The Physic Garden Read online

  Rather, I feel, it is the noxious effluents and vapours of such as the type foundry and numerous other manufactories, which have been established in our town, which destroy our trees and shrubs and flowers, which poison our rivers, which will, I do believe, ultimately destroy us all, for are we not made of the same organic matter? When the plants begin to die, we should look to ourselves and our own health to follow them into putrefaction.

  Now, Glasgow is indeed growing and flourishing, but not in any way of which a gardener would approve. Not to put too fine a point on it, the town which, in my youth, was a place of many gardens and still full of the scent of flowers, now stinks to high heaven. The waters that were clear, in which the fish swam, over which the birds flew, are livid and sluggish as they flow through the town. The green leaves turn yellow and sour, even as they unfurl on the tree. The bark that should be silver or brown is as caked with dirt as the stones of this old house and even the statues on some of the new buildings, the gods and angels, already have a thin overlay of soot.

  I have to remind myself that I am no longer a gardener and need not care for such things. But old habits die hard, and I do not like the smoke and the fog and the soot, even though I seem miraculously immune to its ill effects. There is nothing left of the dear, green place that Saint Mungo loved, and he would recognise no part of it. The folk of this town grow as stunted as the trees. They are pale and cough a great deal, and I think it was not so in my youth, no matter how hard the privations that the poor had to endure then. But progress must have its way, as my sons are always telling me and perhaps they are right.

  My father and Professor Hamilton made strenuous efforts on behalf of the physic garden but they were sadly thwarted by Faculty itself, for a third type foundry was soon built. Everyone knew what the effects of the smoke and fumes would be but nobody was prepared to make a decision to save the garden. And so we limped on in this fashion until Professor Hamilton himself took ill and died. He was then only thirty-two years old. It was in May of 1790 that Professor James Jeffray was appointed to the Chair of Botany and Anatomy in his stead. But in the type foundry next door they were melting lead, tin and antimony. You could taste them on your tongue. Like Canute, and just as helplessly wise, my poor father stood among his plants, head bowed before the onslaught of the incoming industrial tide.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Anatomist

  Professor Jeffray had a fondness for wild experimentation and sensational ventures. His anatomical lectures were well attended because he was a great showman where these were concerned. But as I have said, his botanical lectures, which he was supposed to give in the summer months, were tedious affairs, blighted by his own lack of interest. A little while after the affair of the rat, he proposed that Thomas Brown undertake the lectures in his stead. Brown’s first course of lectures was successful and in May of the following year, he was appointed to teach botany in the university ‘so long as it shall be expedient’. The arrangement suited both men. But it meant that neither could afford to offend the other too much, although I cannot think that Jeffray was a man whom Thomas would have chosen for a friend, had circumstances been different.

  Thomas, I have already begun to describe for you and now that I have made a start, I am afraid I shall write even more of him. Memories jostle my pen: the way he stood, his habit of rocking back and forth on his heels, the way he walked through the gardens with his head in the air, which gave him a haughty look, completely belied by his ability to focus all his attention on you, staring at you with those pale, clever eyes, as though your every word was important to him and for all I know, that may have been the truth. My words may have been important to him at that time.

  But I am somewhat at a loss to bring James Jeffray clearly before your sight because my judgement of him is clouded by subsequent events. He died only a few years ago. He had been professor of anatomy for fifty-eight years, and must, in that time, have contributed a prodigious amount to the study of medicine. Back then, as a young man, he was impulsive, intelligent, experimental. All these things. Mercurial. You could never quite pin him down.

  There were those who called him a mere sawbones, myself included at that time, albeit in private, and only when I was in conversation with Thomas Brown. There were those who thought he was a genius. Perhaps both judgements were true. Most of his qualities would seem to be admirable. And yet, there was something repellent about his demeanour, or I always found it so. There was something about his ruthlessness in the pursuit of knowledge that gave the observer – this observer, at any rate – a certain feeling of revulsion, like a premonition of dreadful things to come. And yet, he was in no way to blame. In no way at all.

