2012 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

wrote the Life of Charles Dickens, the first and
still invaluable biography.
Perhaps we should not make too much of
Forster in the Dickens-Jesus connection
though it is good to think that the novelist’s
closest friend was briefly a Jesuan and, like
Coleridge thirty years before him, had
enjoyed ‘the fields and groves’ of the College.
The second Jesuan in the connection,
however, is someone to whom we can and
should lay proud claim, both with regard to
Dickens and for his own importance as one
of the most interesting and controversial of
Jesus medical men: John Elliotson MD, FRCP,
FRS.
Elliotson was born in Southwark in 1791,
the son of a wealthy druggist. Educated
privately, he went at an early age, to
Edinburgh University, where he obtained his
MD in 1810. He then spent three years at Jesus
as a Fellow Commoner (the College owned
the Half Moon public house in Southwark
High Street where Elliotson’s father had his
shop and this possibly influenced the choice
of Jesus). He worked indefatigably, reading
extensively and, accumulating a ‘large
amount of curious information’. He took his
Cambridge MB in 1816 and his MD in 1821,
by which time he had begun his medical
career at London’s St Thomas’s Hospital
and was building up a flourishing private
practice. His extensively annotated
translation in 1817 of J. F. Blumenbach’s
classic Institutiones physiologicae was a notable
achievement that subsequently formed the
basis for his own comprehensive Human
Physiology of 1840. He published on a range
of topics including prussic acid in the
treatment of stomach disorders, the
diagnosis of heart diseases, and the
medicinal properties of creosote. He was the
first to use iodine in the treatment of goitre
and to prove that glanders can be transmitted
to humans, as well as being one of the earliest
British physicians to advocate the use of the
stethoscope. The Royal College of Physicians
elected him a Fellow in 1822, the Royal
Society in 1829. In short, he was eminently
successful in his profession and a great credit
to Jesus. His younger brother, Thomas,
followed him here in 1822, like him pursued
a medical career, like him became a Fellow of
DICKENS AND JESUS I Jesus College Annual Report 2012 45
John Elliotson
the Royal Society of Physicians. Unlike his
brother’s, however, Thomas’s career was
nowise remarkable.
Small in stature and large of head,
Elliotson’s appearance was not prepossessing
and George Eliot for one was
disagreeably surprised on meeting him:
‘I had expected a tall graceful man. He is
stumpy in person and abrupt in manner’;
while Elizabeth Barrett Browning was put off
by his ‘great boney fingers’. Nor was he
prepossessing in character: vain, irascible,
overbearing in pushing his ideas, lacking in
tact, somewhat humourless. Yet a friend of
George Eliot assured her that he was ‘the best
man living’, and testimonies abound to his
kindness, goodness, and honesty.
By the time Dickens met him, Elliotson
had moved from St Thomas’s to be Professor
of the Principles and Practice of Medicine at
University College and Senior Physician at the
College Hospital. He was at the height of his
success, recognized as one of the leading
physicians of the day. At the same time, he
stood out for his vigorous progressiveness,
his keenness to espouse new ideas, and his
use of innovative medical procedures.
Innovation, indeed, extended even to matters
of dress, with Elliotson abandoning the
standard physician’s garb of knee breeches
and silk stockings. Innovation or not,