2

The University of Edinburgh

In Polidori's time, medical studies at Edinburgh took at least three years;

it was not unusual for them to take four, as Polidori's did.1 The curricu-
lum included Anatomy, Surgery, the Theory and Practice of Medicine,
Chemistry, Botany, Pharmacy, and the related discipline Materia Med-
ica, the study of remedial substances.2
Edinburgh was one of the recognized centres of medical studies for
Europe and the British empire,3 but the years 1811 to 1815, when Polidori
was there, were not among its finest. The very success of the university
had created problems. In 1750, there had been 158 students enrolled in
the medical school; by 1800, there were some 650.4 This increase in
enrolment led to a serious shortage of cadavers for anatomical demon-
strations. (Students were responsible for much of the grave-robbing;
whether or not Polidori was directly involved, it must have stimulated
his Gothic imagination.) Since classes were large, demonstrations were
often difficult to see.5 The system under which the professors received
fees directly from the students, though it had been defended staunchly
by Adam Smith6
8 - and though it meant that Catholic students, as long as
they could pay the fees, were welcome7 - naturally aggravated the
problem of class sizes, and discouraged faculty from devoting much time
to research. Research was further inhibited by the strong public feeling
against autopsies and animal experiments.9
The problem of nepotism was perhaps even more serious. Eight of the
ten professors appointed to the medical faculty in the preceding two
decades were sons of professors in the university.10 One of these, Alex-
ander Monro III (1773-1859), the professor of Anatomy, was also the
grandson of Edinburgh's first professor of Anatomy, and to the end of
his career in 1846, he allegedly read the lectures his grandfather had
prepared, not even changing such phrases as 'When I was a student in
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16 Before Byron: 1795-1816

Leyden in 1714/ though his students used to protest by showering him

with peas.11 Even if it is apocryphal, the story suggests the low regard in
which Monro was held. Andrew Duncan (1744-1828), professor of the
Theory of Medicine, was 'an aged, most amiable, benevolent, but by this
time rather feeble-minded man,' according to Robert Christison, who
began studying medicine at Edinburgh the year Polidori graduated. Like
Monro, Duncan 'contrived to make it appear as if the physiology, pa-
thology, and therapeutics of ... the previous century were the phys-
iology, pathology, and therapeutics of the present day, and the existing
doctrines those of the historical past. Little, therefore, was to be learned
from him.'12
Other members of the faculty were more distinguished. James Home
(1758-1842), professor of Materia Medica, was another nepotistic ap-
pointment. Although, according to Christison, his 'lectures were not
enlightened by well-defined general principles, or illustrated as now
[1871] by experiment and demonstration, or enlivened by any of the
flowers of oratory,' they were nevertheless 'a mine of useful facts,
laboriously collected, sifted with care, and well put together. His deliv-
ery was quiet, but earnest; and his whole soul was evidently in his duty.'
Thus he was a popular lecturer, even though his classes were held at
8:00 AM.13 Daniel Rutherford (1749-1819), professor of Botany, yet an-
other nepotistic appointment, was not a distinguished botanist but had
been a distinguished chemist: he had discovered nitrogen in 1772.14
Thomas Hope (1766-1844), professor of Chemistry and Medicine, had
discovered, sometime around 1800, that water expands as it freezes.15
James Gregory (1753-1821), professor of the Practice of Medicine, held
to the old-fashioned belief that medicine should 'seize nature by the
throat,' and advocated such drastic remedies as purging, vomiting,
bleeding, and blistering,16 but his belief in purging led him to concoct
Gregory's powder, a laxative compounded of rhubarb, magnesia, and
ginger, which for over a century was possibly more commonly admin-
istered than any other medicine.17 As a lecturer, Christison remembers,
Gregory was respected but not always effective:
He never got through more than two-thirds of his full subject,
varying the omitted portion on alternate years, but treating
always of fevers and inflammations - his favourite topics.
When I attended his class, he had, in the last day of the
session, got so far as the pathology of paralysis, when, in the
middle of a sentence, the College bell was run at ten o'clock.
The whole students at once sprang to their feet, according to
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The University of Edinburgh 17

