The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley (23 page)

BOOK: The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley
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Surely, there must be a better way of doing this.
That one simple yet sneakily subversive thought is what drove every aspect of the Scottish Enlightenment, from James Watt’s steam engine to geologist James Hutton’s discovery of “deep time.” The Scottish Enlightenment was, at its heart, an Age of Improvement, and the Scots were the world’s greatest improvers.

Improvement
. You see the word everywhere in Scotland. It’s deployed not in the breathless way we Americans use it—
New and improved!
—but in a more somber, almost reverential manner. “Dare to know,” Kant said. The Scots agreed wholeheartedly, but found Kant’s imperative
incomplete. Dare to know and dare to
act
on that knowledge. That was the Scottish way. This combination of the practical and the metaphysical distinguished the Scottish flavor from the others I’d sampled so far in my journey.

Scotland’s Age of Improvement started with the land. This makes sense. The land is elemental to our being, even today. Scotland was no Eden. Less than 10 percent of the land was arable. Farming techniques were crude and inefficient.
Surely there must be a better way of doing this,
thought a carpenter named James Small. Small had a big idea, and in the 1760s he invented a radically new plow. That might seem like a minor advance in the scheme of human history, but was in fact a tremendous leap forward—especially if you were a farmer or someone who ate food every now and then. Word of Small’s new plow spread quickly, and soon farmers were meeting to discuss other ways to coax a bit more food from the stingy land. From these informal meetings, proper societies and clubs devoted to the embryonic field of agricultural science sprouted like so many flowers in the desert.

The Scots could have stopped with agriculture, I suppose, but that’s not the way creativity works. Once launched, it acquires a momentum of its own; breakthroughs in one field inspire breakthroughs in others, and before you know it, you’re living in a golden age. Sure enough, the Scottish urge to improve—the Doctrine of Improvability, it might be called—soon spread to other disciplines, including one that, for all of us, is a matter of life and death.

I am staring at this contraption, this thing, puzzling over its intended use. Every golden age, like every family, has its embarrassing artifacts. These odd relics, stashed away in the national attic, prompt incredulity, or worse. I’m thinking of the gladiators’ shields from Roman times, the chastity belts of Elizabethan England, the fondue pots of 1970s America.
They sure were a weird bunch back then,
we think.

I’ve never seen a relic stranger, though, than the one I am staring at right now. Housed behind glass at the National Museum of Scotland, this horseshoe-shaped piece of wood has a metal ring fastened atop.
Some sort of torture device, perhaps? That doesn’t seem very enlightened of the Scots. No, a small placard informs me, I am looking at a collar. For the dead.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m all in favor of accessorizing, but these “coffin collars,” as they were known, are not high on my wish list. Why in the world would anyone make a collar for a corpse? I look more closely and see that it appears quite heavy and shacklelike, as if designed to impede egress. Was this some sort of security system against the supernatural?

Alas, no. The coffin collars were designed to thwart grave robbers. The culprits were not ghouls or common thieves. They were, like Michelangelo, students of human anatomy. Legally, only the bodies of executed criminals could be used for dissections, and there simply weren’t enough of those to go around. So the medical students, creative and practical, snuck into cemeteries late at night. It was risky, this corpse snatching. Angry mobs had been known to descend upon those caught in the act.

Personally, I’m grateful to these courageous grave robbers for pointing me toward one of the greatest achievements of the Scottish Enlightenment: medicine. Perhaps in no other field did the Scots make so many advances, and so quickly. Some of the greatest names in European medicine were born and worked within a few miles and years of one another in the west of Scotland. The Scottish physician James Lind discovered that eating citrus fruit could prevent scurvy, a disease that was ravaging sailors across the globe. William Buchan, another physician, made the at-the-time radical suggestion that doctors wash their hands before examining patients, and the Scots pioneered the use of surgical anesthesia with chloroform. In the blink of an eye, backwater Edinburgh became the global epicenter of medical education. Graduates fanned out across the world, founding medical schools in, among other places, New York and Philadelphia.

