Surgical career Said to be a brilliant scholar, Lawrence was the translator of several anatomical works written in Latin, and was fully conversant with the latest research on the continent. He had good looks and a charming manner, and was a fine lecturer. His quality as a surgeon was never questioned. Lawrence helped the radical campaigner
Thomas Wakley found the
Lancet journal, and was prominent at mass meetings for medical reform in 1826. Elected to the Council of the
RCS in 1828, he became its president in 1846, and again in 1855. He delivered their
Hunterian Oration in 1834. During Lawrence's surgical career he held the posts of Professor of Anatomy and Surgery,
Royal College of Surgeons (1815–1822); Surgeon to the hospitals of
Bridewell and
Bethlem, and to the London Infirmary for Diseases of the Eye; Demonstrator of Anatomy, then Assistant Surgeon, later Surgeon,
St Bartholomew's Hospital (1824–1865). Later in his career, he was appointed Surgeon Extraordinary, later
Serjeant Surgeon, to the
Queen. His specialty was
ophthalmology, although he practised in and lectured and wrote on all branches of surgery.
Pugin and
Queen Victoria were among his patients with eye problems.
Shelley and his second wife
Mary Shelley consulted him on a variety of ailments from 1814. Mary's novel
Frankenstein might have been inspired by the vitalist controversy between Lawrence and Abernethy, and "Lawrence could have guided the couple's reading in the physical sciences". Both
Samuel Coleridge and
John Keats were also influenced by the vitalist controversy. Despite reaching the height of his profession with the quality of his surgical work and his textbooks, Lawrence is mostly remembered today for a period in his early career which brought him fame and notoriety, and led him to the brink of ruin.
Controversy and Chancery At the age of 30, in 1813, Lawrence was elected a
Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1815, he was appointed Professor of Anatomy and Surgery by the
College of Surgeons. His lectures started in 1816, and the set was published the same year. The book was immediately attacked by Abernethy and others for
materialism, and for undermining the moral welfare of the people. One of the issues between Lawrence and his critics concerned the origin of
thoughts and
consciousness. For Lawrence,
mental processes were a function of the brain.
John Abernethy and others thought differently: they explained thoughts as the product of vital acts of an immaterial kind. Abernethy also published his lectures, which contained his support for
John Hunter's
vitalism, and his objections to Lawrence's materialism. In subsequent years Lawrence vigorously contradicted his critics until, in 1819, he published a second book, known by its short title of the
Natural history of man. The book caused a storm of disapproval from conservative and clerical quarters for its supposed
atheism, and within the medical profession because he advocated a materialist rather than vitalist approach to human life. He was linked by his critics with such other 'revolutionaries' as
Thomas Paine and
Lord Byron. It was "the first great scientific issue that widely seized the public imagination in Britain, a premonition of the debate over Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, exactly forty years later". Hostility from the
established Church of England was guaranteed. "A vicious review in the Tory
Quarterly Review execrated his materialist explanation of man and mind"; the
Lord Chancellor,
Lord Eldon, in the
Court of Chancery (1822), ruled his lectures blasphemous, on the grounds that the book contradicted
Holy Scripture (the
Bible). This destroyed the book's
copyright. Lawrence was also repudiated by his own teacher, John Abernethy, with whom he had already had a controversy about
John Hunter's teachings. There were supporters, such as
Richard Carlile and
Thomas Forster, and "The Monthly Magazine", in which Lawrence was compared to
Galileo. However, faced with
persecution, perhaps prosecution, and certainly ruin through the loss of surgical patients, Lawrence withdrew the book and resigned from his teaching position. The time had not yet arrived when a science which dealt with man as a species could be conducted without interference from the religious authorities. It is interesting that the
Court of Chancery was acting, here, in its most ancient role, that of a
court of conscience. This entailed the moral law applied to prevent
peril to the soul of the wrongdoer through mortal sin. The remedy was given to the
plaintiff (the
Crown, in this case) to look after the wrongdoer's soul; the benefit to the plaintiff was only incidental. This is also the explanation for
specific performance, which compels the sinner to put matters right. The whole conception is mediæval in origin. It is difficult to find a present-day parallel. The withholding of copyright, though only an indirect financial penalty, was both an official act and a hostile signal. We do not seem to have a word for this kind of indirect pressure, though
suppression of dissent comes closer than
censorship. Perhaps the modern '
naming and shaming' comes closest. The importance of respectability, reputation and public standing were critical in this case, as so often in traditional societies.
