‘The chearful haunts’: John Armstrong (1709–1779),physician,poet,satirist and leveller of medical knowledge

Abstract

John Armstrong, the first honours graduate of the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine, was famous in his day for a lengthy didactic poem entitled The Art of Preserving Health (1744). He is now obscure except to scholars specializing in the 18th century and, when discussed at all, often dismissed as a failed physician who wrote mediocre poetry in a quest for money and fame. A new exegesis by Adam Budd exhumes Armstrong as an original voice who offered timely and reassuring advice to Britons as they braced for another epidemic of plague; who depicted illness through the lens of a vulnerable and sympathetic physician, and who was perhaps above all else a leveller of medical knowledge. Elaborating on Budd's thesis, it would seem that Armstrong, a complicated man, has frequently been misread and was in some ways ahead of his time.

Keywords

John Armstrong Richard Mead Alexander Monro William Osler Physician-poets Scottish Hans Sloane

Introduction

He [Caspar Wistar] is … the very embodiment of the physician who, to paraphrase the words of Armstrong, … ‘Sought the chearful haunts of men, and mingled with the bustling croud.

—William Osler, The Leaven of Science (1894)¹

Two questions prompted this study. Who was Armstrong, evidently so familiar to William Osler’s audience that a first name was unnecessary? and What was the context of ‘the chearful haunts’?

John Armstrong was a Scot who went to London where he encountered the Royal College of Physicians’ opposition to licensing Scottish-educated physicians. He took to writing and in 1744 published The Art of Preserving Health, a 1700-line didactic poem containing the passage that Osler quotes. Capturing an apparent public need for a depiction of disease and its prevention by a knowledgeable physician writing as a feeling patient, by 1795 The Art had gone through 13 editions and 27 impressions in London, Edinburgh and Dublin; had been for about 20 years the only work of medicine or verse published by Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) in Philadelphia; had been translated into German once and into French and Italian twice; and was praised not only for its instructive value but also for its literary merit. The philosopher David Hume told James Boswell (1740–1795) that ‘Dr. Armstrong is a man of great genius’ and his poem ‘truly classical … the most Augustan thing that we have in English’.² It was read well into the 19th century. A Boston edition appeared in 1839 and another Scottish edition in 1858, reprinted in 1880. As late as 1868, Armstrong could be described as ‘the eminent author of The Art of Preserving Health’.³

Both the poem and its author are now largely obscure except to scholars of 18th-century culture. When discussed at all, Armstrong has frequently been portrayed as a failed physician who wrote for self-advertisement and money. A 1997 anthology entitled Very Bad Poetry features The Art of Preserving Health as its first exhibit.⁴ Recently, however, Adam Budd of the University of Edinburgh has brought out a new edition of The Art, extensively annotated and arguing that ‘Armstrong’s Art of Preserving Health offered timeless [sic] advice at a particularly frightening moment in British history [an impending plague epidemic] and it did so by deploying innovations in emergent literary and medical discourses concerning sensibility’.⁵ The purpose of this paper is briefly to summarize the life and times of this complicated man, to expand on Budd’s thesis that Armstrong’s overarching mission was that of a leveller of medical knowledge, to point out some ways in which Armstrong may have been misinterpreted and to track how he came to Osler’s attention.

John Armstrong

John Armstrong (Figure 1; for a portrait of Armstrong, see the recent article by Dunn⁶) was born in 1709 in Castleton, Roxburghshire, Scotland. Like William Osler (1849–1919), he was the son of a minister and had at least one famous brother – George Armstrong (1719–1789), sometimes considered the founder of British paediatrics .^6–10 John Armstrong began writing poetry as a child. At the University of Edinburgh he concentrated on languages, philosophy and then medicine. Although Armstrong’s years in his native Scotland predate the customary chronological boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment (1730–1790),¹¹ he had the good fortune of becoming a pupil, indeed a favourite pupil, of Alexander Monro primus (1697–1767). As is well-known, Monro primus revolutionized medical education in Edinburgh by importing the method of practical bedside teaching he had learned in Leyden from Hermann Boerhaave (1668–1738). Monro taught anatomy by dissection, not through diagrams. He lectured in English, not Latin, addressing the students’ needs rather than his own. He was the driving force behind the creation of the University of Edinburgh’s Faculty of Medicine which made Edinburgh for a while what Osler called one of Minerva Medicine’s successive ‘chief temples’.¹² In 1732 Armstrong became the ninth medical graduate of the new School of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and the first to graduate insignitus (‘with distinction’).¹³ He set out for London almost immediately.