custom, to rush to the Chemistry class. Gregory stood up too,

raised his arm, and called out, 'Stop! stop, gentlemen! Stop!
stop! - one word at parting!' But no one stopping, he shouted,
'Well, well! God bless you all!' Such was his farewell to his
class of 1817.18
Polidori, studying a subject he had not chosen under such unpromis-
ing circumstances, and farther from home than ever, was unhappy. An
Essay upon the Source of Positive Pleasure presents a most unfavourable
picture of college life. The essay, admittedly, presents unfavourable
pictures of all the phases of life, for its thesis is that the only source of
positive pleasure is the imagination. Much of the evidence brought
forward to support this thesis is conventional, but some of it seems to be
drawn from Polidori's own experiences in Edinburgh (which may well
have been conventional enough themselves). A man may claim, the
essay argues, to find pleasure in the memory of his college years:
But he will not tell you of the profession he was studying,
being one he abhorred; of the hankering he had after history,
poetry, and literature, while he was obliged to study math-
ematics, medicine, or theology ... He will not tell you of that
inward disgust he felt while drinking toasts that levelled him,
according to his own boast, with the brute; or of those petty
bickerings which arose from his enlivening discussions. He will
not tell you how often, at first, he was irritated by his supposed
friends not sympathising sufficiently with his enthusiastic
feelings; and afterwards, how his heart was riven by finding
those, upon whose love he had reposed his hope, laugh one
after another at his simplicity, and ridicule publicly the very
things they had heard, and apparently sympathised with in
private.19
The allusion to 'the profession he was studying' as 'one he abhorred,' to
the student's being 'obliged to study mathematics, medicine, or the-
ology' instead of more congenial subjects, is pretty clear, despite the
discreet sandwiching of medicine between mathematics and theology.
The unfavourable images of the student's social life, of the 'toasts that
levelled him ... with the brute,' recall the fear Polidori had expressed to
his father in 1808, of having his morals corrupted by the bad example of
dissolute young men. What evidence there is suggests that Polidori
actually did not mix much with his fellow students, dissolute or other-
wise. He does not mention any by name in his surviving letters, and he
did not join the lively and popular Medical Society.20
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18 Before Byron: 1795-1816

Polidori's first surviving letter home from Edinburgh, written in

November 1812, says only one thing about his activities there: 'I am very
busy writing my notes where I am rather backwards.' Most of it is
devoted to expressing a desperate fear of losing his father's love, a fear
which is the obverse, and perhaps the consequence, of his occasional
feelings of resentment and gestures of rebellion. What provided an
occasion for its expression was the way Gaetano had opened and closed
a letter (eight years earlier, the way John had done it had excited
Gaetano's disapproval):
I hope you will never call me merely John at the beginning of a
letter again and end it with your father Polidori it sounds so
cold at such a distanse that when I opened [it] with the great-
est anxiety for your health I nearly dropt it struck with the
coldness it shows it makes me fear I have lost your affections
which I prize more than any thing else.21
Polidori begins another letter to his father, in December 1813, by
apologizing for not having written for so long. In fact, he explains, he has
written but has kept the letter 'on hand for a week without being able to
resolve to send it': In truth, although you think that I do not love you, I
do hold a great affection for you - but not having those abilities that are
so important in helping us to show affection in small things, I know well
that you do not believe me.' There is a disturbing echo here of the note
written and crossed out at the end of his father's booklet of 'Directions
for John': 7 dont believe you.'22 Polidori is particularly uneasy because he
has something to say which he knows will displease his father. He tries
to persuade him - and perhaps to persuade himself - that this should not
be the case, first, because his frankness is itself a sign of his affection:
As you have always shown that you have wanted to be not
only a father but also a friend, and that you have always
wanted me to confide my thoughts to you, I hope that you will
not take what I have to say as a lack of affection, but as a proof
that I hold you not only as a father but also as a friend.
Second, he argues that what he is about to tell his father is no more than
his father has told him already:
You know what my education has been; you know that the
Roman and Greek histories were always given to me as the
Bible according to which I should order myself. You know
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The University of Edinburgh 19

well that my heroes, put forward by yourself, were not either

Abraham or David, but the Bruti, Timoleon, etc. You always
eulogized to me the antique methods - the devotion of the men
to liberty, and their stoicism, as the greatest virtues that can be.
Certainly you would not wish that I should never take your
counsels to heart.

What requires this long preamble is Polidori's announcement that he

has decided to leave medical school and to go fight for Italy. He anx-
iously insists that this decision is not an abandonment of his duty as a
son: 'if I were the only one I could not ask of you that you give to the
fatherland the only support of old age, but there are many others.' In fact,
he shrewdly argues, as his father's son he cannot do otherwise; indeed,
he will be fighting virtually as the representative of his father, who
would join the struggle if he could. As in the case of his ecclesiastical
vocation (though more explicitly), he is rebelling against his father by an
exaggerated gesture of compliance - by a sort of reductio ad absurdum:

Italy is certainly my country. You have given me Italian blood:

