How the Scots Invented the Modern World (49 page)

Contrary to myth, James Watt did not invent the steam engine. Two Englishmen, Newcomen and Thomas Savery, did that. What Watt did was typically Scottish: he perfected something created by someone else, and gave it a higher and wider application than its original inventor had imagined. Watt applied to the steam engine the idea of separate condensation, which allowed it to generate a constant motion, which, in 1781, Watt turned into a rotary motion. He had created the work engine of the Industrial Revolution. Commercial society was about to turn into industrial society, with technology as its driving force. He gave capitalism its modern face, which has persisted down to today.

The Scots did not invent technology, any more than they invented science—or capitalism or the ideas of progress and liberty. But just as in these other cases, the version of technology we live with most closely resembles the one that Scots such as James Watt organized and perfected. It rests on certain basic principles that the Scottish Enlightenment enshrined: common sense, experience as our best source of knowledge, and arriving at scientific laws by testing general hypotheses through individual experiment and trial and error. Science and technology give civilization its dynamic movement, like the ceaselessly moving pistons of Watt’s steam engine. To the Scots, they were the key to modern life, just as they are for us. A rapid succession of Scottish inventors, engineers, doctors, and scientists proved their point to the rest of the world.

James Watt, for example, grew up in Greenock, with no formal education, but surrounded by the paraphernalia of seagoing Glasgow, since his father supplied nautical equipment to local shipbuilders. Out of this environment of ships’ stores, ropes, pulleys, sextants, quadrants, and compasses, he developed an interest in mathematical and mechanical devices. He failed to find adequate work in London or Glasgow, but when the university found itself heir to a collection of sophisticated astronomical instruments assembled by a local West Indies merchant, it hired him to recalibrate them. Then he met Joseph Black, and began learning chemistry. “No man I know,” Adam Smith said, “has less nonsense in his head than Doctor Black.” Black discovered the same was true of Watt, and the two began exploring the problem that perplexed Black most, the question of what happens to the heat after objects are heated and cooled, or what he called “latent heat.”

Watt’s work on the steam engine led him to conduct a series of experiments on precisely this problem. Those experiments demonstrated that heat was not a substance but a property of matter, just as his description of the principles of the steam engine laid the foundation of modern mechanical engineering. The issue for Watt, though, was always not just how a thing worked, but what to do with it afterwards. Through Joseph Black, he teamed up with a pair of ironmasters named Roebuck and Cadell, who offered to pay for his development of the new engine and arrange for a patent, if he would build them a prototype for their foundry at Kinneil on the river Carron.

The real breakthrough came, however, when he met the English ironmaster Matthew Boulton of Birmingham. Their partnership, formed in 1775, gave them a complete monopoly over steam engine construction for the next quarter-century. Together they transformed Britain’s economic life. They turned the steam engine from primarily a water pump into a way to supply power for every conceivable industry, from John Wilkinson’s ironworks and Josiah Wedgewood’s pottery kilns to feeding the Birmingham Canal and dredging Glasgow’s port. Their engines (they produced more than five hundred in those twenty-five years) operated looms in cotton and textile mills from Paisley and Deanston to Manchester and Liverpool, allowing that business to expand its output almost exponentially. They made the modern factory, and the factory system, possible. They also altered the way people saw the world. That became clear when James Boswell visited their Soho works outside Birmingham, and Boulton showed him around, uttering the famous phrase: “I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have:
power.
”

A new concept had entered the modern consciousness. The idea of power not in a political sense, the ability to command people, but the ability to command nature: the power to alter and use it to create something new, and produce it in greater and larger quantities than ever before. At almost the same moment as Watt and Boulton were setting up their factory and producing their first steam engine, Adam Smith was writing that the division of labor was the key to creating wealth. Watt’s invention revealed that the future of the division of labor was technological change. By unleashing the dynamic power hidden in nature itself, one could make it work to human advantage.