Figure 1.

Timelines for significant dates in the life of John Armstrong (upper panel), in the history of the University of Edinburgh School of Medicine (middle panel) and in the relationship between Scotland and England during the 18th century.

Edinburgh medical graduates were not welcomed in London by the medical establishment. It was not until 1754 that a Scot with an Edinburgh degree (William Schaw) was licensed by the Royal College of Physicians. The law forbade anyone without a Licence from the Royal College of Physicians to practise within seven miles of the Tower of London. Prejudice in London against Scottish-trained physicians ran high for the remainder of the 18th century, despite the fame of the Edinburgh School at home and abroad.¹⁴

Armstrong dedicated his graduation thesis to Sir Hans Sloane (1660–1753), President of the (London) Royal College of Physicians, and hoped that Sloane might help him stand the examination for a Licence to Practise in London. It was not to be. Sloane may have helped him get scheduled to speak at The Royal Society (though the meeting adjourned before Armstrong could finish his short paper)¹⁵ and Armstrong’s clinical experience in treating mental illness was cited to the Society by another writer in 1745,¹⁶ but this was far from professional acceptance. Like other unlicensed physicians, Armstrong took to practising illegally. He also began writing.

In 1734 Armstrong published his first London work, An Essay for Abridging the Study of Physick, a satire against quacks usually interpreted as an effort to gain favour with the elite physicians of London while promoting his own reputation. Whatever reputation he thereby gained suffered when he published, although anonymously, The Œconomy of Love (1736), a poem in blank verse that was considered too racy and explicit for the general public. Simultaneously he translated from the Latin Luigi Luisini’s collection Aphrodisiacus (1728), with a preface by Hermann Boerhaave, under the English title A Synopsis of the History and Cure of Venereal Diseases (1737). The Art of Preserving Health (1744) earned Armstrong a wide readership and increased name-recognition. Two years later he was appointed Physician to the Duke of Cumberland’s Hospital for injured soldiers – the first appointment of an Edinburgh graduate to a London hospital – on the recommendation of the eminent Richard Mead (1673–1754). The appointment while unsalaried held the potential to enhance his reputation and practice which nonetheless still does not seem to have thrived. Who, some suggest, would want to go to a doctor who shared his knowledge so freely? In 1760 Armstrong became Physician to the Forces and served for three and a half years in Germany during the Seven Years’ War. Returning to London, he found himself banned from practice by the Royal College of Physicians, possibly because of the vindictiveness of the radical politician John Wilkes (1725–1797). Armstrong had quarrelled with Wilkes concerning the latter’s anti-Scottish political polemics and his high-handed treatment in publishing one of Armstrong’s poems during the author’s absence abroad. Thereafter, Armstrong retired from practice and seems to have lived modestly on his Army pension and writings, including the two-volume Miscellanies (1770) and a compendium of Medical Essays (1773). He died in London in 1779. A headstone in Castleton Cemetery in the Scottish Borders records his life.¹⁷

Armstrong was by any reckoning a difficult man. Adjectives used to describe him include argumentative, arrogant, bitter, coarse, grumpy, indolent, intemperate, irreverent, melancholic, misanthropic, pathologically shy, peculiar, querulous, sarcastic, thin-skinned and vain.¹⁸ His friendships were sometimes stormy, as shown by famous fallings out with Wilkes and also with the artist Henry Fuseli (1741–1825).¹⁹ On the other hand, Armstrong could also be benevolent, good company and capable of deep friendship, as evinced by his lifelong friendships with Hume, the playwright David Malloch (later Mallet, c. 1705–1765), the poet James Thomson (1700–1748) and the poet and novelist Tobias Smollet (1721–1777) – all fellow Scots by birth.

