John Abercrombie

John Abercrombie was a member of the famous Edinburgh School of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The first to treat neuropathology as a separate entity, he is best known through his Pathological and Practical Researches on Diseases of the Brain and Spinal Cord (1828), the first textbook of neuropathology.

The son of an Aberdeen clergyman, Abercrombie received his doctorate in 1803. Following a six months stay in London he settled in Edinburgh as a member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. At first he had a conventional practice as a general practitioner. However, his superb qualities, particularly the unusual care he showed his patients, soon gained him an exceptional reputation - and an extensive consultative practice, which was still growing when he became a member of the Royal College of Physicians in 1821. From that year he was reckoned the number one consultative authority in Edinburgh. Rivals and enemies were not absent, however, but even they were more or les disarmed by his friendly manners - most of them instead becoming his friends.

A strong religiosity and charitability were basic traits of Abercrombie's characters; to his professional colleagues he was a sample of collegiality, bedside he was a man of silence. He became royal life physician in Scotland, in 1834 doctor of honour of medicine at the University of Oxford and vice president of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, in 1835 Lord Rector of the Marishal College and the University of Aberdeen. His inaugural address on the latter occasion was published under the extended title of Culture and discipline of the mind.

In 1841 Abercrombie suffered an attack of paralysis, but recovered and resumed his practice. On November 14, 1844, he was found dead, lying stretched out with his face down in his room. He had been on his way out to visit patients. The autopsy showed rupture of a coronary artery with haemopericardium as the cause of death. The conspicuously large brain weighed 46 ounces.

Abercrombie was never a physician with a hospital or ambulatorium. His numerous and instructive observations of disease are thus exclusively taken from his private practice. He was a strong advocate of medicine based on experience, maybe too much so, but this may also be seen as a protest against the rampant system building in the medicine of his time.

To Abercrombie, the noblest task of the medical writer is the exact observation and exact report of the pathological facts and their reciprocal relation. To him all theories and systems were of lesser value in these contexts, and neither did he believe that medicine could be enriched by other scientific methods, like experiments.

General principles in the natural sciences are no more than common knowledge, or facts common to all individuals in a class; and only when they are deduced from an exact observation of each and all of these individuals, can they lay claim of truth or usefulness. If, on the other hand, they are deduced from a limited observation, they are usually useless in science, and dangerous in medicine.

Abercrombie's written work was large, comprising not only medicine, but also moral philosophy.

• Cynancke laryngea. 1806.
• De fatuitate alpina.
  Doctoral thesis, 56 pages. Edinburgi, Adamus Neill et socii, 1803. [Pamphl. v. 24.]
• Cynancke laryngea.
  Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 1806.
• Researches on the pathology of the intestinal canal. 1820.
• Pathological and practical researches on the diseases of the brain and spinal cord.
  Edinburgh, Waugh and Innes, 1828. Philadelphia, Carey & Lea, 1831.
  First textbook of neuropathology. Originally published in a series of articles in the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, 1818-1819, and first collected into book form in the German translation, with appendix by Christian Friedrich Nasse (1788-1851). Bonn, E. Weber, 1821.
  French:
  
• Recherches pathologiques et pratiques sur les maladies de l'encéphale et de la moelle épinière. Deuxième édition. Traduites de l'Anglais et augmentées de notes tres nombreuses par A. N. Gendrin. Paris, 1832. IV + 652 pages. Translated by Augustin-Nicolas Gendrin (1796-1890).
  Second edition:
  
• Des maladies de l´encéphale et de la moelle épinière.
  Germer-Baillière, Paris, France, 1835.
  Third edition, same title: Bruxelles : Établissement Encyclographique, 1837.
• Pathological and practical researches on disease of the stomach, the intestinal canal, the liver, and other viscera of the abdomen. 396 pages. Edinburgh, Waugh & Innes, 1827 (43: 1828); 3rd edition, 1834.
  German translation, with appendixes, by Christian Friedrich Nasse, et al.
  3rd Americam edition, from 2nd London edition, 322 pages. Philadelphia, Carey, Lea & Blanchard, 1838.
  French translation by Augustin-Nicolas Gendrin (1796-1890): Recherches pathologiques et pratiques sur les maladies de l'encéphale et de la moelle épinière. Deuxième édition. Traduites de l'Anglais et augmentées de notes très nombreuses par A. N. Gendrin. Paris, 1832. IV + 652 pages.
• Diseases of the abdominal viscera. 2nd ed. 1830.
• On the intellectual powers and the investigation of truth.
  London 1830.
• Suggestions submited to the medical practitioners of Edinburgh on the character and treatment of the malignant cholera.
  2nd edition. 16 pages. 12º. Edinburgh, Waugh & Innes, 1832. [Pamphl. v. 95.]
• Philosophy of the moral feeling. 1833.
• Culture and discipline of the mind. 1835.
  Inaugural address as rector of the Marichal College and the University of Aberdeen.