Malcolm Nicolson

Henry Allan Gleason and the individualistic Hypothesis: the structure of a botanist's career

This paper provides a detailed account of Henry Allan Gleason’s career in ecology, paying particular attention to the development of his controversial individualistic hypothesis of the plant community. It is noted that Gleason developed and maintained a high level of skill in floristic botany. The argument is advanced that the individualistic hypothesis embodies a floristic perspective on vegetation. His pioneering papers on the quantitative analysis of vegetation are carefully examined and it is argued that they too reflect floristic and individualistic concerns. The overall shape of Gleason’s career is interpreted in terms of acquired skills, pedagogical inputs, institutional contexts, and professional and social interests. It is suggested that the characteristics of the work of many of his ecological colleagues may likewise be explained in terms of skills and interests, particularly those gained in other fields, such as physiography and physiology. The reasons for the generally hostile initial reaction to Gleason’s individualistic concept are examined. As well as providing historical background to the long and continuing debate over the nature of the plant community, an examination of Gleason’s career sheds important light on the cognitive development of American plant ecology during a formative period for the discipline. Other historians have not fully realised the extent of Gleason’s involvement in ecology during this time.ZusammenfassungDieser Artikel gibt eine detaillierte Beschreibung der ökologischen Laufbahn Henry Allan Gleasons, mit besonderer Beachtung der Entwicklung seiner umstrittenen, individualistischen Hypothese über die Pflanzengesellschaft. Unter Berücksichtigung von Gleasons grossen Fähigkeiten in floristischer Botanik wird argumentiert, dass seine individualistische Hypothese eine floristische Perspektive der Vegetation verkörpert. Seine bahnbrechenden Arbeiten zur quantitativen Analyse der Vegetation werden sorgfältig untersucht und es wird der Standpunkt vertreten, dass auch sie floristische und individualistische Ansichten widerspiegeln. Die Gesamtkarriere Gleasons wird in Himblick auf erworbene Fähigkeiten, pädagogische Einflüsse, institutionelle Zusammenhänge, sowie professionelle und soziale Interessen zu verstehen versucht. Es wird darauf hingewiressen, dass die charakteristischen Züge in den Arbeiten vieler seiner Kollegen ebenfalls unter dem Blickwinkel von Fähigkeiten und Interessen erklärt werden können—insbesondere sofern diese auf anderen Gebieten wie Zb. Physiographie und Physiologie erworben wurden. Zusätzlich werden die Gründe für die anfangs im allgemeinen feindselige Reaktion auf Gleasons individualistischen Ansatz untersucht. Eine Untersuchung von Gleasons Laufbahn beleuchtet wesentliche Aspekte in der cognitiven Entwicklung der amerikanischen Plan zenökologie während der Gründerzeit dieser Disziplin und trägt ausserdem zu dem geschichtlichen Hintergrund der langdauernden Debatte über das Wesen der Pflanzengesellschaft bei. Bis jetzt wurde das Ausmass von Gleasons Beteiligung in den ökologischen Fragestellungen seiner Zeit von Historikern nicht voll gewürdigt.

Humboldtian plant geography after Humboldt: the link to ecology

Extract: In his classic textbook, The History of Biology, Erik Nordenskiold suggested that there had existed, throughout the nineteenth century, not one but two distinct forms of plant geography. He designated one of these traditions of inquiry ‘floristic’ plant geography, tracing its origins back to the work of Carl Linnaeus on species and their distributions. The second form Nordenskiold termed ‘morphological’, by which he meant that its practitioners concentrated upon the study of vegetation rather than flora. He located the origins of this tradition of inquiry within the botanical work of Alexander von Humboldt.

