Medical Chemists and the Origins of Clinical Chemistry in Britain (Circa 1750-1850) (History‪)‬

In the eighteenth century various London physicians offered private lectures on aspects of medicine and medical practice in efforts to compensate for the lack of organized medical education in the capital. Some of these private medical courses included chemistry lectures that often extended well beyond the limited knowledge needed for the preparation of drugs and medicines, and it was from such small beginnings that the transformation of English medicine from an empirical art to a science-based discipline began. George Fordyce (1736-1802) offered one of the earliest of these chemistry lecture courses at his London home in Essex Street, Strand (1). Fordyce began in 1760, and 6 years later William Saunders (1743-1817) also offered chemistry lectures at Red Lion Court, Fleet Street. Both had been pupils of William Cullen in Edinburgh, from whom they had gained their enthusiasm for chemistry. Their lecture courses were transferred to London medical schools around 1770 when Fordyce was appointed physician to St. Thomas's Hospital and Saunders joined Guy's Hospital, where a new lecture theatre and laboratory specifically designed for chemistry teaching had been built (2). As more such courses began to feature in London medical schools the growing importance of the subject for the practicing physician led a few pioneers to advocate chemical tests as an aid to diagnosis (3). Fordyce continued to lecture in his own home on topics ranging widely over contemporary chemistry, including industrial and agricultural topics as well as medical studies. Saunders, on the other hand, ceased his private lectures and confined his chemistry teaching at Guy's mainly to apothecary arts and the materia medica (4). Some years later George Pearson (1751-1828), a pupil of Joseph Black, also began to lecture on chemistry at his London home where he followed a plan similar to that of Fordyce. He was appointed physician to St. George's Hospital in 1787, but like Fordyce he continued his private chemistry courses in addition to his lectures at the medical school (5). Pearson's lectures became widely known, and he later numbered prominent American chemists such as Benjamin Silliman, the first professor of chemistry at Yale, and William Peck, professor of chemistry at Harvard, among his students. Silliman and Peck also attended Friedrich Accum's chemical lectures at the Surrey Institution, Blackfriars Road, London (6).