of Military Surgery in the University of Edinburgh, and more recently professor of general pathology in the University. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

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    Edinburgh to renew or complete their studies, the number of medical students was great and annually increasing. The lec- ture-room was crowded daily to its greatest capacity. There must have been at least 250 or 280 auditors, and of these about 50 or 60 were men who had been in the service of the country for ten or fifteen years. During lecture every one listened with the deepest attention and interest, eager to carry away every word, of the discourse, which was always animated and often eloquent. The impression it produced was evinced by the conversations and discussions that ensued after lecture. The army and navy surgeons especially used almost invariably to carry on a keen discussion on the merits of the various doctrines propounded in the lecture; and these discussions were often continued or revived in the Medical Society, or in the clinical wards of the Royal Infirmary. The pro- per treatment of gunshot wounds, the comparative advantages of primary and secondary amputation, the causes of traumatic tetanus, tramautic gangrene, and hospital gangrene, all formed points on which every individual present was induced to state his opinions, and the results of what he had himself seen and done. These dis- cussions among the army and navy surgeons were often of great use to the mere student, by making him think, read, and inquire, and thereby leading him to increase his knowledge, and render it pre- cise ; and all this intellectual exertion was unquestionably to be ascribed to the influence of the surgical lectures of Dr Thomson. But the course of lectures delivered by Dr Thomson was valu- able, not simply as a body of chirurgical instruction. From the method of arrangement which he adopted, and the subjecis of which he treated, it followed that much information on medical pathology was communicated. Hence not only were his lectures on inflammation equally useful to the physician as to the sur- geon, but his lectures on cutaneous diseases, on injuries of the head, on wounds of the chest, on hernia, and on syphilis, led him to communicate a large amount of information of the utmost value and interest to the physician. Thus in his lectures on cutaneous diseases, besides taking a full review of the more chronic or local affections of the skin, he considered carefully the history and pathology of the acute erup- tions;—measles, scarlet-fever, small-pox, and chicken-pox, and the important subjects of vaccination and the modified forms of small-pox. His lectures on cutaneous diseases, indeed, gave the only accurate view of the subject at that time taught, and first brought before students the distinctions of Willan and Bateman. In his lectures on injuries of the head, he considered carefully the alleged distinctions between the symptoms of concussion and compression, the subject of cerebral inflammation, and of apoplec- tic and epileptic symptoms, and he was among the first in this