ABSTRACT
Scientific lecturing, to the nobility and gentry and then increasingly to the middle classes in public buildings, was a feature of eighteenth-century Britain, in a new world of leisure, civility and prosperity. It was a way of earning a living. In universities, the sciences occupied a firm place only in the medical faculty. By this time, astrology was no longer believed to be significant in diagnosis and healing, and so there was no scope for astronomers to benefit; but chemists, botanists and zoologists could make a career teaching medical students. One result was that such eminent men of science as William Hyde Wollaston the crystallographer and metallurgist, Joseph Hooker, the Director of Kew Gardens and ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, Thomas Henry Huxley, were all doctors by training, who supported themselves at times in their lives by practising medicine. None of them became Professors of Medicine, but Linnaeus in Uppsala and Joseph Black the chemist in Edinburgh had done that. Formal lectures to students have to cover a syllabus; and in Edinburgh and elsewhere the professor’s salary was heavily dependant on the fees he received from the students who attended. This meant that those professors who covered the most essential parts of the medical curriculum, and who were lively speakers, got a good income. For promoting their careers, in what was primarily a clinical discipline, their research was of little or no significance. They got on as teachers, though the lectures were all too often ‘dull and humdrum’.1
