Essays on David Hume, Medical Men and the Scottish Enlightenment

'Industry, Knowledge and Humanity'

Roger L. Emerson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317141631
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Scottish Enlightenment was a period of intellectual and scientific progress, in a country previously considered to be marginal to the European intellectual scene. Yet the enlightenment was not about politeness or civic humanism, but something more basic - the making of an improved society which could compete in every way in a rapidly changing world. David Hume, writing in 1752, commented that 'industry, knowledge and humanity are linked together by an indissoluble chain'. Collectively this volume of essays embraces many of the topics which Hume included under 'industry, knowledge and humanity': from the European Enlightenment and the Scots relation to it, to Scottish social history and its relation to religion, science and medicine. Overarching themes of what it meant to be enlightened in the eighteenth century are considered alongside more specific studies of notable figures of the period, such as Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Argyll, and David Hume, and the training and number of Scottish medical students. Together, the volume provides an opportunity to step back and reconsider the Scottish Enlightenment in its broader context and to consider what new directions this field of study might take.

Chapter 1
The World in which the Scottish Enlightenment Took Shape

Scots in the World

It sometimes helps to look at the world from the perspectives of those living in the eighteenth century. If you were a Scot in the very north of the country or in Aberdeen, your closest foreign neighbors were the equally poor and sometimes more backward Norwegians and Danes. The sailing times from Aberdeen to prosperous Holland were less than to London. Paris was often as close as the English capital. If one went down the coast to Edinburgh, the time to Holland would be cut a bit but London was still about as far away. From the west of Scotland it made sense to send south Lanarkshire lead pigs bound for Holland to Leith because the sailing times from the west were too great. Glasgow was closer to France than to the Netherlands. It looked west to Ireland and to America. Virginia tobacco made a shorter and safer trip if landed in Glasgow than if it went to a merchant in London. Glasgow was as close to the French market as it was to London. Scots certainly went to England but for many their closest ties in 1700 were to the continent. That was particularly true of the professional classes who were often educated abroad.

Where Scots went in the period before 1700 depended partly on the cost of travel, what they sought and where there were opportunities. Seventeenth-century Scots tended to go for education to the closest and least expensive Calvinist colleges. For employment they ranged farther. In both cases they preferred to sail. It cost less to sail than to travel by land. Any place to which one traveled by land was likely to take longer to reach than if one could sail to it. Scots had to leave their country in numbers because Scotland was too poor to educate or support all of its people. Many traveled.

There are no wholly convincing figures available for the numbers who left Scotland in the seventeenth century but they were numerous and came from all social ranks.¹ The Scottish mercenary had long been a figure in continental wars. In the Thirty Years War there were said to be as many as 40,000 Scottish soldiers serving in the armies of the Kings of France, Sweden, Denmark, the Holy Roman Emperor and the minor states caught up in the conflict.² It is estimated that during the century about 60,000 men went as mercenaries to Europe of whom more that 3,500 were officers fighting in the Scandinavian and Baltic states.³ Scots sometimes went in whole units. Their leaders were often men of culture interested in more than fighting.

Col. Robert Monro (c.1590s–c.1675) served the Danish King and then the Swedish King, Gustavus Adolphus, before returning to serve in the Covenanting army and the anti-royalist army in England and Ireland. He was but one of many who tried to make their fortunes in mercenary service.⁴ Literate, clever and somewhat unscrupulous, he left a classic account of soldiering in the period. More interesting was Monro’s near age-mate, Col. Sir Robert Moray (?–1673). After fighting on the Royalist side in the English Civil Wars, Moray spent a considerable time as a mercenary in France where he met many of the leading intellectual figures in Paris. He returned to Britain with a head full of philosophical ideas and a good deal of knowledge about natural history, chemistry and some of the practical arts. He became a founder and early President of the Royal Society of London. For some years in the 1660s, he was an important figure in the government of Scotland where he was involved with early speculative masonry.⁵ Mercenaries like him were transmitters of new philosophical and scientific ideas.