  Much later, after all was said and done, something happened that may serve to explain both Jeffrey’s genius and my misgivings. You will no doubt have heard the tale. I was not there. Oh no. I was certainly not there. And somehow, I do not think that Thomas would have been there either. Not by then. He would have learned his lesson all too well by then I think, and he had even resigned as lecturer in botany a couple of years earlier. But Professor Jeffray’s courses in anatomy were still exceedingly popular. The numbers who enrolled annually were sometimes as many as two hundred. And as with botany, samples were required. But these were not things that could be gathered by young lads venturing into the countryside on fine days in June. Jeffray needed human specimens. And he needed them to be dead. Not surprisingly, there was some difficulty in obtaining subjects for demonstration. Executed criminals were fair game, but there were few such in Glasgow at that time. I would never have called this a law-abiding town, but murder was still something of a rarity.

  However, in 1818, one Matthew Clydesdale, a weaver from Airdrie, was arrested and charged with murdering an old man in a fit of drunken violence. I suppose Clydesdale was neither better nor worse than many a working man who indulges a little too freely and loses his temper, but in this case the results were tragic. Clydesdale was a big man, and his much older victim could not defend himself. He fell down, banged his head on a flagstone and died. Clydesdale was brought to trial in Glasgow, found guilty of a murder, which was never, I think, his intention, and sentenced to be hung, with the additional judgement that his body was to be anatomised afterwards, a slightly more merciful version of the old, barbarous custom of hanging, drawing and quartering which was generally meted out to Scottish patriots by their neighbours, and latterly to young men such as Andrew Hardie and John Baird, tricked into acts of treason. There had not been a public execution, or indeed any execution for murder, in Glasgow for ten years. As I said, this is by no means a law-abiding town, but murder was still enough of a rarity to be cause for comment, speculation, curiosity. It was by no means the only offence for which the penalty was death. Robbery was also a capital offence, but the additional sentence of being sent to the anatomists was generally the prerogative of foul murderers. Unless one of the professors tipped the wink to the hangman, and there were no close relatives with a prior claim on the body, relatives moreover who were ready to defend it from those who might come to dig it up again in the night. There was a highly lucrative trade in resurrected bodies at that time, certainly enough to encourage a few unscrupulous individuals to cut out the inconvenience of natural death and burial and facilitate the provision of fresh bodies themselves.

  Many people came to watch the execution that late autumn day. It was a regular day’s entertainment. I remember the crowds, although I myself kept well away from the jail square and the Saltmarket where the gallows had been erected in front of the brand new High Court building. There was ale for sale and spirits and all kinds of comestibles and sweetmeats. It was a grand spectacle, so people told me afterwards. The children loved it, and if it taught them a lesson in good behaviour, so much the better. One mother actually said that to her ragged brood within my hearing as she herded them towards the High Court! The authorities even had to post soldiers by the timber footbridge over the river, lest the crowds overwhelm it wi
th their numbers and caused a catastrophe as they struggled to get a better view of proceedings. More fodder for the anatomists I suppose.

  There were two hangings that day. A youngster called Simon Ross was hanged for theft, and I believe the poor lad took a long time to die, twitching and struggling on the rope, a truly dreadful procedure to behold. Clydesdale’s end was much quicker. He was by far the bigger man and the weight of his body must have pulled him down and broken his neck and hastened his end, thank-God. Once they had been pronounced dead, Clydesdale was taken down, placed in a cart and trundled up the Saltmarket, across Trongate and into the High Street, to the university college. Poor young Ross was handed over to his grieving relatives and buried somewhere in the Ramshorn graveyard, so the anatomists did not get their hands on him then, and his grave was well guarded, so that they would not get their hands on him afterwards, either. The resurrection men who were hard at work procuring corpses for scholars would have been sorely disappointed.