Despite Lewis Knapp’s prediction in 1944 that ‘there is no likelihood that Armstrong’s writings will be much read or discussed in the future except by literary antiquarians and special students of the eighteenth century’,¹⁹ it is now clear from Budd’s exegesis and its critical reception²⁰ that Armstrong deserves a reappraisal.

Physician, poet and satirist

Was Armstrong essentially a writer who happened to be a doctor, or a doctor who wrote to promote a struggling practice?^21,22 The prolific medical biographer William Ober avers that ‘John Armstrong’s primary interest in medicine seems to have been that it was a “learned profession” which furnished a convenient background for living in London, albeit precariously … At heart, he was a writer who happened to be a doctor rather than a doctor who wrote’.²³ Budd counters that ‘Armstrong cleverly realized that by writing medical works on various topics … he might earn public attention and hopefully collegiate esteem’²⁴ although his ‘prolific literary output between 1734 and 1742 suggests a lack of success in regular trade’.²⁵ There is, however, a tenable middle ground.

Armstrong clearly arrived in London as ‘an ambitious young doctor utilizing all means of promoting a successful career without allowing the muses to interfere very much with his scientific profession’.²⁶ Evidence for sustained seriousness about medicine include the high regard in which he was held by Monro primus, his support from Sloane and Mead, his repeated efforts to take the licensure examination of the Royal College of Physicians, his successfully obtaining two government appointments, and his compiling Medical Essays even after being forbidden to practise. It was not unusual for a young physician to promote his career through not-so-subtle forms of advertising. In the mid-18th century medical success in London depended, as Roy Porter puts it, ‘immediately as well as ultimately on public esteem’.²⁷ Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), born in the same year as Armstrong, famously wrote ‘A physician in a great city seems to be the mere plaything of Fortune; his degree of reputation is, for the most part, totally casual; they that employ him, know not his excellence; they that reject him, know not his deficience’.²⁸

Armstrong wrote with the learnedness befitting a first-born son of the manse but he wrote mainly for contemporaries rather than posterity.²⁹ While still a medical student, he was already recognized as a gifted poet and his ‘Imitation of Shakespeare’ (written about 1726 though not published until 1770) was circulated in manuscript among other young Scottish poets and is a possible influence on James Thomson’s poem ‘Winter’, the first part of Thomson’s The Seasons.³⁰ Some suggest Armstrong patterned his works, especially The Art, after Virgil’s Georgics, which enjoyed a revival during Armstrong’s lifetime and on this question Budd’s new edition provides valuable context. Others who influenced Armstrong include Edmund Spenser (c. 1552–1599) and, especially, John Milton (1608–1674). Of these, Milton’s influence is the most pervasive, yet critics have been reluctant to give Armstrong much credit for the way he reuses recognizably Miltonic phrasing. RD Havens indeed suggested that The Art can be read as a ‘burlesque of Paradise Lost’.³¹ Boehrer suggests that Armstrong is representative of a straightforward 18th-century approach to Milton with little appeal to modern readers. He treats Armstrong’s Miltonism as naively imitative (‘very bad poetry indeed’) rather than as playful or parodic or witty.³²

This problem of judging Armstrong’s tone can be illustrated from The Œconomy of Love. Even if one has never read Armstrong before, his two lines ‘To shed thy blossoms thro’ the desert air / And sow thy perish’d offspring in the winds’³³ seem familiar because they probably inspired two famous lines in ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard’ by Thomas Gray (1716–1971) (‘Full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air’, lines 55–56). Gray is lamenting the ‘mute inglorious Miltons’ (line 59) whose rustic unfulfilled potentials never reached publication; the central image in both poets echoes Milton’s picture of Eve as Proserpina in Paradise Lost, Book IX, and the phrase ‘the desert air’ comes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Act 4, scene 3. However, where Gray uses these literary echoes quite seriously and straightforwardly, Armstrong uses them teasingly, to warn his young male readers against masturbation and the excessive expenditure of semen.³⁴ Most critics of Armstrong still give him too little credit for wit.

