“Enquire into All the Circumstances of the Patient Narrowly”: John Rutherford’s Clinical Lectures in Edinburgh, 1749–53

Abstract

Early eighteenth-century Edinburgh provided a unique learning environment for aspiring practitioners: one in which the unity of medicine and surgery was appreciated and clinical observations and a reasoning practitioner became the well spring of proper patient care. John Rutherford, a surgical apprentice in this environment, student on the wards of London hospitals and under Boerhaave at Leiden, became one of the original medical professors at the University of Edinburgh medical school in 1726. Rutherford taught the popular, theory-based Practice of Medicine for twenty-two years. Then at the end of 1748 he convinced Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh managers to allow him to begin a new lecture series, entitled Clinical Lectures, conducted at the patient's bedside. Pedagogically, the new lecture series integrated medical theory and its application on the ward. Pragmatically, Rutherford used the Clinical Lectures to transition students into practitioners. He oriented the student to the medical profession at large and placed him simultaneously at the patient-disease-physician interface. He taught that systematic patient observation and examination, when combined with experience and reasoning, were essential to accurate diagnoses and proper therapeutic interventions. Importantly too, Rutherford prepared his students for failure through humility, introspection, and the speculative nature of medical practice.

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