“Nature has its weak side,” Watt liked to say, “if only we can find it.” Finding that weakness was the job of science. Exploiting the opening that science provided was the job of the engineer—and his business sidekick, the entrepreneur.

Watt was perfectly comfortable with the idea that his scientific expertise, like his machine, should be used to make a profit. So was his mentor, Joseph Black. As Professor of Chemistry, Black devoted much of his attention to improving the system of bleaching used by Glasgow’s linen manufacturers, just as Robert Foulis had conceived his school of design as a support center for textile printing. This was, again, very typical of the Glasgow Enlightenment’s fusion of the practical and the theoretical. Black’s own teacher, William Cullen, had launched the bleaching agent project when he was Professor of Anatomy at Glasgow. When he moved to Edinburgh in 1755, he was a distinguished figure not only in the field of medicine, but also in what might be called industrial science.

Cullen was a practicing doctor (he became Adam Smith’s personal physician). So was Joseph Black. Other key figures in the early development of Scotland’s industrial revolution were also trained as doctors, including Watt’s first business partner, John Roebuck. The two fields resembled each other. The hallmarks of Scottish medicine were close clinical observation, hands-on diagnosis, and thinking of objects such as the human body as a system—not so different from the practical approach of engineers such as James Watt. In fact, science and medicine were probably more closely linked in Scotland than any other European country. Together with mathematics, they formed the triangular base of the Scottish practical mind.

Even before the formal creation of Edinburgh’s medical school in 1726, Scotland was famous for its physicians. The field was dominated by two great dynasties of teachers, the Gregorys at Glasgow and the Munros at Edinburgh, who taught class after class of aspiring doctors in anatomy for nearly 130 years.
²⁸
The dynasty’s founder, Alexander Munro, Sr., made the study of anatomy central to the training of physicians. He was a student of the great Hermann Boerhaave at the University of Leyden, who broke away from the old medieval medical traditions and encouraged his students to use their eyes and ears to diagnose disease at the patient’s bedside. Boerhaave believed that progress in medicine depended on open-minded inquiry, a search for general laws based on observation—the key idea behind modern scientific method, in fact (Boerhaave was also a great admirer of Isaac Newton).

The first staff of Edinburgh’s new medical faculty were all Leyden students, including Munro. The school was the brainchild of the same man who conceived the New Town, Provost George Drummond, and for the same reason: to give Edinburgh a distinctly modern and “civilized” identity, as a leading center for British medicine as well as British urban life. It succeeded beyond Drummond’s dreams. Students flocked in from across the country—since in medicine as in everything else, Oxford and Cambridge were closed off to non-Anglicans. Edinburgh became the preeminent place in Europe for the study of anatomy. The school used human cadavers for dissection in such record numbers that supplying new ones became a problem.
²⁹

The Munros were the anchor of the school. Alex senior founded the Royal Infirmary, developed its celebrated lectures on anatomy and the central nervous system, and made the study of surgery a fundamental part of medical training. However, the pace changed dramatically when William Cullen, already Edinburgh’s Professor of Chemistry, stepped in as Professor of the Theory of Physic in 1766. Cullen was an iconoclast. He created the same revolution in medicine that Francis Hutcheson had in philosophy, by lecturing in English rather than Latin. He encouraged students to challenge him in class and to think on their own, based on what they saw rather than what they had been taught to expect. He vehemently rejected academic speculation; his motto was, in effect, no facts, no theory. But as the first professor of chemistry in Britain, he also insisted his students equip themselves with the most up-to-date knowledge of the basic sciences.

The typical product of the Edinburgh school in those years was a new kind of modern doctor: the general practitioner, who was physician, surgeon, and apothecary rolled into one (Cullen published the first modern pharmacopoeia in 1776). Other medical schools, especially Oxford and Cambridge, discouraged their students from any kind of physical contact with the patient. Probing a tender spot, or cleaning and dressing a wound—let alone cutting someone open to see what was going on—was left to menial servants, such as the barber-surgeon. Edinburgh taught its doctors to be hands-on generalists, who could spot a problem, make a diagnosis, and apply treatment themselves. Professor John Rutherford created the first system of clinical rounds for training medical students in 1750. More than just spouters of medical theory, Scottish doctors were in effect scientific missionaries, ready to push forward the frontiers of knowledge and progress wherever they went, and equipped to do battle against ignorance and apathy, as well as against disease.