Transition to respectability After repudiating his book, Lawrence returned to respectability, but not without regrets. He wrote in 1830 to
William Hone, who was acquitted of libel in 1817, explaining his expediency and commending Hone's "much greater courage in these matters". His last major contribution to the debate was an article on "Life" in the 1819
Rees's Cyclopaedia although this volume had in fact appeared in 1812. He continued to espouse radical ideas and, led by the famous radical campaigner
Thomas Wakley, Lawrence was part of the small group which launched
The Lancet, and wrote material for it. Lawrence wrote pungent editorials, and chaired the public meetings in 1826 at the
Freemasons' Tavern. He was also co-owner of the
Aldersgate Private Medical Academy, with
Frederick Tyrrell.
The 1826 meetings Meetings for members of the college were attended by about 1200 people. The meetings were called to protest against the way surgeons abused their privileges to set student fees and control appointments. In his opening speech Lawrence criticised the by-laws of the College of Surgeons for preventing all but a few teachers in London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen from issuing certificates of attendance at preparatory lectures. He pointed out that Aberdeen and Glasgow had no cadavers for dissection, without which anatomy could not be properly taught. A proposed change in the regulations of the College of Surgeons would soon cut the ground from under the private summer schools, since diplomas taken in the summer were not to be recognised. :"It would appear from the new regulations that sound knowledge was the sort acquired in the winter, when the hospital lecturers delivered their courses, while unsound knowledge was imparted in the summer when only the private schools could provide the instruction". Lawrence in his opening speech, Freemason's Tavern, 1826. Lawrence concluded by protesting against the exclusion of the great provincial teachers from giving recognised certificates.
Gradual change However, gradually Lawrence conformed more to the style of the College of Surgeons, and was elected to their Council in 1828. This somewhat wounded Wakley, who complained to Lawrence, and made some remarks in the
Lancet. But, true to form, Wakley soon saw Lawrence's rise in the college as providing him with an inside track into the working of the institution he was hoping to reform. For some years Lawrence hunted with the Lancet and ran with the college. From the inside, Lawrence was able to help forward several of the much-needed reforms espoused by Wakley. The College of Surgeons was at last reformed, to some extent at least, by a new charter in 1843. This episode marks Lawrence's return to respectability; in fact, Lawrence succeeded Abernethy as the 'dictator' of
Bart's. His need for respectability and worldly success might have been influenced by his marriage in 1828, at the age of 45, to the 25-year-old socially ambitious Louisa Senior. At any rate, from then on Lawrence's career went ever forward. He never looked back: he became
President of the Royal College of Surgeons, and
Serjeant-Surgeon to
Queen Victoria. Before he died she made him a
baronet. He had for many years declined such honours, and family tradition was that he finally accepted to help his son's courtship of an aristocratic young woman (which did not succeed). "Never again [did] he venture to express his views on the processes of evolution, on the past or the future of man." He did, however, warn the young
T.H. Huxley – in vain, it must be said – not to broach the dangerous topic of the evolution of man. In 1844
Carl Gustav Carus, the physiologist and painter, made "a visit to Mr Lawrence, author of a work on the "Physiology of Man" which had interested me much some years ago, but which had rendered the author obnoxious to the clergy... He appears to have allowed himself to be frightened by this, and is now merely a practising surgeon, who keeps his Sunday in the old English fashion, and has let physiology and psychology alone for the present. I found him a rather dry, but honest man". Looking back in 1860 on his controversies with Abernethy, Lawrence wrote of "events which though important at the time of occurrence have long ceased to occupy my thoughts". In 1828, he was elected a foreign member of the
Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and in 1855 a Foreign Honorary Member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Darwin The careful anonymity in which the
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation was published in 1844, and the very great caution shown by
Darwin in publishing his own evolutionary ideas, can be seen in the context of the need to avoid a direct conflict with the religious establishment. In 1838 Darwin referred in his "C" transmutation notebook to a copy of Lawrence's "Lectures on physiology, zoology, and the natural history of man", and historians have speculated that he brooded about the implied consequences of publishing his own ideas. In Lawrence's day the impact of laws on
sedition and
blasphemy were even more threatening than they were in Darwin's time. Darwin referred to Lawrence (1819) six times in his
Descent of man (1871). Lawrence's
Natural history of man contained some remarkable anticipations of later thought, but was ruthlessly suppressed. To this day, many historical accounts of evolutionary ideas do not mention Lawrence's contribution. He is omitted, for example, from many of the Darwin biographies, from some evolution textbooks, essay collections, and even from accounts of pre-Darwinian science and religion. Although the only idea of interest which Darwin found in Lawrence was that of
sexual selection in man, the influence on
Alfred Russel Wallace, was more positive. Wallace "found in Lawrence a possible mechanism of organic change, that of spontaneous variation leading to the formation of new species". == Context ==