Medical science was hot, the digital technology of its day, and Edinburgh its Silicon Valley. Its heroes were not digerati such as Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg but surgeons such as John Hunter and chemists such as Joseph Black.

But why medicine? And why Edinburgh? Those are the questions on
my mind as I climb the stairs of the old Royal Infirmary, a red-sandstone building that reeks of musty secrets, tucked away in a still-functioning wing of the medical school. I walk past consulting rooms and dingy corridors that look as if they haven’t changed since the days when Arthur Conan Doyle studied here. I am greeted by a nice woman who, for a few pounds, hands me a ticket to what is officially known as the Surgeons Hall Museum but, unofficially, as the House of Horrors.

Just like those in Silicon Valley, Edinburgh’s medical geniuses made their mark with devices and procedures that now, with the gift of hindsight, we find laughingly—and frighteningly—primitive. We eye these contraptions smugly.
Look how far we’ve come!
In the case of digital technology, it’s that poky Commodore 64 that evokes this sort of self-satisfied nostalgia. In the case of medicine, it’s devices such as the trephine, one of which is displayed in a glass case here. It looks exactly like a corkscrew, complete with a wooden handle. It was used, the placard optimistically informs me, to relieve pressure on the brain after a skull fracture. Personally, I’d take my chances with the Commodore.

My reaction, I realize, is unfair. At the time, the small medical school was a pioneer. It helped steer the young profession from the regrettable age of the barber-surgeons (history’s most unfortunate hyphenation) into what we would (almost) recognize today as modern medicine.

I dive deeper into the building and learn much. I learn that the rationale for building a medical school was made on—what else?—rational grounds. The founder, John Munro, argued that it made economic sense to treat the sick and teach surgeons at home rather than abroad. Money was raised, and soon construction began on the infirmary and an adjacent medical school. When it opened in 1729, the hospital had only six beds. At first, surgeons brought their own instruments, the way plumbers bring their own tools, but the hospital and the school soon grew into world-class institutions. Once again, there was an American connection. Benjamin Franklin served as a conduit between Scotland and the colonies, providing letters of introduction to young Americans wishing to study in Edinburgh. At least one of the medical school’s graduates, Benjamin Rush, later signed the Declaration of Independence.

Suddenly, medicine was
the field
to be in, thus launching a long and neurotic tradition of maternal expectations. Scottish mothers wished for nothing more than their sons to become doctors. For many, their wish came true. By 1789, 40 percent of the city’s college students were enrolled in the medical school.

Who were these new students? Many were bright and ambitious young men (women wouldn’t be permitted to matriculate until 1889) who might otherwise have gone into the clergy, but the Church’s popularity was waning, and so they chose medicine, just as today young people who might otherwise have gone into public service are drawn to the money and glamour of Wall Street or Silicon Valley. This dynamic explains why we see spikes in professions at certain times and in certain places. The number of geniuses who appear in any given field at any given time is a function not of the pool of talent available but, rather, the attractiveness of the field. The reason, for instance, we find far fewer brilliant composers of classical music today than in the nineteenth century is not because composers are less talented, or owing to some strange and sudden genetic deficiency, but because far fewer ambitious young people see classical music as the way to make their mark in the world.
What is honored in a country will be cultivated there.

Medicine provided the perfect vehicle for this uniquely Scottish flavor of genius. It’s a practical endeavor, one that leads to tangible improvements in people’s lives, yet it also has a theoretical component. Like the modern denizens of Silicon Valley, the medical adventurers of Edinburgh saw themselves as trailblazers. And like Silicon Valley, medical Edinburgh was very much a case of group genius.

I walk upstairs and, on the wall, find an old black-and-white photograph of a dining room. Beside the photograph is a stylish brandy decanter, with fluted lip and removable glass stopper. It’s accompanied by a portrait of a rotund, middle-aged man with a kind face. James Young Simpson was an obstetrician and medical maverick—and a classic Scottish success story. The seventh son of a village baker, Simpson showed early academic promise. He was admitted to Edinburgh University at age fourteen.