The flood of mercenaries continued into the eighteenth century. Exiled Jacobites, adventurers like General Patrick Gordon of Auchleuchries (he captured Azov for Peter the Great in 1696) and men fighting in the Scottish regiments of the French and other armies were still on the continent in considerable numbers.⁶ They found successors after 1715, 1745 and whenever wars brought British and foreign recruiters to Scotland as they usually did. Many Scots in the Dutch Brigade effectively made careers in Europe until the French Revolution.⁷ Those men included many genteel and educated men. A great many of them did not return to Scotland but those who did came with intellectual baggage.

Where there were Scottish soldiers, there were often Scottish medical men serving in their regiments. By c.1700 those trained in and around Edinburgh were regularly going out to gain experience by practicing in the armies, navies and other services of foreign powers. Most were trained as surgeon-apothecaries and not as physicians or simple surgeons. Most were undistinguished but not all of the medics so trained were of that sort. James Sutherland, the Edinburgh University professor of botany, tells us that in 1700 many of his students served in foreign places where some distinguished themselves.⁸ Among those with whom he maintained contact were James Fraser, who ranged as far as present day Indonesia,⁹ the Douglass (or Douglas) brothers—Walter, James, John and William, who went to the West Indies, London and Boston, and Cadwallader Colden, later a Lieutenant Governor of New York, a botanist and would be physicist.¹⁰ About the time Colden studied with Sutherland so did Robert Erskine.¹¹ Peter the Great hired him as a physician. Such men remained in contact with Scots. Sutherland received plants and seeds from some of them. Two of the Douglass brothers, John and James, taught many Scots medics in London. William Douglass was the most prominent physician in Boston, Massachusetts, from where he carried on a correspondence with British intellectuals. Colden sent botanical specimens and theories about physics to the Edinburgh Philosophical Society in the 1750s. Erskine, from a Jacobite family, was said to have been involved with plots against the British government. He acquired for the Russians the valuable library of Edinburgh’s Dr Archibald Pitcairne. Erskine’s own library was sold to the Russian state he had so long served. He remained in touch with his family until the end of his life and helped other Scots to posts in Russia. By the end of the eighteenth century there were many Scottish medics in Russia.¹² Such ties made Edinburgh a significant clearing house for information about natural history, science and medicine. Edinburgh even became a place to educate Russians and a place for Princess Dashkova to live in genteel exile in the 1770s. Such connections made it easier for the Russians to recruit architects, artisans, and teachers in Scotland which they did throughout the eighteenth century.¹³ What was true of them was to a lesser degree true of the other states in which Scots mercenaries served.

If Scots soldiers and medical men were common figures in Europe c.1700 so too were Scottish merchants. By 1700, Scottish trade was not flourishing but what there was ranged widely. Some was to the Baltic and Eastern Europe where Scots had been present throughout the seventeenth century. Their descendants were still occasionally coming to Scottish universities in the eighteenth century and Scots were still solicited for contributions to the churches and communities from which those boys came. Small Scottish ships also made it to the Mediterranean and others before 1707 were already smuggling to the English colonies in America and to the West Indies. Indeed, by 1700, there had been many contacts with America. Efforts had been made to establish Scottish colonies in present day maritime Canada, South Carolina, New Jersey and the Isthmus of Panama.¹⁴ Indian artifacts from Carolina came to the Glasgow area with Principal William Dunlop who had emigrated to Carolina in the 1680s.¹⁵ From Panama similar materials had been sent in the 1690s by members of the expeditions of the unfortunate Darien Company. The tobacco trade had been established even before it was made legal by the Union with England in 1707. It made possible the later successes of merchants like the Alexanders of Edinburgh.¹⁶ Not so different from them were the merchant and banking families of Oswald, Coutts, Stewart and Fairholm. Their fortunes were based on the import of wines, grain, and other goods and the export of linens and fish and dealing in sugar and slaves. The Fairholms in the 1750s could issue letters of credit honored from southern Italy to Riga, from Spain to Vienna.

Large numbers of Scots studied abroad,¹⁷ some taught there¹⁸ and many published books there.¹⁹ That was largely owing to the fact that Scots could study neither medicine nor law in a complete way in any of their country’s universities until c.1726. In the early seventeenth century, Scots were not uncommon in the colleges rimming the Baltic but that ended as the Thirty Years War progressed.²⁰ They then went more often to France until the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). After that they streamed into the Protestant Dutch universities where they were to be found especially after the 1640s. Just as they lacked medical schools, the Scots had few presses and a small market for books. Many they wrote were printed abroad.