Commentary: Nicholas Jewson and the disappearance of the sick man from medical cosmology, 1770–1870

principles to the provision and organization of both primary and secondary health care. Of course a dyed-in-the-wool Marxist might be tempted to view all of these trends as ones instigated by big Pharma or other global corporate interests. Yet it is clear, from UK experience at least, that many of these trends are fostered and encouraged by the state itself—via its policies for ‘targeted’, ‘personalized’ and ‘tailored’ systems of health care in which the patient as independent consumer is paramount. It is this choice-burdened consumer who becomes allied with various interest groups (including corporations) so as to lobby the state for medicines, treatment and care procedures that serve the interests of some rather than most of the public. In any event, the ways in which contemporary doctor–patient relationships and systems of health care are structured is a product of many agents—consumers and policy makers every bit as much as scientists and corporations. However, whilst the modern sick-man and woman are no longer viewed as ‘patients’, but as independent consumers with responsibility each for their own health, and expected to express that responsibility through choice and action in the health-care market, it is not, I would argue, because of any new cosmology. Rather, it is an expression of the everyday material circumstances in which we all live and medicine is practiced. I suspect that had Jewson written his paper in 2006 rather than 1976, he would have stated as much himself.

The early history of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland: a socio-historical study of lay/practitioner interaction in the context of a medical charity.

In the twentieth century single-disease charities have become an established feature of the social organization of biomedicine, providing support and welfare for sufferers and raising funds for research. Such charities are an important interface between the medical profession and the interested laity. They therefore constitute a subject area that ought to reward the attention of the historian or sociologist of medicine. The present paper approaches the issue of lay/professional interaction within recent biomedicine through an investigation of the early history of the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.2 We explore episodes in the development of the Society from its foundation in 1953 to the retirement of its founder-chairman in 1976.

A witness seminar: the development of old age psychiatry in Britain, 1960-1989. Themes, lessons and highlights.

To create a record of the development of old age psychiatry in Britain, as seen through the eyes of some of the people who participated in building it, from the earliest days until it was officially recognised as a specialty by the Department of Health in 1989.

James Willocks and the Innovation of Fetal Cephalometry

James Willocks (1928–2004), a Glasgow obstetrician, was an important pioneer of obstetric ultrasound and the originator of the first clinically useful technique of fetal cephalometry. He collaborated with Tom Duggan, an engineer, who designed and built an electronic cephalometer to be used in conjunction with a Kelvin Hughes industrial flaw detector. Working in the Royal Maternity Hospital, Willocks was able to measure the biparietal diameter to an accuracy of better than 2mm. This major innovation enabled fetal growth in the third trimester to be accurately charted and thus greatly improved the detection of placental insufficiency, as well as the management of antepartum haemorrhage, hypertension and other complications of late pregnancy.

Hyaline membrane and neonatal radiology: Ian Donald's first venture into imaging research

While he was working at the Royal Postgraduate Medical School, Ian Donald (later Regius Professor of Midwifery, University of Glasgow and a pioneer of diagnostic ultrasound) collaborated with Albert Claireaux and Robert Steiner on histological and radiological studies of hyaline membrane disease. In 1953, Donald and Steiner published the first radiological study of a series of cases. The success of this research stimulated Donalds interest in imaging technologies.

Nick Hopwood, Haeckel's Embryos: Images, Evolution and Fraud (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. viii, 388, £31.50, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-226-04694-5.

Most revealing, and most moving, are her passages on those who suffered, and those who cared for them in the most demanding of circumstances. Set in an abandoned sugarcane plantation on a bend of the Mississippi, Carville was for many years the only leprosarium in the mainland United States. Established in 1894, it was initially run by the Sisters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul, who pioneered new treatments and new attitudes to leprosy – though their patients were not allowed to marry until 1952, and even then could not vote. From the 1930s one patient, Stanley Stein – known as the Carville Crusader – used The Star, Carville’s in-house newspaper, to raise international awareness of their plight and to campaign for improvements in their status. This is, as near as possible, an up-to-the-minute history of disease, and the global picture that emerges from Murderous Contagion is unsettling. Dobson highlights the persistent problem of sexually transmitted infections, the growing threat of antibiotic resistance, the challenge of climate change – and, though the book is far from a polemic, she makes an urgent political point. In a deeply unequal world, lack of access to basic sanitation and safe drinking water means that the global poor bear the burden of infectious disease. Vaccines, screening programmes and treatment regimes must, she argues, go hand in hand with a concerted effort to lift the bottom billion out of poverty.

