This article examines the life and work of the eminent surgeon and philosopher Joseph Henry Green. It details the influence on his literary output of his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge and shows the ways in which transcendental philosophy underpinned his scientific outlook.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was educated at Christ's Hospital School in Horsham, Sussex, and Jesus College, Cambridge. His early addiction to opium had a major impact on his personal and creative life. At the time Green first became acquainted with him, Coleridge had gone (in the hope of having his addiction medically supervised) to live as a paying guest with an apothecary-surgeon, James Gillman, in Highgate. In the event Coleridge lived out the remainder of his life with Gillman and his family. Coleridge has recently been described as ‘one of the most remarkable writers and thinkers in one of English Literature's most remarkable periods’. PerryS. Coleridge's Notebooks: A Selection.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002: p. vii.
2.
Henry Cline senior was educated at Merchant Taylor's School and apprenticed to the surgeon Thomas Smith at St Thomas's Hospital in 1767. During 1774 he attended a course of John Hunter's lectures and gained a diploma from Surgeon's Hall. Cline lectured in anatomy at St Thomas's from 1781 to 1811 and was a surgeon at the hospital from 1784 to 1811. He was President of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1823. Cline's relationship to the Green family was very close and he married a half-sister of Joseph Green. For further reading see TubbsFAGreenJ H, FRS, FRCS: a great surgeon of St Thomas's. St. Thomas's Gazette1974; 72 (1):29.
3.
Astley Paston Cooper was educated at home and apprenticed to his uncle, William Cooper, surgeon to Guy's Hospital, in 1784. He later transferred to Henry Cline senior and attended Edinburgh Medical School from 1787 to 1788. He became Demonstrator in Anatomy at St Thomas's in 1789, and joint Lecturer in Surgery, with Cline, in 1791. Cooper lectured in anatomy at the Royal College of Surgeons between 1793 and 1796 and became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1802. From 1800 to 1825 he was a surgeon at Guy's Hospital. In 1805 Cooper was a founder and first Treasurer of the Medical and Chirurgical Society of London, becoming President of the Society in 1819–20. In 1820 he removed a sebaceous cyst from King George IV's scalp and was subsequently made a baronet. In the later years of his career Cooper was Consulting Surgeon to Guy's. He was President of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1827 and 1836, Sergeant-Surgeon to King William IV in 1828 and Vice-President of the Royal Society in 1830. Green's close relations to Henry Cline and Astley Cooper no doubt helped advance his career in an era when influence and patronage were rife in London hospital medicine. See GoldV. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the appointment of J. F. Daniel, F.R.S., as Professor of Chemistry at King's College London. Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London1973; 28:25–9.
4.
TubbsFA (op. cit. ref. 2).
5.
CreightonC.Dictionary of National Biography.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1890 (CD ROM 1995).
6.
MannPG.John Keats: Further Notes.London: The Keats-Shelley Memorial Association, 1961: p. 23. Thomas Hammond, the father of Ann Eliza and William, had studied at Guy's Hospital and, following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, became a general practitioner in Edmonton, Middlesex. In 1810, at the age of 15, the poet John Keats was apprenticed to Thomas Hammond. At the end of his five-year apprenticeship, Keats enrolled at Guy's and spent a year ‘walking the wards’ with the intention of becoming a general practitioner. As a student at Guy's, Keats attended lectures at St Thomas's, including ‘dissecting and studying morbid anatomy with Joseph Henry Green’. See Motion A. Keats. London: Faber and Faber, 1998: p. 48 and 77. In April 1819 Keats met Coleridge and Green by chance as they were walking along Millfield Lane between Highgate and Hampstead. The three men walked and conversed together for two miles, during which Coleridge, according to Keats, held forth on a thousand topics. See Motion A (ibid.): p. 365.
7.
Green's uncle, Henry Cline, resigned as surgeon in 1812 and was replaced by his son Henry Cline junior. Cline junior died of tuberculosis at the early age of 39 and Green was elected to fill the vacancy. See CreightonC (op. cit. ref. 5).
8.
LambertR.Sir John Simon 1816–1904 and English Social Administration.London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1963: p. 32.
9.
For an interesting account of the appointment process at King's and the significance of influence and patronage, see GoldV (op. cit. ref. 3).
10.
The property no longer exists.
11.
Obituary notices of Fellows deceased. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London1865; 3:14. Benjamin Collins Brodie (1783–1862) attended anatomical lectures at St Bartholomew's Hospital and also at the Hunterian School of Anatomy, Great Windmill Street, London, from 1801 to 1802. He entered St George's Hospital as a pupil under Sir Everard Home in 1803, and was appointed House Surgeon in 1805; he was Demonstrator in the School of Anatomy 1805–12; Assistant Surgeon at St George's 1808–22; Professor of Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, Royal College of Surgeons 1819; Sergeant-Surgeon to King William IV 1832; and he was created Baronet in 1834. He was Examiner and Member of Council, Royal College of Surgeons, and introduced the Fellowship examination in 1843; President in 1844; and President of the Royal Society in 1858.
12.
WangensteenOWangensteenS.The Rise of Surgery: From Empiric Craft to Scientific Discipline.Folkestone: Dawson, 1978.
13.
King's College London College Archives reference GB 0100 T/GREEN M67–69.
14.
SimonJ. Memoir of Green's life published as an introduction to GreenJH. Spiritual Philosophy Founded on the Teaching of the Late Samuel Taylor Coleridge.London: Macmillan, 1865: vol. I, p. li.
15.
The Lancet1863; ii:736.
16.
A wide-grooved lithotome director.
17.
WangensteenOWangensteenS (op. cit. ref. 12): pp. 68–9.