The middle ground, then, is that Armstrong ‘was torn between the attractions of making his mark as a doctor and as a man of letters’.³⁵ While unusual, pursuing a literary career was certainly not rare for a Scottish physician (Table 1). One indication that authorship could be combined with professional recognition is that Osler himself had collected copies of all but the earliest of the Scottish physician-poets shown in Table 1.³⁶ Armstrong’s self-assessment towards the end of his career, in Medical Essays (1773), was that he had largely failed at both endeavours but that his failures were not his own fault. He did not fare well in practice because, in his own words but writing in the third person, he

could neither tell a heap of impudent lies in his own praise, wherever he went, nor intrigue with nurses; nor assimilate, with the various knots of pert insipid, lively stupid, well-bred impertinent, good-humoured malicious, obliging deceitful, Gossips, nor enter into juntos with people that were not to his liking; it will not appear a mighty boast to any one that is but moderately acquainted with this overgrown town [London] to say, that [had he made these compromises] he might have done great things in physick … ³⁷

Table 1.

Some Scottish Physician-Poets.

David Kinloch (1559–1617)	John Leyden (1775–1851)
Arthur Johnson (1587–1641)	John Ferriar (1761–1815)
Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713)	William Beattie (1793–1875)
John Arbuthnot (1667–1735)	David Maebok Moir (1798–1851)
John Armstrong (1709–1779)	Robert Macnish (1802–1837)
James Grainger (c. 1721–1776)	Sir Ronald Ross (1857–1932)
Tobias Smollett (1721–1721)	Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)^a

Smollett and Doyle of course are much better known as novelists but their published works include poetry.

Likewise he blamed others for his lack of financial success as an author:

As an author too his fate has been somewhat particular. – His having written a Poem [The Art] upon a subject reckoned of no inconsiderable consequence to the health of mankind was, as some say, sufficient alone in this age and meridian, to have ruined him as a Physician. At the same time, from the treachery of one Bookseller after another, it is true enough what one of his friends guessed not long ago – that tho’ his works, as he called them had sold greatly; he did not believe they had all together brought him near so much as has often been made by one play that deserved to have been damned.³⁸

Armstrong’s sense of failure may indeed have been exaggerated. Never married and living modestly, he left an estate estimated at £3,000 (about £270,000 Sterling or US$ 430,000 in today’s currency), prompting many to speculate where the money came from.

Satirist, educator and leveller of public knowledge

One recurrent aim of satire has always been instruction, and a dual identity – as satirist and public educator – runs through the course of Armstrong’s career. Armstrong was not the first physician to deliver ‘inside’ medical knowledge to the general public³⁹ although he might have been the first to make so sustained a career of it. As Budd puts it ‘For Armstrong, popularization of medical knowledge is a humanitarian and practical matter, one that reflects the demands of patients more than the commercial worries of physicians – whether they be authors or not’.⁴⁰ Reviewing Budd’s book, Stafford recognizes that Armstrong’s mission was at least to some extent revolutionary.⁴¹ He was a pioneer in self-help. This perspective raises new questions reviewing Armstrong’s literary career.

The prose pamphlets that bookend Armstrong’s career, his Essay for Abridging the Study of Physick (1735) and Medical Essays (1773), are perhaps his most directly satirical works. The Essay is at face value an obvious satire against anti-intellectualism, intended to gain for Armstrong favour with the medical elite in a city rampant with quackery, while Medical Essays has been characterized as an embittered attack on the medical profession. However, both can be read as (1) opposing excessive theorizing in medicine and (2) emphasizing the utility of practical knowledge.

The sting of the earlier work lies in having an absurdly anti-Establishment quack ‘author’ (who is Armstrong’s primary target) make some real and justifiable criticisms of Armstrong’s more stuffy professional colleagues. The fictional ‘author’ asserts, for instance, that

Learning is no more necessary to a Physician than to a Fidler⁴²

and gives himself away by his scorn for extensive professional training:

[The student of medicine] must study every particular branch of that Science under able Teachers, and labour night and day for God knows now many years, before he can be supposed fit for Practice.⁴³

At the same time, however, some of his sallies against the medical Establishment as a closed shop found their target:

