Content area
Full Text
In the fall of 1766, a twenty-one-year-old Philadelphian named Benjamin Rush arrived in Edinburgh for two years of study that would lead to his degree as a doctor of medicine. 1 Among the bits of academic arcana that he recorded in his journal was an anecdote about his anatomy professor, Alexander Monro secundus, third son of the famous Alexander Monro primus, Edinburgh University's first Professor of Anatomy. The senior Dr. Monro had brought his namesake up to succeed him at the university and to carry on his life's work of detailing the anatomy of the human bones and nervous system. This carefully planned succession had been jeopardized at first, it seems, by a disinclination in young Alexander to attend to his books. According to Rush, Alexander Monro secundus was
12 Years old before he could be prevailed upon to apply himself to study of any kind; by means of a strategem his Father contrived to throw Robinson Crusoe into his Hands which he read with great pleasure, & thus contracted a Taste for History-Travels etc which his Father in a little time transferred to the more useful studies.2
On the evidence of Rush's journal, then, we have Daniel Defoe's novel, The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), to thank for the continuation of one of the great medical dynasties in modern history.
So seamless was the transition from father to son that for four years (1754-1758) the two Monros held the professorship conjointly, the elder Monro delivering most of the lectures while the younger finished his medical studies in London, Leyden, and Berlin. In the late 1750s, as the elder Monro's health began to fail, he delivered only the inaugural lecture of his courses, leaving the son to finish the term using notes written for him by his father. 3 The son carried on for the next fifty years, adding another 13,000 to the number of prospective doctors trained in anatomy, physiology, and surgery by Alexander Monro primus. 4 This enormous number of acolytes-which includes, in addition to Rush, such writers as Tobias Smollett, David Hume, and Oliver Goldsmith, and such physicians as William Hunter, John Armstrong, and Alexander Crichton-suggests the extent of the Monros' influence on medical, scientific, and even literary...