Pedagogical Progeniture or Tactical Translation? George Fordyce's Additions and Modifications to William Cullen's Philosophical Chemistry — Part I

Abstract

This article contributes to a growing body of research on the dissemination, dispersion or diffusion of scientific knowledge via pedagogical networks. By examining students’ handwritten lecture notes, I compare the eighteenth-century chemistry lectures given by William Cullen (1710–1790) at Glasgow and Edinburgh Universities with those of his one-time student George Fordyce (1736–1802), in London, at first privately and then as part of the medical education of physicians at St. Thomas's Hospital. Part I examines the broad structure of Cullen's and Fordyce's courses, comparing both course content and pedagogical approaches to ask how far knowledge flowed directly ‘downstream,’ and the extent to which it was transformed, translated or transmuted in the process of transmission. Part II (forthcoming) will approach the affinity theories of Cullen and Fordyce in greater depth, revealing the dynamics of knowledge transfer. The results shed light on the transmission of knowledge and skills between master and student, and reflect on whether Fordyce can be better described as Cullen's pedagogical progeny, or less straightforwardly as a tactical translator.

Acknowledgements

This research formed part of my PhD and I must gratefully thank the Arts and Humanities Research Board/Council for its funding of my doctoral research, and the staff of the STS Department at UCL for their kind support throughout my PhD and ever since. Thanks are also due to all the various libraries and archives that have allowed me to make use of their wonderful collections. Also I must thank the anonymous referees for their careful reading and helpful suggestions from which this paper has benefitted greatly. My gratitude is also extended to all those historians of chemistry who have offered their advice, help and copious knowledge, and most particularly to Professor Hasok Chang, whose unfailing faith in me continues to inspire me.

Notes

1 Antonio Garcia-Belmar et al., “The Power of Didactic Writings: French Chemistry Textbooks of the Nineteenth Century,” in Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Wiebe E. Bijker, W. Bernard Carlson, and Trevor Pinch (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2005); Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent, “College Chemistry: How a Textbook Can Reveal the Values Embedded in Chemistry,” Endeavour 31, no. 4 (2007): 140–44; Jan Frercks and Michael Markert, “The Invention of Theoretische Chemie: Forms and Uses of German Chemistry Textbooks, 1775–1820,” Ambix 54, no. 2 (2007): 146–71; David Kaiser, “Making Tools Travel: Pedagogy and the Transfer of Skills in Postwar Theoretical Physics,” in Pedagogy and the Practice of Science, ed. David Kaiser (Cambridge, Mass; London: MIT Press, 2005), 41–74.

2 Georgette Taylor, “Pedagogical Progeniture or Tactical Translation? George Fordyce's Additions and Modifications to William Cullen's Philosophical Chemistry — Part II,” forthcoming in Ambix.

3 Arthur L. Donovan, Roy Hutchinson Campbell, and Andrew S. Skinner, “William Cullen and the Research Tradition of Eighteenth-Century Scottish Chemistry,” in Origins and Nature of the Scottish Enlightenment (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), 98–114; Arthur L. Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Doctrines and Discoveries of William Cullen and Joseph Black (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975).

4 The Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine, London, holds at least four fairly complete sets of lectures, as well as a number of more fragmentary sets: William Cullen, “Notes Taken by Charles Blagden from Lectures on Chemistry 1765–6” (1766), MS 1922, Blagden Papers; Cullen, “Notes Taken by Will Falconer from Chemistry Lectures” (1765), MS 1919–1921; Cullen, “Notes Taken from Lectures on Chemistry” (n.d. [1760s]), MS/MSL/79a-c Medical Society of London; Cullen, “Lectures on Chemistry 1760” (1760), MS/MSL/7a-7b Medical Society of London. Glasgow University Library holds a vast number of manuscripts, comprising Cullen's own notes as well as fragments of the lecture notes of students: too many to list here individually. Quotations from individual MSS will be specified hereafter. Edinburgh University Library and the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh are two further repositories for the copious number of Cullen papers still extant.

5 Jan Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry and Enlightenment in Britain, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 42–3, and Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment, 271.

6 Sylas Neville and Basil Cozens-Hardy, The Diary of Sylas Neville 1767–1788 (London: Oxford University Press, 1950), 151.

7 John Elliot, Philosophical Observations on the Senses of Vision and Hearing to Which Are Added, a Treatise on Harmonic Sounds, and an Essay on Combustion and Animal Heat (London: Printed for J. Murray, 1780), 122–3.