The Pride and Ill-nature, perhaps the Avarice too, of the Learned in every Science, would gladly make a mystery of the art they possess, and render it inaccessible but to a few. … Its present professors … grudge that any should rise to the dignities and privileges of their profession with less Pain and charge than they themselves have done.⁴⁴

Among the qualities necessary for success in medical practice, Armstrong’s quack author enumerates self-assurance, facile use of Latin, reputation as a ‘travelled Gentleman’, the art of ‘Drinking strong Liquor valiantly’ and the ability to discourse with ‘the air of an Oracle’.⁴⁵ These are surely real criticisms of many successful early 18th-century physicians. Behind the humour, Armstrong is surely making a very serious point.

Medical Essays, Armstrong’s last work, returns to this theme although he now speaks in his own voice and the anti-Establishment rhetoric is more direct:

The slow progress which the art of physick has made from what may be called its commencement under Hippocrates to this present day … has in a great measure been owing to the vanity natural to mankind.⁴⁶

… no man of sense, and such only can be a good physician, will long amuse himself with the theory after engaging in the practice of the art.⁴⁷

Is it really necessary, Armstrong asks, to comprehend Harvey’s theory of the circulation of the blood when all that really matters is the ability to distinguish an artery from a vein? Armstrong neatly summarizes what the contemporary physician really needed in non-surgical cases: ‘The great instruments of physick, exclusive of diet, exercise, and other articles of regimen; these are evacuations by bleeding, vomiting, and blistering; evacuations by increasing the natural discharges; and a few capital specifick medicines, such as opium, mercury, antimony, and the Peruvian bark’.⁴⁸ Like many physicians of his time he was ambivalent about bloodletting, saying on the one hand that it was the ‘chief remedy’ for inflammatory fevers but on the other that ‘many more Englishmen dye by the lancet at home, than by the sword abroad’.⁴⁹ Armstrong exposes the bitter reality that the conceptual advances of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution had little impact on what the most learned of doctors could actually do for the average patient.

The synergy between Armstrong’s prose and verse, and between his professional and general writing, is illustrated in his two publications in the late 1730s about sexuality and sexually transmitted disease: his poem The Œconomy of Love (1736) and his prose treatise A Synopsis of the History and Cure of Venereal Diseases (1737). Of The Œconomy of Love, the original Dictionary of National Biography (quoted by Osler⁵⁰) noted that it ‘was published anonymously’, commenting ‘it is indeed a production which not many men would care to claim. A more nauseous piece of work could not easily be found’. Indeed, parts of it seem at first blush to read like a steamy sex manual for teens:

Ye Youths and Virgins, when your generous blood

Has drunk the warmth of fifteen Summers, now

The Loves invite; now to new rapture wakes

The finish’d Sense: While stung with keen Desire

The madd’ning Boy his bashful Fetters bursts;

And, urg’d with secret Flames, the riper Maid

Conscious and shy, betrays her smarting Breast.⁵¹

However, if one recognizes Armstrong’s playfulness in his reusing of Milton’s grand style, the poem reads very differently, channelling a benign older voice explaining realities to younger readers. The Œconomy of Love deals with serious contemporary problems related to premarital sex, marital sex and extramarital sex. According to Cruickshank, in the 1730s about one in five women in London was involved in one way or another in the sex industry.⁵² Sexually transmitted diseases were rampant. Armstrong’s Synopsis of The History and Cure of Venereal Diseases, the first full translation into English of a recent continental publication, brought to a lay readership as well as physicians the dangers of these diseases. The poem (Œconomy of Love) even more than the medical treatise suggests Armstrong felt a duty to bring these matters to the attention of a wider public.

Armstrong’s other major early work was his A Full View of All the Diseases Incident to Children (1742), the first paediatric anthology in English and the first book of its kind intended for lay readers. An edited compilation of various authors, including translations from the Latin, the Full View was published anonymously but a strong case has been made that the editor was indeed Armstrong.^53,54 It aimed to summarize the best professional knowledge for all who care for sick children, for ‘the Parents but especially Mothers’ and asked them to listen carefully, for example, to the sound of a child’s cough. If the attribution is indeed correct, Armstrong can be considered an 18th-century precursor to Dr Benjamin Spock (1903–1998).

