On the history of pathology in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the functions of the Pathological Department / by John H. Teacher.

  • Teacher, John H. (John Hammond), 1869-1930.
Date:
[1912]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: On the history of pathology in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary and the functions of the Pathological Department / by John H. Teacher. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    helped hira to hold on until he began to succeed in practice. Sam Moore made no record in the minute-book, and he left behind him nothing of permanent value in the shape of medical writings ; but his career was one of the most remark- able in the medical history of Glasgow. Coats has described him as a strong, clever, honest, warm-hearted man of the world, of clear insight and of rapid decision. The influence of his powerful personality and intellect penetrated to every department of professional life in Glasgow, and was felt over an area of human life the full extent of which is difficult to gauge. In 1870 he was succeeded by the late Professor Coats, whom we may describe as the first professional pathologist in Glasgow. Coats acted as Lister's house surgeon in 1868, the year of the inception of the antiseptic system, and in the following year went to Germany and worked under the great experimental pathologist, Ludwig. On his return to Glasgow he became pathologist to the Royal Infirmary, and at the same time practised in diseases of the throat and as a consulting physician. In my time as a student he still held wards in the Western Infirmary, giving them up only in 1892. During the winter of 1870-71 Dr. Coats reorganised and catalogued the museum, now grown to 1,100 specimens, and prepared and delivered the first systematic course of lectures on pathology. In 1875 he was transferred to the Western Infirmary, where, first as pathologist to the infirmary, then from 1890 as University lecturer, and after 1894 as professor, he was the master in pathology in Glasgow. All the pathologists to the Royal Infirmary, with the exception of Dr. Workman, have been pupils of Coats. We are indebted to him for the arrangement by which the professors of pathology in the University are ex officio pathologists to the Western and Royal infirmaries respectively. Some one has said that a surgeon without wards is like a gardener without a garden, and a pathologist without his hospital is in much the same position. Coats's teaching, in the first place, consisted of lectures on •systematic pathology and demonstrations of morbid anatomy. About 1877 Dr. Newman, then his assistant in the Western Infirmary, brought to him Rutherford's freezing microtome, which revolutionised the teaching of histology, both normal and morbid, by making it possible to supply a class, however numerous, with a series of good microscopic specimens. Coats was succeeded by David Foulis, a bold and skilful