8 Neville wrote: “I find that Dr. Cullen notwithstanding his present eminence had but a poor education and had not acquired much learning before he was 40 years old. … Knowles heard that one J. Brown, a great Latinist, who writes many Theses for those who are not ashamed to bring out the composition of another as their own, assists Cullen in his Latin.” Neville and Cozens-Hardy, Diary of Sylas Neville, 144. Although Cullen lectured in English, examinations were still held in Latin, and Neville also testifies to the fact that in spite of Cullen's alleged lack of facility with the language he was nevertheless sufficiently proficient to hear examinations without assistance.

9 Letter, Robert Wallace to John Thomson, 5 July 1811, quoted in J. Thompson, An Account of the Life, Lectures and Writings of William Cullen (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1832), vol. 1, 25.

10 George Fordyce, “Notes Taken by John Samwell from Chemistry Lectures” (1765), MS Gen 786, Glasgow University Library.

11 George Fordyce, Elements of Agriculture (Edinburgh, 1765). This work is undated, but evidence in other sources confirms it as having been published for the first time in 1765.

12 Jeremy Bentham, “Commonplace Book” (1769), Add. MS 33564, British Library, London, fols. 55 ff.

13 Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring, 11 vols. (Edinburgh: Simkin, Marshall & Co, 1838–1843), vol. 10, 184.

14 George Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry 1786” (1786), MSS 146–148, St Thomas's Hospital, Henry Rumsey Papers, Royal College of Physicians, London; Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry 1786” (1786), MS E 146 G, Historical Collection, Royal Society of Chemistry Library, London; and Fordyce, “Notes Taken by Richard Whitfield from Chemistry Lectures” (1788), M58–M60, St Thomas's Collection, King's College Library, London.

15 George Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry” (n.d. [1770s?]), Ferguson MS 172, Glasgow University Library, fol. 9.

16 Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment, 62–64.

17 William F. Bynum, “Cullen, William (1710–1790),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Henry Colin Gray Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004), http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/6874 (accessed 11 June 2009).

18 The pedagogical network headed by Cullen spanned Europe and America, and included such luminaries as Jeremy Bentham (discussed further in Part II) and Benjamin Rush. See Georgette Taylor, “Variations on a Theme: Patterns of Congruence and Divergence among Eighteenth-Century Chemical Affinity Theories” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of London, 2006), Appendix 2.

19 Thomas Thomson, The History of Chemistry (London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1830), 307.

20 Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment, 65, and Golinski, Science as Public Culture, 17.

21 Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment. See also Donovan, Campbell, and Skinner, “William Cullen and the Research Tradition of Eighteenth-Century Scottish Chemistry,” 98–114.

22 For an example of this mechanical chemistry, see John Freind, Chymical Lectures: In Which Almost All the Operations of Chymistry Are Reduced to Their True Principles and the Laws of Nature. Read in the Museum at Oxford, 1704 (London: Jonah Bower, 1712).

23 Golinski, Science as Public Culture, chapter 1.

24 Matthew D. Eddy, The Language of Mineralogy: John Walker, Chemistry and the Edinburgh Medical School, 1750–1800 (London: Ashgate, 2008), 8–9, 62–3.

25 Lectures 4–7, William Cullen, “Notes Taken by Charles Blagden.”

26 William Cullen, “The Plan of a Course of Chemical Lectures and Experiments to Be Given in the College of Glasgow During the Session Mdccxlviii” (1748), MS 1069, Cullen Papers, Glasgow University Library.

27 William Cullen, “Lectures on Chemistry” (n.d. [1748/9]), Cullen 15, Cullen Papers, Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh Library, lectures 4–6.

28 William Cullen, “The Plan of a Course of Chemical Lectures and Experiments to Be Given in the College of Glasgow During the Session Mdccxlviii” (1748), MS 1069, Cullen Papers, Glasgow University Library.

29 See, for example, lectures 28, 29 and 30 of Cullen, “Notes Taken by Charles Blagden” (op. cit. n. 4), London. Elective attraction, also known as affinity, is discussed further below, and in Part II of this paper.

30 Ibid.

31 For a useful discussion of Cullen's history of chemistry as included in his lectures, see John R. R. Christie, “Historiography of Chemistry: Hermann Boerhaave and William Cullen,” Ambix 41, no. 1 (1994): 4–19.