  * * *

  The anatomy theatre was very crowded. I suppose that some who had watched the execution came to watch the dissection. We are wont to talk of nature red in tooth and claw, but there are few creatures of the natural world so lacking in sympathy for the fellow members of their own species as human beings. The dog will fight his enemies to the death, but, on the whole, will spare the lesser canine who submits to him. Even rooks will mob the hunting hawk to protect their own kind. The casualties of the overcrowded rookery are few, and then only when the young tumble from the nest. We are more like insects, I think, but even they eat because they must and that for the greater good.

  The anatomists who received the body of the unfortunate Clydesdale were Jeffray and Doctor Andrew Ure, who seemed to have a touching not to say daft faith in the possibility that he really could reanimate a dead body and bring it back to life. James Jeffray, I’m absolutely sure, held no such illusion. He was no fool but he was quite prepared to experiment with galvanisation – the application of the mysterious current to the corpse – in an effort to observe the effects of such stimulation on the human anatomy.

  One of the customers at our bookshop, Hugh Brodie, a Glasgow watchmaker who had a somewhat unlikely passion for the works of Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe, that is, for gloomy castles and distressed damsels and mysterious murders, came to the shop specifically to tell me all about it. I suppose it fed his taste for the bizarre. When I pointed out that reanimating a murderer might be something less than advisable, he became quite angry with me.

  ‘There’s no need to tak’ that tone wi’ me!’ he said, as though I had deliberately affronted him.

  ‘What would they have done if he had lived?’ I asked, amicably enough. ‘Would they perhaps have hung him all over again, do you think? And what would the legal position have been in such a case? Would it have been permissible?’

  He departed, muttering and shaking his head, and that was a customer we had lost, but I found I didn’t care. Besides, the question was not such a foolish one after all, for I later learned that Ure had attempted to answer it for me.

  ‘This event, however little desirable with a murderer, and perhaps contrary to the law, would yet have been pardonable in one instance, as it would have been highly honourable and useful to science,’ were his exact words.

  Useful to science. Ah yes. How many execrable acts have been justified with those glib words? How many will yet be justified? But I repeat that I do not think that Jeffray anticipated any such result.

  The way it went was this. The men first dissected the body. There was no flow of blood. Clydesdale was well and truly dead. But they wished to expose areas where galvanisation might be applied. The connecting rods were fixed to heel and spinal cord whereupon Clydesdale’s knee flexed so violently that he appeared to kick one of the assistants in the ribs, thus causing the man almost to fall over, in a somewhat ironic recreation of the actions that had brought the weaver to this pass in the first place.

  Then they connected the rods to what they called the phrenic nerve and the diaphragm. Ure thought to restore breathing to the corpse and, indeed, according to written reports at the time, the ‘chest heaved and fell. The belly was protruded and again collapsed.’

  Tiring of this, at last, with the corpse showing no signs whatsoever of reviving permanently, they applied the current to the forehead and the heel, encompassing the whole man, as warlocks are said to do when they make their followers swear allegiance to Satan. Then they varied the voltage.

  Expressions of all kinds appeared to flit across the murderer’s features in a terrible imitation of life. He seemed, by turns, enraged, horrified, despairing, amused and desperate. It was at this point, I believe, that several of the spectators turned sick and were forced to leave the theatre in order to vomit in the street outside. One gentleman fainted and had to be carried out. However, some of the students, of a more sanguine disposition, were distinctly heard to clap their hands, whistle and cheer, as such young gentlemen invariably will. The corpse remained resolutely dead, although to make doubly sure, Jeffray despatched him again with a scalpel, slicing right into his neck and almost decapitating the unfortunate weaver in the process.

  Clydesdale’s corpse was eventually released to his wife. She, poor woman, had given birth to a son less than a month before the assault that was to result in her husband’s execution. I do not know where the body was buried, although executed murderers were usually laid to rest under the courtyard of the High Court building, with the weight of the forces of law and order pressing down upon them, presumably to stop their restless ghosts from troubling the populace at large.