The issues raised by these lesser known works about the communication of professional knowledge to a lay readership are brought together in Armstrong’s most popular work, The Art of Preserving Health (1744). Written again in a playful variant of Miltonic verse, The Art consists of four books – Air, Diet, Exercise and The Passions – modelled after four of the moderating elements for healthy living. Budd maintains that The Art ‘retains historical importance not only for its powerful depiction of the knowledgeable physician as a feeling patient but also for the way it encouraged its considerable numbers of eighteenth-century readers to think critically’ about health-related matters.⁵⁵

Much of Armstrong’s poem, which runs to 1700 lines of blank verse, is simply good homiletic advice, crisply presented:

With useful studies you, and arts that please,

Employ your mind, amuse but not fatigue.⁵⁶

Our greatest good, and what we least can spare,

Is Hope: the last of all our evils, Fear.⁵⁷

We curse not wine: The vile excess we blame … ⁵⁸

Toil, and be strong. By toil the flaccid nerves

Grow firm, and gain a more compacted tone … ⁵⁹

And learn to suffer what you cannot shun … ⁶⁰

… by frequent use

The strongest medicines lose their healing power,

And even the surest poisons theirs to kill.⁶¹

… For want of timely care, Millions have died of medicable wounds.⁶²

Such common-sense adages aspire more to the proverbial than to the surprising but interspersed are occasional sparks of originality. For example, Armstrong was apparently among the first British physicians to promote music therapy for pain:⁶³

There is a charm, a Power, that sways the breast;

Bids every Passion revel or be still;

Inspires with Rage, or all your Cares dissolves;

Can soothe Distraction, and almost Despair.

That power is Music.⁶⁴

Making so much medical advice freely available to the public, or at least to those able to comprehend blank verse laced with classical and literary allusions, was almost certainly resented by the orthodox medical Establishment. One claim to being a ‘professional’ or a member of the ‘learned professions’ is the possession of a specialized body of hard-won knowledge that is largely inaccessible to those outside the profession, that is, to the laity. Only within recent decades has the physician’s cognitive authority become seriously undermined by web-based information including Google and PubMed. In confronting this issue, Armstrong was far ahead of his time.

‘The chearful haunts’

Stylistic parody such as Armstrong’s allusive reuse of Milton is by definition never wholly original. Armstrong almost certainly borrowed ‘the chearful haunts’ (the phrase used by Osler) from Milton’s poem Comus: A Mask (1637):

’Tis most true

That musing meditation most affects

The pensive secrecy of desert cell,

Far from the chearful haunt of men and herds.⁶⁵

Yet the borrowing also reveals something of Armstrong’s approach to medicine. The context for both Milton and Armstrong concerns the prevention and treatment of melancholy (depression). After warning the reader that ‘vain are the consolations of the wise;/In vain your friends would reason down your pain’, Armstrong prescribes the active life:

Go, soft enthusiast! quit the cypress groves,

Nor to the rivulet’s lonely moanings tune

Your sad complaint. Go, seek the chearful haunts

Of men, and mingle with the bustling croud;

Lay schemes for wealth, or power, or fame, the wish

Of nobler minds, and push them night and day.

Or join the caravan in quest of scenes

New to your eyes, and shifting every hour,

Beyond the Alps, beyond the Apennines.

Or more advent’rous, rush into the field

Where war grows hot; and, raging thro’ the sky,

The lofty trumpet swells the madd’ning soul:

And in the hardy camp and toilsome march

Forget all softer and less manly cares.⁶⁶

Nor was the phrase ‘the chearful haunts’ limited to Milton and Armstrong. Others who have used it include Armstrong’s friend and contemporary poet James Thomson in the context of the impending plague epidemic (The Seasons, ‘Summer’ (1730)), William Cowper (1731–1800) in the context of self-reliance (The Task: A Poem in Six Books, in ‘The Winter Morning Walk’ (1785)) and Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) in the context of adventure (William Tell (1804)).