As with many innovators, Simpson was driven by a fierce desire to solve a puzzle and, in his case, correct an injustice. As a young doctor, barely out of medical school, Simpson had observed a mastectomy performed without anesthesia, an unpleasant experience for all involved, especially the patient. Simpson was determined to do something about that, so he devoted himself to the embryonic field of anesthesia.

One evening, while hosting a dinner party, Simpson filled the brandy decanter with chloroform, a potent chemical about which little was known at the time, and presented it to his guests. You would think they might have balked at their host’s unusual brew, but this was Scotland, where no one ever turns down a liquid offered, and so Simpson’s friends happily imbibed. Everyone soon grew “ever more cheerful” and giddy, according to a witness.

The following morning, the maid found all of the guests passed out. Simpson was lucky. A higher dose would have killed him and his guests; a lower dose would have discouraged his hunch that chloroform could be used as an anesthetic. He got the proportions right.

Simpson refined the purity of the chloroform, conducted more experiments, and within weeks it was being used in surgery and childbirth across Europe. Some religious leaders, and even a few doctors, opposed its use, arguing that God intended for childbirth to be difficult (“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe”—Genesis 3:16), but when Queen Victoria allowed chloroform to be used during the birth of her son Prince Leopold, the case was settled. James Simpson was fully vindicated, and famous.

It was a classic case of Scottish genius at work: a group effort, conducted in a highly social setting, and carried out methodically yet boldly. Simpson demonstrated a willingness to risk his own life in the name of science, not to mention the lives of his closest friends, and it all started with a hunch.

I climb the stairs and spot an exhibit called “Early Ophthalmology.” I look the other way. Ophthalmology, like dentistry, is one of those fields I pretend had no “early.” I spot the “Syphilis Exhibit,” supposedly a real crowd-pleaser, but give it, as well as the display on parasites, a wide berth
and instead stop to look out the window. It’s a wonderful view. I can see the hills off in the distance, including Arthur’s Seat, the old volcano that sits at the edge of town. I look for a long time, marveling at how the scene before me is virtually unchanged from what a young medical student would have seen nearly three hundred years ago.

I can picture him: scruffy, no doubt, but bright eyed and brimming with energy. What were his dreams? Was he out to save the world—or merely to earn a decent living, make his mother happy? A little bit of both perhaps?

He no doubt shared much with a young coder in Silicon Valley: a tenacious optimism and an unwavering belief in the redemptive powers of technology, not to mention a desire to change the world, to
improve
it.

He did not, however, share the Valley’s novelty fetish, its utter disdain for any idea more than five minutes old. The enlightened Scots, in the medical field and beyond, possessed a deep respect for history. The Scots invented history (sorry Thucydides), at least the readable kind. “Conjectural history,” they called the genre, and we recognize it today in the works of writers such as David McCullough or any piece of historical fiction. For the Scotts, though, history wasn’t merely interesting. It was useful. The Scots studied the past to understand the present, and of course improve it. Like the ancient Greeks and the Chinese, they knew that those who lack a keen awareness of history are destined to “remain forever children in understanding,” as David Hume put it. Genius requires not only an accelerator but also a rearview mirror.

Leaving the infirmary, I step outside to a slate-gray sky and stiff breeze. Edinburgh is a compact city, designed for shoes, not cars. I pass a few grubby student bars, with names that could double as 1980s punk bands. Pink Olive, the Blind Poet. A few minutes later, I pass another kind of bar, advertising pole dancing. I’m reminded that the Scots are not saints, never have been. Places of genius always have a seedy underbelly, a by-product, I suspect, of all that tolerance.

I pass a traditional pub. The only poles here are the ones that hold a wooden sign painted with an image of the disgraced man the pub is
named after: William Brodie, better known by the honorific Deacon Brodie. Actually, the pub has two signs, for there were two Deacon Brodies. By day, he was a successful cabinetmaker and respected member of the city council. By night, he was an equally successful, and cunning, thief. He secretly made wax copies of clients’ keys, which he then used to pilfer their belongings. Deacon Brodie stole partly to support his covert gambling habit (as well as two equally covert mistresses) and partly for the thrill of it.

BOOK: The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World's Most Creative Places From Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley
4.44Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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