V. From Anatomists to Physiologists
3. Printing, Publishing, and Remaking Audiences
When Charles Bell printed his little book A New Idea of the Anatomy of the Brain in 1811 and circulated it among his friends, publicizing was not the same thing as publishing. Bell planned to publicize his work, what he considered his discovery, in three main ways: by circulating a privately-printed pamphlet to one hundred important medical men, natural philosophers, and potential benefactors; by lecturing on it to a wider audience of students who would be drawn to his classroom to hear about his great discovery; and finally, when the new system of brain and nerves and all of Bell’s ideas about it had been thoroughly developed—perhaps a lifelong
project—by publishing a grand book of engravings, a showpiece to leave for posterity, to secure his status as a great discoverer.1 In 1811 this was more or less the set of available options for publicizing one’s work. There were many ways to establish priority or circulate one’s ideas without printing them (the classroom, society
meetings, informal gatherings that helped to constitute professional communities), but options for printing were few and costly.
Though certainly periodicals circulating to a general audience were available by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the majority of British medical periodicals, in particular the weeklies that developed wide audiences, were not born until the 1820s.2 When medical periodicals did begin to circulate, however, they did so
widely, with several competing periodicals becoming available within just a few years of each other. The majority of these medical journals were published in London.
1 See Chapter 2 of this dissertation.
2 Roderick Macleod's London Medical and Physical Journal and James Johnson's Medico-Chirurgical Review were quarterlies that were both in existence before the 1820s, but the bulk of periodicals, and certainly the weeklies, were not founded until later. William Bynum and Janice Wilson, "Periodical Knowledge: Medical Journals and Their Editors in Nineteenth-Century Britain," in Medical Journals and Medical Knowledge: Historical Essays, ed. William Bynum, Stephen Lock, and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), Introduction.
William Bynum and Janice Wilson write, “Crudely speaking, during the century, London had 10 per cent of the population and 15 per cent of the doctors. Up to 50 per cent of the profession spent part of their training in the metropolis, almost 75 per cent of the medical journals were published there....”3 The proliferation of journals was so rapid and altered the nature of publicizing scientific work so totally that, as described in Chapter 1, François Magendie could make the claim that Bell’s work was not sufficiently public to allow him to claim priority for the discovery. Although medical periodicals started being printed later than other kinds of journals, they were a part of a general trend in publishing: the number of periodicals in Britain tripled in the first three decades of the nineteenth century.4 By 1830 pedagogical practices had come to include periodicals—teachers recommended that students read particular periodicals,5 and many assumed that their lectures would appear later in print.
It is very clear, based on the ways he chose to publicize his discovery, whom Bell imagined to be his audience and what level of expertise he thought they had.
Though he did envision publishing a grand series of engravings in book form, he had a clear knowledge of who his audience was in 1811, and maintained that control over the next decade, since he did not, in fact, publish on the nerves until he delivered a lecture at the Royal Society in 1821.6 In the intervening years Bell would have known his audience personally, as members of his classes or as professional colleagues. His audience was also a type of community, formed through direct interactions. The London medical societies, most of which were founded between 1750 and 1820,
3 Ibid., 34.
4 Geoffrey Cantor writes of the increase in periodical literature: “The greatest proportionate increases [in the number of periodicals] occurred… in the late 1810s/early 1820s and in the early 1830s… the number of titles trebled in the first three decades of the new century, and the types of periodical also rapidly increased.” Geoffrey Cantor, Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical: Reading the Magazine of Nature, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture (Cambridge;
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 8.
5 Bell, Institutes of Surgery; Arranged in the Order of the Lectures Delivered in the University of Edinburgh, Preface.
6 Bell, "On the Nerves."
offered the main opportunity to develop communities.7 By 1830, medical audiences and communities had been redefined by the birth of journals; these journals brought people into contact in new ways, creating communities of people who had not met, opening up the audience for medical education, and in some ways bringing the contents of classroom practice itself to a wide reading public. Pedagogical practices came to encompass publishing, revealing assumptions that knowledge could be effectively conveyed through text.
As new audiences were brought together by the periodical press, arguments about what constituted a “public” or an appropriate audience for any given periodical became increasingly important. They were important in general publications aimed at
“improving” the lower classes and in professional periodicals. In the specialized world of medical periodicals, “private” and “public” were terms initially employed when talking about publishing rights to lectures that were “private” versus those that were “public,” and thus the significance of their definitions was economic. Over time, the terms instead began to signify expert and non-expert audiences. Private audiences were controlled, limited, expert. Public audiences were unknown audiences, non-expert audiences, and potentially dangerous audiences. Although radicals and men who devoted themselves entirely to publishing, like Thomas Wakley, are exceptions to this rule, most medical men whose work was published seem to have published some form of scientific or medical (rather than political or literary) text, and it is on this majority that my chapter focuses. Medical men contributed to publications meant for both private and public audiences, helping to create private, expert, medical
knowledge and the sort of depoliticized, safe science meant for broad reading publics.
There has been a host of texts devoted to print culture, to the constitution of a public,
7 Susan C. Lawrence, Charitable Knowledge: Hospital Pupils and Practitioners in Eighteenth-Century London (Cambridge ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 261.
and to the technology of printing.8 My argument concerns the ways in which these sorts of issues affected, and were affected by, medical men. I will begin by looking at the role of medical men in crafting popular scientific texts like the Library of Useful Knowledge and Bell’s Bridgewater treatise that would bring “safe science” or depoliticized science to the working class. I will then move to a discussion of the specialized, deeply political medical journals aimed at a professional, expert audience, while simultaneously attempting to achieve a wide enough circulation to survive.
I. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge—Science for the Public