Other Scots were in Europe because they had been exiled or because they were on a grand tour which surprisingly many could afford to take by the mid-seventeenth century.²¹ It is startling to read in the register of visitors to Padua c.1660–1720 the names of about 75 Scots, 7 per cent of the English speakers listed there.²² That is a large number given the rather hard times Scots were experiencing and the fact that this was a trip into Catholic country albeit in Venetian territory. Many were young aristocrats on the grand tour with their tutors. Some must have been exiles. Others were medical men and still more seem to have been simple gentleman tourists. It has even been estimated that about one in six Scottish males c.1700 had been out of the country at some point usually as a mercenary, sailor, trader or worker. Most had not gone to England.

It is useful to remember that Scots had many relations with Ireland. Some had relatives there from earlier settlements. Irish students attended Glasgow University in large numbers. In the eighteenth century the Irish also offered models of economic development bodies such as the Dublin Society for the Improvement of Husbandry, Agriculture and Other Useful Arts (1731) and they encouraged in Scotland debates about the nature of Presbyterianism and politics.²³ Not all the Irish were wild.

Finally, many Scots went south to England and, after 1707, flooded into the Empire which they shared with the English.²⁴ England was Scotland’s principal market, and after 1707, was a place of employment and always an example of a more affluent and polite society having higher standards in literature and more accomplished intellectuals. The great English contributions to the Scottish Enlightenment were not just toleration, Whiggery, Locke’s philosophy and Newtonism, but the fear which this powerful and successful society infused in Scots. Scots wanted to improve, to be as good as the English, but they also wanted their cultural independence. The English were admired and, at the same time, resented by most of those who created the Scottish Enlightenment. The fact that Scots lived in tense proximity to the English, who shamed them, but whom they would emulate, was important in virtually every area of Scottish life and thought. Living in a less well-endowed society, Scots had to struggle harder to place themselves on a par with the ‘South Britons’.

But, the Scottish Enlightenment was not, as Roy Porter recently argued, part and parcel of an English one.²⁵ Scots did not send many of their boys to study in England. Enrollments in the English public schools were largely of aristocratic boys whose families lived in England at least part of the time. Their attendance was meant to wear away accents so they might make good careers in politics. Few attended Oxbridge because it did not give useful degrees in medicine or in much else save divinity, and, after the mid-century, in classics and maths at Cambridge. For young men who had to make their ways in the world, the Scottish universities or those abroad were better. Going to them made Scots different and gave them perspectives on their society which few if any Englishmen encouraged. The Scottish Enlightenment had its own concerns and idiosyncratic values and went its own way. Given the exposure of all kinds of Scots to foreign areas, one should not see Scotland as an isolated country unaware of what was a-doing elsewhere. That was not the case. Moreover, Scottish contacts were more with the continent than with England.

What Did Scots Make of the Foreigners?

What Scots made of their exposures to foreign people and places is not always easy to determine but the evidence shows them responding to various intellectual currents. Educated Scots had generally followed the continental religious debates of the seventeenth century. A few throughout the period had been aware of philosophical and scientific developments. Galileo was defended at Padua in 1609 by a Dundee Scot named John Wedderburn. The latter ended up teaching in Poland. His brother, James, became a tutor to the children of Isaac Casuabon in England. Their contempora...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The World in which the Scottish Enlightenment Took Shape
• 2 Archibald Campbell, 3rd Duke of Argyll (1682–1761): Patronage and the Creation of the Scottish Enlightenment
• 3 How Many Scots Were Enlightened?
• 4 What Did Eighteenth-Century Scottish Students Read?
• 5 ‘Our Excellent and Never To Be Forgotten Friend:’ David Hume (26 April 1711–25 August 1776)
• 6 Hume’s Intellectual Development: Part II
• 7 Hume’s Histories
• 8 A Note on Hume and Political Economy
• 9 Numbering the Medics
• 10 What is to be Done About the Scottish Enlightenment?
• Select Bibliography
• Indices