32 Cullen, “The Plan of a Course of Chemical Lectures,” 1.

33 Cullen, “Notes Taken from Lectures on Chemistry,” fol. 29.

34 Cullen, “Notes Taken by Charles Blagden,” lecture 21.

35 Cullen, “Notes Taken by Charles Blagden,” lecture 19. Square brackets denote expansion of abbreviated words.

36 William Cullen, “Lectures on Chemistry,” unknown [1764?], MS/MSL 79a–c, Medical Society of London (MSL), Wellcome Library, London, fols. 66–67. See also Cullen, “Notes Taken by Charles Blagden,” lectures 19–21

37 Cullen, “Notes Taken from Lectures on Chemistry,” fol. 66.

38 See John R. R. Christie, Geoffrey N. Cantor, and M. Jonathan S. Hodge, “Ether and the Science of Chemistry,” in Conceptions of Ether: Studies in the History of Ether Theories 1740–1900, ed. Geoffrey N. Cantor and M. Jonathan S. Hodge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 85–110.

39 Cullen, “Notes Taken from Lectures on Chemistry,” fols. 66–67.

40 Cullen, “Notes Taken by Charles Blagden,” lectures 60–63 and 81. Fixed air (or carbon dioxide) had been described for the first time by Black in his MD dissertation of 1754. Cullen often called it “mephitic air” and for a while at least suggested that it might be an ingredient of phlogiston. See Georgette Taylor, “Unification Achieved: William Cullen's Theory of Heat and Phlogiston as an Example of His Philosophical Chemistry,” British Journal for the History of Science 39, no. 4 (2006): 477–501.

41 Most popular works on the history of chemistry, as well as the vast number of published papers on the Chemical Revolution, claim that the overthrow of phlogiston was the crucial event of the late eighteenth century. This kind of argument in many cases emanates from the Kuhnian account of scientific revolutions, particularly the chemical revolution: Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

42 Cullen, “Notes Taken by Will Falconer,” fol. 72v.

43 For more details on Cullen's novel ‘phlogiston theory,’ see Taylor, “Unification Achieved.”

44 Cullen, “Notes Taken by Charles Blagden,” lecture 9.

45 On Cullen's emphasis of the usefulness of chemistry, see Jan Golinski, “Utility and Audience in Eighteenth Century Chemistry: Case Studies of William Cullen and Joseph Priestley,” British Journal for the History of Science 21 (1988): 1–31; Donovan, Philosophical Chemistry in the Scottish Enlightenment, 65–66; John R. R. Christie et al., “William Cullen and the Practice of Chemistry,” in William Cullen and the Eighteenth Century Medical World, ed. A. Doig, J. P. S. Ferguson, E. A. Milne, and R. Passmore (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 98–109; Stephen Shapin, “The Audience for Science in Eighteenth Century Edinburgh,” History of Science 12 (1974): 95–121; and Golinski, Science as Public Culture.

46 Briefly, affinity theory was concerned with with the varying tendencies of different substances to combine together, and the apparently preferential nature of chemical combination so that one substance could be used to separate two others in combination.

47 Wilda Anderson, Between the Library and the Laboratory (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). See also Maurice Crosland, Historical Studies in the Language of Chemistry (London: Heinemann, 1962).

48 We are indebted for much of the biographical information on Fordyce to Noel Coley, whose entry for Fordyce in the Dictionary of National Biography and Notes and Records paper are invaluable: Noel G. Coley, “Fordyce, George (1736–1802),” ODNB, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9878 (accessed 6 February 2010); Coley, “George Fordyce MD FRS (1736–1802): Physician-Chemist and Eccentric,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London 55, no. 3 (2001): 395–409.

49 Golinski, Science as Public Culture, 38.

50 Coley, “George Fordyce Md Frs (1736–1802).” William Saunders (1743–1817) was a pupil of Cullen's at Edinburgh, graduating in 1765. He was elected physician to Guy's Hospital in 1770. See Norman Moore, “Saunders, William (1743–1817),” rev. Jean Loudon, ODNB, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/24705 (accessed 23 December 2013).

51 Golinski, Science as Public Culture, 65–66.

52 Coley, “George Fordyce MD FRS (1736–1802).” On the medical marketplace in eighteenth-century London, see Richard Barnett, Sick City: Two Thousand Years of Life and Death in London (London: Strange Attractor Press, 2008), in particular chapter 2. Also, Roy Porter, “Medical Lecturing in Georgian London,” British Journal for the History of Science 28, no. 1 (1995): 91–99.

