John Chalmers (ed.), Andrew Duncan Senior: Physician of the Enlightenment (Edinburgh: National Museums Scotland, 2010), pp. xvi + 253, £14.99, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-905267-30-9.

Abstract

In 1750, Mr John Amyat, the King’s Chemist, visited Edinburgh. He is said to have remarked to Robert Burns’ publisher, William Creech, ‘Here I stand at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius by the hand’. The purpose of John Chalmers’ new book might be summed up as the wish to ensure the inclusion of Andrew Duncan Senior in any such roll call of the Scottish Enlightenment. He has been successful in that task. Professor of the Institutes of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh for thirty years, Andrew Duncan was certainly a prolific author on medical matters (a full list of his writings comprises a valuable appendix to the book). However, Chalmers argues that Duncan should be remembered as much for the manner in which he expressed the values of the Enlightenment in practical initiatives for the benefit of society as for more narrowly intellectual endeavours. There were certainly plenty of the former – Duncan played a major role in the founding of Edinburgh’s first Public Dispensary, its Lunatic Asylum (now the Royal Edinburgh Hospital), and the University’s chair of Medical Police and Jurisprudence. He was the founding editor of what was arguably the first successful English language medical periodical, Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, and the principal editor of the Edinburgh New Dispensatory (a major pharmacopoeia) from 1789 to 1801. Duncan also conspicuously displayed the distinctive sociability of the eighteenth-century Scottish intellectual: he personally founded the Aesculapian Club and the Harveian Society – remaining the society’s secretary for forty-six years – was a founding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Medico-Chirurgical Society, as well as serving as President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (twice) and the Royal Medical Society (six times). Nor were his activities confined to medicine – he began what became the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society, as well as bathing and gymnastic clubs. An enthusiastic advocate of the health-giving properties of golf, good wine and good fellowship, he also boasted of his long membership of Beggar’s Benison – readers not familiar with this remarkable association are referred to David Stevenson’s revealing study, The Beggar’s Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland (East Lothian: Tuckwell, 2001). Duncan fancied himself as a poet and a wit. To mark the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, he composed a cleverly sanitised version of the Beggar’s Benison bawdy motto: ‘Long may you live in harmony and ease / And never want, or purse, or power to please.’ A most appropriate toast to a spendthrift and licentious monarch. All of these various activities, and many more, are ably documented in Chalmers’ book. Incidentally, although Chalmers is modestly described as the book’s editor, of fifteen chapters, he is sole author of eleven and the joint author of two. Notable among the other contributions are Martin Kaufman’s essay on the work of the Public Dispensary, and James Gray’s chapter on Duncan’s medical societies. But Chalmers is to be congratulated on clearly having been as much the driving force behind the production of this volume as Duncan was in any of the initiatives he was involved in. The result has been a readable and informative volume, which sorts out many of the details of Duncan’s biography (warts and all, Duncan was vain and could be grasping and disputatious). It will be an indispensable aid to further research, not only on Andrew Duncan Senior, but also on his equally significant and almost equally industrious son, Andrew Duncan Junior.