[BITList] Birds do it, bees do it

[John Feltham]

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Pettigrew,  James Bell  (1832-1908), comparative anatomist, born on 26 May 1832 at Roxhill, Lanarkshire, was the son of Robert Pettigrew and Mary Bell. He was related on his father's side to Thomas Joseph Pettigrew, surgeon, and on his mother's side to Henry Bell, the builder of the Comet steamship. Educated at the Free West Academy of Airdrie, he studied arts at the University of Glasgow from 1850 to 1855. He then migrated to Edinburgh, where he pursued medical studies. In 1858-9 he was awarded Professor John Goodsir's senior anatomy gold medal for the best treatise 'On the arrangement of the muscular fibres in the ventricles of the vertebrate heart' (Philosophical Transactions, 1864). This treatise gained him the appointment of Croonian lecturer at the Royal Society of London in 1860. He received at Edinburgh in 1860 the annual gold medal in the class of medical jurisprudence with an essay 'On the presumption of survivorship' (British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review, January 1865). He graduated MD at Edinburgh in 1861, obtaining the gold medal for his inaugural dissertation on 'the ganglia and nerves of the heart and their connection with the cerebrospinal and sympathetic systems in mammalia'  (Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 1865).

In 1861 Pettigrew acted as house surgeon to Professor James Syme at the Royal Infirmary, Edinburgh, and in 1862 he was appointed assistant in the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England. Here he remained until 1867, adding dissections to the collection and writing papers on various anatomical subjects. In 1867 he contributed a paper to the Transactions of the Linnean Society entitled 'On the mechanical appliances by which flight is maintained in the animal kingdom', and in the same year he left the Hunterian Museum in order to spend two years in the south of Ireland so as to extend his knowledge of the flight of insects, birds, and bats. He also experimented largely on the subject of artificial flight. His Animal Locomotion, or, Walking, Swimming, and Flying, with a Dissertation on aeronautics appeared in 1873 and was translated into French (1874) and German (1879).

Elected FRS in 1869, in the autumn of that year Pettigrew became curator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and pathologist at the Royal Infirmary. He continued his anatomical, physical, and physiological researches, especially those on flight, and in 1870 he published a memoir 'On the physiology of wings, being an analysis of the movements by which flight is produced in the insect, bird and bat' (Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 26).

At Edinburgh Pettigrew was elected FRSE and FRCP (Edin.) in 1873. He was appointed in the same year lecturer on physiology at the College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. In 1874 he was awarded the Godard prize of the French Academie des Sciences for his anatomico-physiological researches and was made a laureate of the Institut de France. In 1875 he was appointed Chandos professor of medicine and anatomy and dean of the medical faculty in the University of St Andrews. In 1875-7 he delivered special courses of lectures on physiology in Dundee, and University College, Dundee, owes its origin largely to his efforts. In 1877 he was elected by the universities of Glasgow and St Andrews to represent them on the General Medical Council. After 1886, when a new medical act enabled each of the Scottish universities to return its own member, Pettigrew represented St Andrews alone on the council. In 1883 he received the honorary degree of LLD at Glasgow. He married, in 1890, Elsie, second daughter of Sir William Gray, of Greatham, co. Durham, but left no family.

Pettigrew died at his home, the Swallowgate, St Andrews, on 30 January 1908. A museum for the botanic gardens was erected in his memory by his widow as an adjunct to the Bute medical buildings of St Andrews University. Pettigrew's Design in Nature, the work which occupied the last ten years of his life, was published posthumously in three volumes in 1908.

D'A. Power 

Michael Bevan 

Sources  Men and women of the time (1899) + The Lancet (8 Feb 1908), 471 + BMJ (8 Feb 1908), 357 + private information (1912) + F. Bennet and M. Melrose, Index of fellows of the Royal Society of Edinburgh: elected November 1783 - July 1883, ed. H. Frew, rev. edn (1984) + WWW
Likenesses  W. W. Ouless, oils, 1902, U. Edin. [see illus.]