53 See Mary D. Archer and Christopher D. Haley, eds., The 1702 Chair of Chemistry at Cambridge: Transformation and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

54 John Hadley, An Introduction to Chemistry Being the Substance of a Course of Lectures Read Two Years Successively in the Laboratory at Cambridge, MS R.1.50/51 (1759), Trinity College Library, Cambridge.

55 Jan Golinski, “Peter Shaw: Chemistry and Communication in Augustan England,” Ambix 30, no. 1 (1983): 19–29.

56 Coley, “George Fordyce MD FRS (1736–1802).”

57 Coley, “George Fordyce MD FRS (1736–1802),” 398.

58 Letter from Fordyce to William Cullen, 4 September 1762, in George Fordyce, “Five Letters to William Cullen” (1759–1774), MS 180, Cullen Papers, Glasgow University Library.

59 Fordyce to Cullen, 4 September 1762.

60 William Saunders, A Syllabus of Lectures on Chymistry ([London?]: [1770?]).

61 Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry 1786,” MSS 146–148, Lecture 1^st.

62 Charles Caldwell, Autobiography, with Preface, Notes, and Appendix by Harriot W. Warner (Philadelphia, PA: Lippincott, Grambo, and Co., 1855), 124.

63 Fordyce, “Notes Taken by John Samwell”; cf. n. 10.

64 Fordyce, “Notes Taken by John Samwell,” fols. 37–67.

65 Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry,” Ferguson MS 172.

66 Fordyce, “Notes Taken by John Samwell,” fol. 37.

67 Fordyce, “Notes Taken by John Samwell,” fol. 53; Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry 1786,” MS E 146 G, fol. 62.

68 Fordyce, “Notes Taken by John Samwell,” fol. 53

69 Fordyce, Elements of Agriculture, 3.

70 Fordyce, Elements of Agriculture, Plate 3rd and explanation of 3rd Plate, fig. VII.

71 Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry,” Ferguson MS 172, fol. 9.

72 Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry 1786,” MS E 146 G, fol. 70.

73 Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry 1786,” MS E 146 G, fol. 72.

74 Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry,” Ferguson MS 172, fol. 20–21

75 Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry 1786,” MSS 146–148, Lecture 5.

76 Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry 1786,” MSS 146–148, Lecture 5.

77 Henry Guerlac, “The Background to Dalton's Atomic Theory,” in John Dalton and the Progress of Science, ed. D. S. Cardwell (New York: Manchester University Press, 1968), 57–91.

78 Glasgow University Library holds another set of lectures, undated and with the lecturer not specified, but it is clear from internal evidence that the lecturer was Fordyce, and that they should be dated between 1765 and 1780s — probably from the early 1770s. These include the above example of muriatic acid's combinations with mercury, so it seems likely that these ideas were being disseminated much earlier than 1786. Fordyce, “Lectures on Chemistry,” Ferguson MS 172.

79 Brian B. Kelham and Donald S. Cardwell, “Atomic Speculation in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in John Dalton and the Progress of Science, ed. Cardwell, Ignore GT's interpolation here, since the book was cited earlier, in n.77. 109–24, is the most often cited paper claiming Higgins as a pioneer in atomic thinking. For more on Bryan Higgins and his nephew William, also commonly regarded, not least by William himself, as pre-empting Dalton's atomic theory, see Thomas Sherlock Wheeler and James Riddick Partington, The Life and Work of William Higgins Chemist (1763–1825) Including Reprints of ‘a Comparative View of the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Theories’ and ‘Observations on the Atomic Theory and Electrical Phenomena’ by William Higgins (London: Pergamon Press, 1960).

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Georgette Taylor

Georgette Taylor completed her PhD in 2006 at University College London, on the affinity theories that were prevalent in the chemistry of eighteenth-century Britain. Her research explored the teaching of chemistry, in particular by William Cullen and by many of his ex-students. She won the 2008 Partington Prize awarded by the Society for the History of Alchemy and Chemistry for “Tracing Influence in Small Steps: Richard Kirwan's Quantified Affinity Theory.” A post-doctoral fellowship followed with the project “Analysis and Synthesis in Nineteenth-Century Chemistry: Towards a New Philosophical History of Scientific Practice.” At present, she is an honorary research associate at UCL, while also working as a research and development manager at a software company, pursuing a degree in mathematics, and continuing her research on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chemistry. Address: 5 Dobson Walk, Wimblington, March, PE15 0PN; E-mail: [email protected].