Book Reviews: Andrew Duncan Senior: Physician of the Enlightenment

In 1750, Mr John Amyat, the King’s Chemist, visited Edinburgh. He is said to have remarked to Robert Burns’ publisher, William Creech, ‘Here I stand at what is called the Cross of Edinburgh, and can, in a few minutes, take fifty men of genius by the hand’. The purpose of John Chalmers’ new book might be summed up as the wish to ensure the inclusion of Andrew Duncan Senior in any such roll call of the Scottish Enlightenment. He has been successful in that task. Professor of the Institutes of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh for thirty years, Andrew Duncan was certainly a prolific author on medical matters (a full list of his writings comprises a valuable appendix to the book). However, Chalmers argues that Duncan should be remembered as much for the manner in which he expressed the values of the Enlightenment in practical initiatives for the benefit of society as for more narrowly intellectual endeavours. There were certainly plenty of the former – Duncan played a major role in the founding of Edinburgh’s first Public Dispensary, its Lunatic Asylum (now the Royal Edinburgh Hospital), and the University’s chair of Medical Police and Jurisprudence. He was the founding editor of what was arguably the first successful English language medical periodical, Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, and the principal editor of the Edinburgh New Dispensatory (a major pharmacopoeia) from 1789 to 1801. Duncan also conspicuously displayed the distinctive sociability of the eighteenth-century Scottish intellectual: he personally founded the Aesculapian Club and the Harveian Society – remaining the society’s secretary for forty-six years – was a founding member of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Medico-Chirurgical Society, as well as serving as President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (twice) and the Royal Medical Society (six times). Nor were his activities confined to medicine – he began what became the Royal Caledonian Horticultural Society, as well as bathing and gymnastic clubs. An enthusiastic advocate of the health-giving properties of golf, good wine and good fellowship, he also boasted of his long membership of Beggar’s Benison – readers not familiar with this remarkable association are referred to David Stevenson’s revealing study, The Beggar’s Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland (East Lothian: Tuckwell, 2001). Duncan fancied himself as a poet and a wit. To mark the visit of George IV to Edinburgh in 1822, he composed a cleverly sanitised version of the Beggar’s Benison bawdy motto: ‘Long may you live in harmony and ease / And never want, or purse, or power to please.’ A most appropriate toast to a spendthrift and licentious monarch. All of these various activities, and many more, are ably documented in Chalmers’ book. Incidentally, although Chalmers is modestly described as the book’s editor, of fifteen chapters, he is sole author of eleven and the joint author of two. Notable among the other contributions are Martin Kaufman’s essay on the work of the Public Dispensary, and James Gray’s chapter on Duncan’s medical societies. But Chalmers is to be congratulated on clearly having been as much the driving force behind the production of this volume as Duncan was in any of the initiatives he was involved in. The result has been a readable and informative volume, which sorts out many of the details of Duncan’s biography (warts and all, Duncan was vain and could be grasping and disputatious). It will be an indispensable aid to further research, not only on Andrew Duncan Senior, but also on his equally significant and almost equally industrious son, Andrew Duncan Junior.

Death and Doctor Hornbook by Robert Burns: a view from medical history.

Robert Burnss poem, Death and Doctor Hornbook, 1785, tells of the drunken narrators late night encounter with Death. The Grim Reaper is annoyed that ‘Dr Hornbook’, a local schoolteacher who has taken to selling medications and giving medical advice, is successfully thwarting his efforts to gather victims. The poet fears that the local gravedigger will be unemployed but Death reassures him that this will not be the case since Hornbook kills more than he cures. Previous commentators have regarded the poem as a simple satire on amateur doctoring. However, it is here argued that, if interpreted in the light of the exoteric and inclusive character of 18th century medical knowledge and practice, the poem is revealed to have a much broader reference as well as being more subtle and morally ambiguous. It is a satire on 18th century medicine as a whole.