Two brothers, William and John Hunter, best exemplified this Scottish approach. William studied with Francis Hutcheson and William Cullen at Glasgow, took Munro’s anatomy classes at Edinburgh, and taught the subject to his brother John when he joined him in London in 1748. William turned the field of obstetrics into a scientifically precise discipline under the supervision of doctors. Critics even derided him as “the man mid-wife,” as he broke down the barrier that made delivering babies the exclusive preserve of women. Feminist critics still deplore Hunter’s efforts to turn childbearing, and the female body, into an object of medical knowledge. But Hunter was motivated not by male chauvinism but by the desire to make infant delivery more organized, more systematic, and safer than traditional methods— including banning the use of forceps. John Hunter worked to achieve a similar transformation of the fields of dentistry (he first coined the terms
incisor, bicuspid,
and
molar
for describing teeth) and surgery.

Despite incessant criticism and vast professional jealousy, both became spectacularly successful. William Hunter was personal physician to the rich and powerful, including Physician Extraordinary to Queen Charlotte. His brother held the same position to the King himself (still another Scottish medical man, John Arbuthnot, had been physician to Queen Anne). More than any other person, John Hunter turned surgery from a quick-and-dirty art, practiced part-time by barbers, into a scientific discipline resting on a solid foundation of both anatomy and biology. The Hunters were bona fide figures of the Scottish Enlightenment. Edward Gibbon and Adam Smith both attended William’s lectures in the 1770s; John diagnosed David Hume’s fatal illness, and treated Smith for hemorrhoids. He passed on his great motto, “Don’t think, try,” to his most famous English student, Edward Jenner. It probably helped to inspire Jenner’s experiments with using cowpox inoculations to fight off its far deadlier relative, smallpox. Jenner gets the credit for inventing medical inoculation—although it was in fact another distinguished Scottish London physician, Charles Maitland, who first borrowed the technique from the Middle East and used it to protect his patients from smallpox outbreaks in the 1720s.

Scottish doctors were more popular with patients than English ones, since, as the historian Anand Chitnis has suggested, “their useful knowledge contrasted with the ornamental learning of the London physicians who were Anglican and Oxbridge-trained.” Between 1800 and 1825, 258 of the Royal College of Physicians’s 371 fellows and licentiates were Scottish-educated. Guy’s Hospital in London offered a host of distinguished Edinburgh-trained doctors, including Richard Bright, Thomas Addison, and Thomas Hodgkin, each of whom gave his name to the disease he was the first to diagnose.

Scottish physicians also pioneered another aspect of modern medicine: the field of public health, which largely meant trying to halt dangerous epidemic diseases. John Pringle, another Boerhaave student, served as Physician-General of the British Army in Flanders. Appalled at the needless loss of thousands of soldiers to disease and neglect, he insisted on sweeping changes in the way the army treated its sick and wounded, including ventilation of field hospitals and barracks to prevent the spread of disease. He made sure that every soldier was issued a blanket, and that campsites included proper latrines and sanitation.

On one occasion, just before the army was about to engage the French in battle, Pringle suggested that the army’s commander deploy his field hospitals in a clearly neutral area, away from the actual fighting, so that the wounded and those tending them would be out of harm’s way. The commander was a fellow Scot, none other than the fourth Earl of Stair—grandson of the man who saved the Treaty of Union. Stair agreed. During the battle, the French saw what was happening and avoided shelling or attacking the British hospitals. They then adopted Pringle’s idea, and other European nations followed suit. Pringle had established the fundamental principle of army medics and their patients as noncombatants, which would not only make European warfare more humane, but would also inspire organizations such as the Red Cross.