I feel that I am Italian. At the name of Italy I perceive my heart
beat with added ardour - I feel a pleasure which I cannot
express. I feel an affection for Italy which has always clung to
me - it is no matter of today. You well know how often I have
written to you on this subject: you well know that I have al-
ways spoken of it with enthusiasm. Italy has always been the
country where our castles in the air and our projects centred.
You remember all our walks, and will recollect all that we
talked about. Why then, if that is my country, why should I not
go and lend a hand in saving it? I need not remind you what
ought to be the conduct of every citizen - to free his country -
you have so often and with so much energy impressed this
lesson on me. But you cannot yourself do it: you have a family,
a wife. I on the contrary am free: I have no ties save those of
country and glory. What reason could you offer me why I,
in these great moments which will probably not present
themselves again, should not assist my country? I am well
aware that all the more recent affections which engage you in
your family have not been able to extinguish patriotic love in
you. I hope therefore that you will not hesitate in allowing me
to respond to the cry of my country, which now calls me to
arms.
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20 Before Byron: 1795-1816

Besides patriotism, Polidori has two personal reasons to fight for Italy.
Both of them, like his fearful love for and rebellion against his father, will
remain with him as leading motivations for the rest of his life. The first
corresponds to his rebellious side; it is ambition - a desire for glory,
which he fears he can never win as a mere doctor:
Besides, ambition, and the love of glory which consumes me,
call me to action; and it has always been in times similar to
these, perturbed by war, that men have been able to show
themselves great - which is as much as to say that all we do is
only done for glory's sake. For glory -

'The proud, to gain it, toils on toils endure,

The modest shun it but to make it sure.'
You, urged by this desire, have had recourse to pen and ink: I,
for the same, would wish to wield arms, always the source of
the greatest glory. All our acts originate in this desire, which
might be shown to be the true principle of good and evil ...
What matters it to me if perchance I shall not be so rich as in
the medical career? I should be more happy. No doctor ever
acquired glory, save among doctors. My ambition aims at
general fame: for this I would give life and all. I have but life to
sacrifice: and this who would hesitate to hazard for so noble a
prize? 23
The second reason corresponds to Polidori's lonely and fearful side, and
anticipates his complaint in the Essay about the general lack of enthusi-
asm, or sympathy for enthusiasm, among university students. Polidori
wants to leave Britain because he believes that he is among people who
cannot feel with him - who perhaps cannot feel at all:
I, although born in England, am not an Englishman - No. My
disposition is not that of the English. They are automatons:
they have no enthusiasm, nor other vivid passion. Moreover I
feel that I can never be happy in this country. I am obliged to
curb my tongue from saying things of which no one else here
has any idea. They always think me mad; and so I have got to
speak like them, and I can never say what I feel, for fear that
they should treat me as crazy if I talk of liberty, war, literature
... But, as soon as I am in company with a foreigner, what a
relief! I see that they feel like myself: we discuss, we talk of
all things with enthusiasm. I am very happy when I am with
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The University of Edinburgh 21

some Germans who are now here. But, when I am with these
Scotchmen, I drone, one leg crossed over the other, and they
think me a pedant.24
Polidori does not make it clear, and perhaps he was not clear himself,
what he meant by fighting for Italy, a nation which did not yet exist. In
December 1813, a year after the end of the Russian campaign,
Napoleon's imperial rule was crumbling. His brother-in-law Gioacchino
Murat, whom he had made king of Naples, was transferring his alle-
giance to Austria in the hope of retaining his throne.25 In the north,
Francesco Melzi D'Eril, head of government of the kingdom of Italy
(which included Gaetano's native Tuscany), was trying to persuade
Napoleon's stepson and viceroy, Eugene de Beauharnais, to do the
same.26 In 1812, Lord William Bentinck, the English commander in
Sicily, had forced Ferdinando IV to accept a constitution; in 1814, he
would land in central Italy and call on all Italians to fight for their
independence. Castlereagh, however, repudiated his plans - as Ferdi-
nando later repudiated his constitution.
The French revolutionary and Napoleonic occupations had contrib-
uted to the unification of Italy largely by giving the Italians a common
enemy; after 1814, this role would be taken over by the Austrians.27
Polidori's Italian patriotism may thus account for his ambivalence to-
wards the larger European conflict. In 1816, perhaps because of Byron's
influence, perhaps because the Austrians were then in the ascendant,
Polidori would call Napoleon his hero.28 But one of his poems (which,
though undated, clearly refers to this earlier period) speaks of fighting
against the French:
Loud the warlike trumpet blow
Let the blood of Frenchmen flow,
See their arms away they throw,
They yield the victory.
Raise your warlike banners high,
Freemen see the Gauls they fly
See the oppressors slaughtered lie
'Tis your's the victory.29
In his reply, Gaetano Polidori, veteran of the fall of the Bastille, took
the opportunity to indulge in a long tirade against Napoleon and the
Revolution - which could hardly have discouraged his son from
fighting:
The horrors of the infamous French Revolution have obscured,
dishonoured, disgraced, the very name of liberty ... What has
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22 Before Byron: 1795-1816