What did the phrase mean for Osler, why did he use it in his address at the 1894 opening of the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology, and was it apt for the occasion? Caspar Wistar (1761–1818), born in Philadelphia, received his medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1782 and spent the next five years in Edinburgh where despite his youth he served two consecutive years as President of the Royal Medical Society. Returning to Philadelphia, he taught anatomy, chemistry, midwifery, surgery, palaeontology and clinical medicine. His fame as a teacher of anatomy – based on his abilities as a lecturer, his authorship of the first American textbook of anatomy and his preservation of numerous anatomic specimens by injecting them with wax – greatly advanced the reputation of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine (a plaque in the Edinburgh Medical School honours Wistar as one of its five American graduates on the first real faculty at the Philadelphia medical school, the first in North America⁶⁷). His frequent ‘open house’ parties for students, faculty, leading citizens and visiting scientists became known as ‘Wistar parties’ and played a prominent role in Philadelphia’s social life well into the 20th century .⁶⁸ These gatherings were reminiscent of Osler's Open Arms at his home in Oxford. Thus Caspar Wistar, like William Osler, was an avatar of the ability to balance sociability with the solitude necessary for sustained scholarly achievement. Also like Osler, Wistar was a notable humanist and humanitarian. Wistar succeeded Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) as President of the American Philosophical Society and succeeded Benjamin Rush (1746–1813) as President of the Society for the Abolition of Slavery.

In all probability Osler had discovered (or been reminded of) the phrase in question by reading up on Wistar while preparing for his 1894 address because Wistar himself had quoted it in his dissertation for the Edinburgh MD. Indeed, the phrase may have caught Osler’s eye as one of the few English passages in a dissertation that otherwise was written in Latin. Osler’s complete sentence (excerpted in the preface to this paper) reads

In the history of the profession of this country, Caspar Wistar holds a unique position. He is its Avicenna [c980–1037], its Mead, its Fothergill [John Fothergill, 1712–80], the very embodiment of the physician who, to paraphrase the words of Armstrong, used by Wistar in his Edinburgh Graduation Thesis, ‘Sought the chearful haunts of men, and mingled with the bustling croud’.⁶⁹

The Wistar Institute, now a centre for basic cancer research, still thrives as do the flowering vines of the genus Wistaria, better known as Wisteria, named in honour of the popular Philadelphia physician, surgeon and anatomist.⁷⁰

‘Go, seek the chearful haunts of men, and mingle with the bustling croud’ – a memorable phrase, indeed!

Footnotes

Author biographies

Charles S Bryan MD is Heyward Gibbes Distinguished Professor of Internal Medicine, Emeritus, at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine, Columbia. A past president of the American Osler Society, he has written or edited three books on William Osler and is writing a history of pellagra in the American South.

Patrick Scott PhD is Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, at the University of South Carolina. His primary research areas are Victorian and Scottish Literature, his most recent book is the edited collection Robert Burns & Friends (2012), and he currently coedits the journal Studies in Scottish Literature.

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. Dr. John Armstrong, littérateur, and associate of Smollett, Thomson, Wilkes, and other celebrities. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 1944; 59: 1019–1058.

20.

Stafford F. Diets in poetry (Review of Adam Budd, John Armstrong’s ‘The Art of Preserving Health’). Times Literary Supplement, 25 November 2011:24.

21.

Anonymous. John Armstrong, 1709–79: poet, physician, essayist. British Medical Journal 1933; 2: 582–582.

22.

Hill

. Prescriptions in poetry: John Armstrong, M.D., 1709–79. The Practitioner 1951; 166: 498–501.

23.

Ober

. John Armstrong, M.D. (1709–1799 [sic]): a Scot in London. New York State Journal of Medicine 1965; 65: 2711–2717.

24.

Budd A. (op. cit. ref. 5): p.16.

25.

Ibid.: p.23.

26.

Knapp LM. (op. cit. ref. 19).

27.

Porter

Introduction. In: Porter

(ed). Patients and practitioners: lay perceptions of medicine in pre-industrial society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985, pp. 12–12.

28.

Johnson

Akenside. In: Johnson

(ed). The lives of the most eminent English poets; with critical observations on their works 1803; Vol. 2, New ed. Philadelphia: Benjamin Johnson, pp. 401–406. p. 403.

