Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Medicine and Blackwoodian Romanticism
- 1 Medical Discourse and Ideology in the Edinburgh Review
- 2 The Tale of Terror and the ‘Medico-Popular’
- 3 ‘Delta’: The Construction of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Surgeon
- 4 Professionalisation and the Case of Samuel Warren's Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician
- 5 The Rise of Public Health in the Popular Periodical Press: The Political Medicine of W. P. Alison, Robert Gooch, and Robert Ferguson
- Coda: Medical Humanism and Blackwood's Magazine at the Fin de Siècle
- Select Bibliography
- Index
3 - ‘Delta’: The Construction of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Surgeon
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Dedication
- Introduction: Medicine and Blackwoodian Romanticism
- 1 Medical Discourse and Ideology in the Edinburgh Review
- 2 The Tale of Terror and the ‘Medico-Popular’
- 3 ‘Delta’: The Construction of a Nineteenth-Century Literary Surgeon
- 4 Professionalisation and the Case of Samuel Warren's Passages from the Diary of a Late Physician
- 5 The Rise of Public Health in the Popular Periodical Press: The Political Medicine of W. P. Alison, Robert Gooch, and Robert Ferguson
- Coda: Medical Humanism and Blackwood's Magazine at the Fin de Siècle
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Delta…. Your judgment, and that of other enlightened men, have [sic] confi rmed my own, that such occasional relaxation, as the study of elegant literature affords, from the not unsevere and rarely intermitting labours of a profession, of which I conscientiously endeavour to discharge the duties, to the best of my skill and knowledge, so far from either incapacitating or disinclining my mind for such labours and such duties, does greatly strengthen both its moral and intellectual energies.
….
North. Heavens! can any studies be idle in a physician – in a medical man – that inevitably lead to elevation of spirit, breathing into it tenderness and humanity? Will he be a less thoughtful visitant at the sick or dying bed, who from such studies has gathered knowledge of all the beatings of the human heart, and all the workings of the human imagination, at such times so wild and so bewildering, aye, often even beyond the range of poetry, in those delirious dreams?
In August 1830 David Macbeth Moir, pen-named ‘Delta’, made his singular debut as a character in the Noctes Ambrosianæ. ‘The Modern Pythagorean’, aka Robert Macnish, also features for the fi rst and only time in the series. In a letter to Blackwood in July 1830, Macnish notes that ‘When I saw Professor Wilson in Edinburgh he spoke of introducing a new character into the Noctes viz. The Modern Pythagorean’, but laments:
Had I been a free agent in this matter I should have felt proud beyond measure in being placed there, but the people in this place are such an infernal set of apes that they look with an evil eye upon a medical man who has any thing to do with literature unless it be upon professional subjects.
In the same letter Macnish tentatively grants Blackwood permission to print the ‘Noctes’, if it has already been written, ‘for it would be out of the question that on my account the article should be spoilt’, but expresses his desire that ‘something could be said in the Noctes about the execrable absurdity of that doctrine, which supposes that a person cannot excel both in literature and professional subjects: the very idea is a disgrace to the intellect of the age’.
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- Literature and Medicine in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical PressBlackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 1817-1858, pp. 88 - 123Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017