18.
Op. cit. ref. 13.
19.
TubbsFA (op. cit. ref. 2): p. 30.
20.
According to Kelly, Coindet first advocated iodine internally for goitre in 1820. See KellyFC. Iodine in medicine and pharmacy. Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine1961; 54:831–6.
21.
Removal of the right lobe of the thyroid gland. The Lancet1828; ii:351–2. The wound was covered with lint and left open to granulate. The patient was slow to recover and her subsequent brief life was painful in the extreme and serves to illustrate the nature and limitations of the available therapeutics. On 23 May she was given three grains of calomel and this was repeated on 25 May when a bread poultice was applied to her wound and she was given an enema. On 26 May she was given three grains of mercury with chalk and half a grain of opium twice a day and this continued until 30 May, when she was given three grains of ipecacuanha every four hours and her wound was bathed with chloride of soda. By 4 June she was very weak and was given three grains of mercury with chalk, a quarter of a grain of opium and two ounces of brandy. On 5 June she had difficulty in swallowing, was annoyed by the light, suffered tremors of the lower extremities and her pulse was very weak. She was given one ounce and a half of tincture of roses, 15 minims of tincture of henbane every six hours and one ounce and a half of port wine. By 5 June she was obviously very ill and even more desperate remedies were applied. Her head was shaved, four leaches were applied to each temple and she was given mercury with chalk. On 6 June she was given one ounce and a half of camphor mixture, five grains of carbonate of ammonia and four minims of ‘the black drop’ every four hours. On 7 June, her ‘countenance became blue [she] became very irritable and delirious, the dresser applied 12 leaches to the temples, but she did not experience any relief, and died in the evening in convulsions’.
22.
GrossSD.John Hunter and His Pupils.Philadelphia: Presley Blakiston, 1881: p. 101.
23.
Solger was a student of the philosopher Johan Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and, together with Tieck, the Schlegel brothers, August Wilhelm (1767–1845) and Friedreich (1772–1829), and Novalis (1772–1801), a member of the so-called Jena Romantics. For further reading see HeiferMB. Retreat of Representation: The Concept of Darstellung in German Critical Discourse.New York: State University of New York Press, 1996.
24.
PowerD.Plan's Lives of the Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons.London: Royal College of Surgeons, 1930: vol. IV, p. 466.
25.
SimonJohn was educated at Dr Charles Parr Burney's School in Greenwich and apprenticed to Joseph Henry Green in 1833. He gained his diploma from the Royal College of Surgeons in 1838 and became Green's Joint Demonstrator in Anatomy at King's College. Following the establishment of King's College Hospital in 1839, Simon became an Assistant Surgeon there. Appointed Lecturer in Anatomical Physiology at St Thomas's in 1847, he became assistant surgeon there on Green's retirement in 1852. Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons 1844; Member of Council 1868–80; Vice President 1876 and 1877, President 1878. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1844. Appointed Medical Officer of Health to the City of London in 1848, Chief Medical Officer to the General Board of Health and subsequently the Local Government Board 1855–76. Crown Member of the General Medical Council 1876–95. KCB 1887. Simon described Coleridge's papers at his death as consisting of ‘fragments - for the most part inadaptable fragments, and beginnings, and studies of special subjects, and numberless notes on the margins and fly-leaves of books …. many of the written fragments were in the highest degree interesting and suggestive … but there was no system of philosophy, nor even the raw materials for such a system’. See Simon's memoir of Green published as an introduction to Spiritual Philosophy (op. cit. ref. 14): p. xxxviii.
26.
MillJS.Autobiography. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1873/1989: p. 130. Mill was a devotee of Coleridge's work, finding the key to escaping his own extended bout of depression on reading ‘Dejection: an ode’ in Coleridge's Sibylline Leaves of 1817.
27.
AshtonR.The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.Oxford: Blackwell, 1997: p. 196.
28.
DuchesneauF.Vitalism in late eighteenth-century physiology: the cases of Barthez, Blumenbach and John Hunter. In: BynumWPorterR, eds. William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985: p. 259.
29.
AshtonR (op. cit. ref. 27), p. 157.
30.
HunterJohn worked in London as an assistant in the private anatomy school of his brother William (1718–83). Studied under the eminent surgeons William Cheselden (1688–1752) and Percival Pott (1714–88). Commissioned as an army surgeon in 1760, he spent three years on active service in France and Portugal. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767 and Surgeon to St George's Hospital in 1768.
31.
PorterR.Blood and Guts: A Short History of Medicine.London: Allen Lane, 2002: p. 70.
32.
GreenJH.Vital Dynamics.London: William Pickering, 1840: pp. xiv, xix and 17.
33.
GrossSD (op. cit. ref. 22), p. 102.
34.
The Athenaeum: Journal of Literature, Science, and the Fine Arts, 28 July 1866, p. 108. Augustus De Morgan (1806–71) was Professor of Mathematics at University College, London. He contributed a vast number of reviews to The Athenaeum on a wide range of subjects, including astronomy, mathematics, science, religion, the history of science, philosophy and medicine. Some of his comments in his review of Spiritual Philosophy lead to the suspicion that he had not read Green's book very closely.
35.
The Reverend Edward Casaubon, a character in George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, was embarked on the ultimately futile scholarly quest for the Key to all Mythologies. As Baltazar put it, ‘his aim was to prove etymologically the priority and historical accuracy of Genesis as against the legendary accounts of other ancient civilizations … Eliot's relentless critique of his [work] amounts to an informed debunking of the infallibilist position.’ BaltazarL. The critique of Anglican scholarship in George Eliot's Middlemarch. Literature and Theology2001; 15:40–60.