29.

Budd A. (op. cit. ref. 5): pp. ix–xvii.

30.

Scott MJW. James Thompson, Anglo-Scot. Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1988, pp.106–108, pp.301–306.

31.

Havens

. The influence of Milton on English poetry, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922, pp. 364–364.

32.

Boehrer

. English bards and Scotch physicians: John Armstrong’s debt to Paradise Lost and the dynamics of literary reception. Milton Quarterly 1998; 32: 98–104.

33.

Hart

Stevenson

. John Armstrong’s The Œconomy of love: a critical edition with commentary. Eighteenth-Century Life 1996; 19: 58–69.

34.

Crawford

. Scotland’s books: a history of Scottish literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 262–262.

35.

Hart C and Stevenson KG (op. cit. ref. 33).

36.

Osler W. Bibliotheca Osleriana: a catalogue of books illustrating the history of medicine and science. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929, pp. 175, 235, 253, 294, 336, 349, 390, 391–392, 428–429, 435–436, 441, 450–451, 454, 463–464, 475, 483, 488, 601, 691, 694, 699.

37.

Armstrong

. Medical essays, London: T. Davies, 1773, pp. 37–38.

38.

Ibid: pp. 39–40.

39.

Porter

Spreading medical knowledge: The popularization of medicine in Georgian England. In: Porter

(ed). The popularization of medicine, 1650–1850, London: Wellcome Trust, 1992, pp. 218–218.

40.

Budd A. (op. cit. ref. 5): pp. ix–xvii.

41.

Stafford F. (op. cit. ref. 20).

42.

Armstrong J. Essay on abridging the study of physick. London: J Wilford, 1735, p.10.

43.

Armstrong J. (op. cit. ref. 42): p.39.

44.

Armstrong J. (op. cit. ref. 42): pp.10, 11.

45.

Armstrong J. (op. cit, ref. 42): pp. 11, 19, 21.

46.

Armstrong J. (op. cit. ref. 42): p.1.

47.

Armstrong J. (op. cit. ref. 42): p.2.

48.

Armstrong J. (op. cit. ref. 42: p.6.

49.

Armstrong J. (op. cit. ref. 42): pp. 13, 15.

50.

Osler W. (op. cit. ref. 36): p.391.

51.

Hart C and Stevenson KG (op. cit. ref. 33).

52.

Cruickshank

. The secret history of Georgian London 2009; Vol. x, London: Random House, pp. 135–135.

53.

Pearn J. (op. cit. ref. 10).

54.

Still

The Full View: the first anthology of diseases of children. In: Still

(ed). The history of paediatrics. The progress of the study of diseases of children up to the end of the XVIIIth century, London: Oxford University Press, 1931, pp. 365–372.

55.

Budd A. (op. cit. ref. 5): p.3.

56.

Armstrong J. The art of preserving health. London: A. Millar, 1744, book 4, lines 57–58.

57.

Ibid: book 4, lines 320–321.

58.

Ibid: book 2, line 446.

59.

Ibid: book 3, lines 39–40.

60.

Ibid: book 3, line 290.

61.

Ibid: book 56, lines 309–311.

62.

Ibid: book 3, lines 515–516.

63.

Budd A. (op. cit., ref. 5): pp. 126–127 (n. 217).

64.

Armstrong J. (op. cit., ref. 56):481–5.

65.

Milton J. Comus. In: Carey J and Fowler ADS (eds) The poems of John Milton. London: Longman, 1968: lines 382–385.

66.

Armstrong J. (op. cit., ref. 56): lines 150–163.

67.

Dingwall

Hamilton

Macintyre

. Scottish medicine: an illustrated history, Edinburgh: Berlin Limited, 2011, pp. 141–143.

68.

Shackleford

. The book of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: The Penn Publishing Company, 1918, pp. 206–208.

69.

Osler W. (op. cit. ref. 1).

70.

Nuttall

. The genera of North American plants and a catalogue of the species to the year 1817 1818; Vol. 2, Philadelphia: D. Heartt, pp. 115–115.