[BITList] Involuntary motions

[John Feltham]

More from the North.



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Whytt,  Robert  (1714-1766), physician and natural philosopher, was born in Edinburgh on 6 September 1714. He was the second son of Robert Whytt (d. 1714) of Bennochy, an advocate whose family was traceable to the late fifteenth century and had intermarried with the better-known families of Balfour and Melville, and who died six months before Robert was born. His mother, Jean, daughter of Anthony Murray of Woodend in Perthshire, died about 1720. Whytt was educated first at the public school of Kirkcaldy, where his widowed mother had moved. There is little evidence for the common assumption that about 1727 he followed his elder brother, George (d. 1728), to the University of St Andrews, which George had left abruptly on the death of their mother. It is much more likely that he was the Robert Whyt recorded as matriculating in arts in Edinburgh in 1729, the year after George died. Certainly Whytt was studying medicine there in the following year under Alexander Monro primus, in whose class-list he appears also in 1732 and 1734.

Later in 1734 Whytt left for London to study under the great lithotomist William Cheselden. From the wards of the London hospitals he went to those of Paris and attended the lectures of Jacques Benigne Winslow. After this he studied at the foremost medical school of the time, Leiden, and with the 'teacher of all Europe', the ageing Herman Boerhaave. Whytt took his MD (like many contemporary Scottish physicians) at Rheims, on 2 April 1736. After returning home he took the career steps of taking an equivalent degree from St Andrews, on 31 October 1737, and becoming a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, on 21 June 1738; he was elected a fellow on 27 November and began his practice. His first wife was Helen Robertson, sister of General Robertson, governor of New York. The two children of this marriage died in infancy and Helen died in 1741. On 24 April 1743 he married Louisa Balfour (d. 1764), the White Rose of Pilrig. They had fourteen children, of whom eight had died by the age of five.

Whytt's contemporary reputation rested in the first instance on his use of lime water and soap in cases of the stone of the bladder, about which he published his 'Essay on the virtues of lime-water and soap in the cure of the stone' in Observations and Essays in Medicine by a Society in Edinburgh (vol. 2, pt 2, 1743). Whytt considered that lime water and soap were the active principle of a secret remedy of Joanna Stephens which had been made public at great cost by parliament. Interest had been heightened by the controversy over the death of Sir Robert Walpole, in which was implicated a medicine containing lime. Whytt's paper went through several editions and was translated into French and German. Soap, when dissolved in lime water, remained popular as a lithontriptic until the second half of the nineteenth century.

By 1739 Whytt had begun to question the received views on the nature of the vital motions, and thus to begin his most important enterprise. The Boerhaavian orthodoxy was that the body was a machine composed ultimately of particles, some with chemical properties. No part was played by the soul as a source of motion in the body, as in the traditional systems of Galen and Aristotle, ultimately because Descartes, the greatest proponent of physiological mechanism, had denied it. Descartes had also espoused a modified form of Harvey's doctrine of the circulation of the blood, leaving a residual problem of whether a wholly mechanical heart could account for the circulation of the whole mass of blood, even through the capillaries. Whytt believed that no mere machine could perform vital actions and held that the living body contained a 'sentient principle' that could perceive and react to stimuli in an unconscious way. Unconscious perception was unintelligible to mechanists, for whom the soul, as the organ of perception and rationality, was entirely distinct from matter. In place of the discredited Galen and Aristotle, Whytt could draw support from Hippocrates, who had divided the bodily parts into 'containing', 'contained', and the impetum faciens, the vital spark that provided motion.

Whytt outlined these ideas in a paper read before the Philosophical Society in Edinburgh in 1745 or 1746, which no doubt helped to bring the 'lime-water' doctor more into the public eye. He was teaching in the 'Town's College' in the latter year and was elected professor of the practice of medicine in the Edinburgh medical faculty in the place of Andrew Sinclair, on 26 August 1747. He was also appointed as the professor of the institutes of medicine. Whytt was associated with Alexander Monro primus and William Cullen at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, where he gave clinical lectures in 1760.

