Book Review
The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation
Paul Wood, ed. The Scottish Enlightenment: Essays in Reinterpretation. Rochester Studies in Philosophy, no. 1. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 2000. xi + 399 pp. Ill. $75.00 (1-580-46065-8).
Researches into science and medicine in the Scottish Enlightenment were an area of heightened activity in the 1970s and early 1980s. This was particularly true of studies of Edinburgh, where the institutional bases and broader cultural context of these disciplines were explored in scholarly fashion, perhaps for the first time. Since then things have been slightly quieter on the science and medicine front, but in other areas much work has been done. Paul Wood thinks it is time for reinterpretation, and on the evidence of these essays his judgment is correct. Two major assumptions have dominated Scottish Enlightenment scholarship since the early nineteenth century, both of which, as Wood shows in the splendid first essay, were the creation of the philosopher Dugald Stewart. The first was explicit and was that the Scottish Enlightenment (although Stewart did not know the term) was roughly to be equated with moral philosophy in the broadest sense: the study of mind and its progress through history. The second was implicit, and understandably followed from the first: that the Scottish Enlightenment for all intents and purposes happened in Edinburgh. Scholars followed these tramlines for 150 years before the first challenges appeared. All these essays either test these assumptions or self-consciously defend either or both of them.
It is something of a caricature to say that John Robertson's subtle and historiographically informative essay "The Scottish Contribution to the Enlightenment" adopts the latter position, but he does maintain that "the investigation into the progress of society . . . remains at the center of the Scottish contribution to the Enlightenment" (p. 42). Robertson's paper is an invaluable guide to another [End Page 145] debate: how far was Scottish Enlightenment philosophy particular to Scotland, and how far did it partake of a wider European and North American debate? A number of the essays take on traditional themes and subjects, such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, religion, Lord Kames, and Thomas Reid. All these chapters conform to the overall high standard of the volume. The essay by Charles W. J. Withers, "Toward a Historical Geography of Enlightenment in Scotland," is complex and informative. It is complex in that it both deals with ideas of geography in the Enlightenment and, directing attention away from Edinburgh, surveys seats of Enlightenment practices in Scotland as a whole; in both it is eminently successful.
Four chapters deal more directly with science and medicine, although many of the others make reference to them. Richard Sher's essay on the book trade particularly in relation to science and medicine challenges traditional interpretations of the Enlightenment in numerous ways. If the Enlightenment was once pure mind, as evidenced in the printed book, in Sher's chapter it is very much material. Authors, he shows, did not have great thoughts that were teleported to the page; out there were publishers and printers, and not just in Edinburgh, commissioning and cajoling writers to produce for an audience. This is a major reinterpretation based on a large bibliography and prosopography. The implication that John Hunter was university-educated, however, would be almost incorrect: he had only the briefest of flirtations with St. Mary's Hall, Oxford, in 1755 (p. 128).
Anita Guerrini, whose book on George Cheyne has recently appeared, has a chapter on another facet of the Scottish Enlightenment: its human exports. Her study of Alexander Stuart, an early-eighteenth-century Scottish physician making his way in London, is a valuable addition to our understanding of medical patronage. Perhaps the most thoroughly medical-historical chapter in the book is Fiona Macdonald's account of the Glasgow Town's Hospital. This excellent study of a poorhouse, based on detailed examination of patient records, is an important contribution to the idea of Enlightenment as practice, and a counterweight to Enlightenment as Edinburgh.
Finally, John Wright's chapter is a learned study of the ideas of Robert Whytt and others on the immaterial basis of life. I find myself (and William Cullen) badly misrepresented in this chapter, but this is not the place to pursue much of this save to say that I think Cullen was endeavoring to develop a model of the body to escape a Cartesian framework and used Robert Whytt's ideas to do this. Wright says I am "totally misleading" (p. 190) about Cullen's use of Whytt, but he gives us no account of what he considers Cullen's physiological views to be except to say that Cullen claimed that vital and involuntary motions "can occur purely mechanically" (p. 190). This, however, is not enough: Cullen simply rejected a Cartesian model of the body as a machine. Wright then gives an extended account of Cullen's view of mind which I do not dispute.
All in all this is a rich volume. It is generally historiographically
sophisticated and generous. Important authors who are not here, such as
Roger Emerson and Nicholas Phillipson, are frequently acknowledged. This
is a mandatory starting
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point for anyone embarking on Scottish Enlightenment studies, and old
hands eschew it at their peril.
Christopher Lawrence
Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at
University College London