come of all the blood shed in the revolution of France? in her

unjust wars, her extravagant notions? They beheaded a kindly
and legitimate King, to put his crown afterwards upon the head
of a foreigner who sways them with absolute power - who
deprives fathers of their sons, wives of their husbands, sisters
of their brothers, to send them by hundreds of thousands to
perish of the sword, famine, frost, misery, in the most incle-
ment climes, in wars waged for one man's ambition - one who
thus destroys the population, squanders the finances, rends
husbandmen from the fields, crushes the arts, sciences, litera-
ture, and thrusts Vandalism wholesale upon that nation which
passed aforetime for the most civilized in Europe. Where are
the Brutus, the Manlius, the Regulus, the Camillus, the Scipio,
the Cato, the Fabricius? What hero can you cite to me in a rev-
olution exceeding twenty years?30
Both Gaetano and Polidori considered Napoleon, a Corsican, to be
Italian rather than French. Gaetano's habit of referring to Italians as
foreigners is striking: he clearly no longer felt the patriotism his son
credited him with inculcating.
Much of Gaetano's letter is devoted to reminding Polidori of his
situation and prospects and of the circumstances under which he might
expect to go to Italy. These passages are stern but not unreasonable; the
letter is obviously, though not entirely, and unfortunately never ex-
plicitly, inspired by a father's anxiety for the safety and welfare of his
son:
What business have you in the armies of the Emperor of
Austria, or in Italy? Are you to be a General? What military
abilities do you possess? how many campaigns have you
fought? If you want to be a soldier, you have no other means
than that of enlisting as a Private, with ninety-nine chances out
of a hundred of being killed before you obtain a Corporal's
stick. And what are you talking as to a Brutus, a Manlius, and a
Regulus? Which is the Stoic who does not instruct you to be
contented with the state in which Nature and circumstance
have placed you? And what have you in common with Brutus,
Manlius, or Regulus? To those who are in the great offices of a
nation, who have great influence over their compatriots, it
belongs to imitate these men - not to a medical student who
has neither a conspicuous post nor the means of so much as
maintaining himself...
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The University of Edinburgh 23

To Italy you may be able to go after a peace, especially if my

brother is then alive - but with other intentions than your
present ones ...
In much of the letter, however, Gaetano simply vents his wounded
feelings, without showing much concern for his son's. He opens the
letter precisely as John had begged him not to, simply with 'John,'
threatens him with precisely what he had feared, the loss of his affection,
and all but accuses him of parricide:
Indeed I will answer you immediately, as you wish; but only to
tell you that you are a madman fit for a strait waistcoat - that I
disapprove all your idle ideas - and that, if you don't pursue
the path of reason, I will no longer receive your letters, nor
write to you; for your madness pierces my heart, and has
increased to such an extent that I myself am on the point of
losing my senses by reason of your presumptuous, conceited,
empty, and silly notions. But my madness would be of a kind
very different from yours.
Again, he is insisting that his feelings have priority over his son's.
Return to your reason; and, if you will be mad, wait until I
am dead. Don't thrust a dagger into my heart with your
extravagance, with your madness, because such is the affection
I have for you that I cannot but be unhappy when I see you
stray far from the path of reason.
He closes with a veiled version of his threat: 'These are my views. If you
love me, show yourself worthy of my affection, for I am your father, and
an affectionate father.'31
Gaetano seems to have felt that he had gone too far - hence his
reassuring references to the affection his son had not yet lost. His son
was not reassured. He was crushed. He did protest against some of the
harshness of his father's letter, but his protests were pathetically limited.
He conceded his father's right to prevent his acting on his ideas, and
even to prevent his expressing them; he objected only to his father's
apparent desire to prevent his having them, as he could not prevent this
himself:
you do not think how much it hurts me to see that you
complain of my ideas. I have promised you not to write any
more about the ideas that you call foolish, but you are not
satisfied with this: you think that it is easy to put off opinions
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24 Before Byron: 1795-1816

like clothes. You wound my heart by blaming me for what I

cannot prevent. If my opinions are foolish, prevent me from
following them, and wait for my mind to find out by itself that
they are false; do not complain that I am not so wise in the
affairs of this world as you are, who have lived more than 40
years. The first part of your letter is nothing but a thorn, which
pierces me the more as I always wait for your letters in the
hope of something pleasant.32
So Polidori did not go to the rescue of Italy. But he did not confine
himself to his medical studies either.

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