Whytt's major work was his Essay on the Vital and other Involuntary Motions of Animals of 1751. In it he elaborated his doctrine of the sentient principle: it was the soul, distributed all over the body and acting in a limited way in the organs and tissues it occupied. It carried impressions in the sensory nerves and initiated motion in the muscles. It was not limited to the brain, for a frog survived the loss of its head. Moreover, the headless frog still retained the power to move its foot away from a pricking needle: clearly the frog retained the power of sentience and motion, which combined to generate a beneficial action. This power, now known as reflex action, lay in the spinal cord, as Whytt showed by destroying it. Whytt's work also drew him into the European arena, where he conducted a controversy with the great Albrecht von Haller on 'sensibility and irritability'-the sentient and motive powers of the parts of the body still generally regarded as a machine. Haller and the mechanists represented Whytt as a follower of the religious enthusiasm of Stahl, the pietist of Halle, who argued for the physiological actions in the body of an autonomous, freely acting, and even wilful soul. But Whytt believed that the soul was bound by the laws of the parts of the body it occupied; this was recognized by a number of practitioners who from the 1740s began to react against the mechanism of Boerhaave. One of them was Francois Boissier de Sauvages, who corresponded with Whytt and taught animist doctrines in Montpellier. A principal argument of Whytt and the animists was that if the body was a hydraulic machine, in the Newtonian manner, then there must be a non-mechanical source of motion that moved it.

Whytt's interest in the sensibility and co-ordination of the nerves led to a major work on nervous diseases in 1764. It has been suggested that this work helped to make 'nervous disease' a fashionable term, replacing 'the vapours'-a remnant of humoral pathology. Whytt's doctrine was that the part of the soul resident in the sensory nerves was so bound by the laws of union of body and soul that it allowed each nerve to transmit only its own kind of stimulus to the brain and spinal cord. Here the soul, acting as a kind of common sensory agent, redirected the stimulus to appropriate motor nerves. This accounted for the 'sympathy' of the parts of the body, many of them later recognized to be under the control of the sympathetic nervous system. In disease these sensibilities and sympathies became distorted. Whytt's general pathology also rested on the principles of unconscious sentience and response, and his lectures, which remain unpublished, drew on the Institutiones pathologia (1750) of Hieronymus David Gaubius, who had been teaching in Leiden since 1744 and who was a follower of Boerhaave.

Whytt's context was the Scottish Enlightenment of Edinburgh and the city's new medical school, and the connections of both with continental and colonial-American medicine. Whytt corresponded with a number of doctors in these places and his works were translated into French and German. His work was recognized by the society of which he was part: he was elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society (16 April 1752) and to the presidency of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (1 December 1763). His position as physician to the king in Scotland is said to have been created for him. There was a pugnacious side to his writing, and he took part in controversies not only with Haller, but with his Edinburgh colleague Alston (on the topic of lime water).

Whytt died in Edinburgh on 15 April 1766. His medical attendants did not name the disease that killed him, and the post mortem revealed fluid in the thorax, a red spot on the stomach wall, and concretions in the pancreas. He was buried in Old Greyfriars Church, where there is a monument to his memory. Whytt's collected works were published by his son in 1768.

Roger French 

Sources  R. K. French, Robert Whytt, the soul, and medicine (1969) + W. Seller, 'Memoir of the life and writings of Robert Whytt, MD, professor of medicine in the University of Edinburgh, 1714-1766', Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 23 (1864), 99 + R. M. Barclay, 'The life and work of Robert Whytt: a preliminary survey', part of an MD diss., Edinburgh, 1922 + A. Bower, The history of the University of Edinburgh, 3 vols. (1817-30) + A. Grant, The story of the University of Edinburgh during its first three hundred years, 2 vols. (1884) + J. Rurhah, 'Robert Whytt, M.D., professor of medicine in the University of Edinburgh', Journal of the Alumni Association of the College of Physicians and Surgeons (1911) + J. D. Comrie, 'An eighteenth-century neurologist', Edinburgh Medical Journal, 3rd ser., 32 (1925), 755 + E. M. W. Balfour Melville MSS, priv. coll. + A. von Haller, Ad Roberti Whytii nuperum scriptum apologia (1764) + A. von Haller, Bibliotheca anatomica, 2 vols. (Zurich, 1774-7) + DSB
Archives Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, corresp., casebook, and lecture notes + U. Edin. L., corresp. and lecture notes + Wellcome L., papers incl. unpublished lectures, case reports, and prescriptions | NRA, priv. coll., letters to J. Oswald
Likenesses  oils, 1863 (after Bellucci, 1738), Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh [see illus.] · Bellucci?, oils, priv. coll.
Wealth at death  'landed' family




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