  There can have been few murderers, however, who proved to be so resolutely, finally, unarguably dead as Clydesdale. Where galvanisation and the combined skills of two professors of anatomy had failed, even the saviour himself might have faltered, Lazarus notwithstanding. But I am an old man and must be allowed my fun, if fun it can be called. A gruesome joke, certainly. And I tell this tale only to bring Jeffray before your eyes. He was this kind of man, you see, quite ruthless in the pursuit of learning. The great mass of people may well approve of him and find his actions both explicable and even praiseworthy. It is universally accepted that the pursuit of knowledge is a very fine thing. And Clydesdale was, after all, a common murderer.

  * * *

  All of that came later and at the time I knew only that I found Jeffray and his obsession with anatomy disturbing. During the years when we were friends, Thomas would sometimes say to me that observing the way the human body worked was like seeing a machine, a complicated machine, where everything was dependent upon everything else.

  ‘So much sickness and misery,’ he would say, ‘is caused because the machine that we call our body breaks down. If we could only repair that machine, William! If we knew how these things worked. If we could effect adequate repairs, then so many lives might be saved, so much misery avoided!’

  It was a sign of the times. There was a positive rage for machinery, for mechanisms that worked and could be fine tuned and repaired when they broke down. It was one reason why the pursuit of perpetual motion was so much in vogue. The type foundry was one such mechanism that was admirably suited to its purpose. But the problem for the new manufacturers was so often that their human operatives broke down beyond hope of repair, crushed, exhausted, sickly as the plants in my garden and certainly far more ill nourished.

  When Thomas said to me that it would be a blessing if one could learn how to repair the human body, I could not help but agree with him. He respected Professor Jeffray well enough. To be sure, he would sometimes say, ‘Oh, Jeffray is such a showman!’ and there would be a slight air of disapproval even from him. Yet there was always the implied ‘but’ in such remarks. ‘But the work he does is worthwhile. But he is a fine surgeon. But anatomy is the way of the future.’

  I believe now, with the benefit of all too many years of hindsight, that there was a connection between the aspirations of the new manufacture
rs and the desire to learn how to mend the human body in the abstract. And I doubt if there was anything very philanthropic about it. It was, rather, a matter of good business sense. Machines might run endlessly with the application of a little oil, a small adjustment here or there, so why not people? The poor factory weans could work fourteen hours a day, but those who did the full stretch soon fell ill, crippled by calamitous fatigue as much as by the constant collision of wood and metal with poorly formed bones. If machines could be fixed, then so could people. Rest and nourishment were costly alternatives. Surgery might come cheaper. This was their motivation, or so I believed and still continue to believe, although I cannot accuse everyone of an equal cynicism. And I cannot accuse my friend Thomas Brown of desiring anything but the general good of mankind, although for a long time I blamed him, ferociously and bitterly.

  By the time Jeffray was performing his experiments with the reanimation of corpses, I had learned other, more subtle and yet more terrible lessons. And so had Thomas Brown. Which serves to explain why neither of us wished to witness the galvanisation of Matthew Clydesdale. His was, as it turns out, the last body to be sent for public dissection, the authorities having a little more compassion, or perhaps a little more distaste for the subject, than either of the distinguished medical men involved.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  My Father and My Family

  One way and another, the turn of the century was a terrible time in Glasgow. There had been shortages of even the most basic foods, oatmeal and potatoes, and there had been riots in the town, since when folk can barely afford to eat, they become weak but they also become desperate on behalf of their children. Food may have been in short supply but alcohol was freely available. A proliferation of ‘tippling houses’ gave working men a respite from all the misery. But when desperate folk have a drink inside them, the least thing will set them off, like a spark on tinder-dry moorland. Troops had been called in to disperse the crowds and had behaved with predictable brutality. Many arrests were made and people were transported to the colonies.