Goodsir, John

(b, Anstruther, Fife, Scotland, 20 March 1814; d. Edinburgh, Scotland, 6 March 1867)

anatomy, marine zoology.

Goodsir was the eldest of the five sons and one daughter of John Goodsir, a surgeon. Three of his brothers also studied medicine. After attending school in Anstruther until the age of twelve, Goodsir was sent to St. Andrews University, where he studied humanities and natural history, acquiring considerable proficiency in Latin and Greek. As was the custom at that time, he left without taking his degree. His natural predilections were for engineering and chemistry, but his father encouraged his interest in natural history while his mother taught him to draw.

Goodsir matriculated in Edinburgh University in 1830 and studied anatomy, surgery, and natural history under Robert Knox, James Syme, and Robert Jameson. From the beginning his anatomical work was characterized by a high degree of manual dexterity. He surprised his fellow students by making permanent plaster casts of his dissections and was meticulous in articulating skeletons and preserving pathological specimens, believing that “a piece of true dissection ought to turn out an object of wonder and beauty.” His father apprenticed him to A. Nasmyth, a dental surgeon, but Goodsir grudged the time the dental work took from his anatomical investigations—which quickly became his absorbing hobby as well as his major study—and Nasmyth agreed to cancel his indentures before the legal term.

In 1835 Goodsir became a licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, joined his father’s practice in Anstruther, and began an investigation into the development of teeth. From a microscopic examination of developing jaws at different ages he demonstrated the independent origin of the deciduous and permanent dentitions. This study in the then new field of developmental anatomy was possibly Goodsir’s finest piece of work. He communicated his conclusions “On the Origin and Development of the Pulps and Sacs of the Human Teeth” to the British Association in 1838. Although some of these observations on dental embryology had been anticipated by Friedrich Arnold in 1831, Goodsir believed most of his facts were new to science. This work was followed by a study “On the Follicular Stage of Dentition in the Ruminants; With Some Observations on That Process in the Other Orders of Mammals” (1840).

While a student Goodsir formed a close and important friendship with Edward Forbes. He joined local societies and read accounts of various natural history observations, from supposed new fossil fish to the structure of the cuttlefish eye. Goodsir spent a fortnight with Forbes dredging around the Orkney and Shetland Islands in 1839. Their results were jointly presented to the British Association and other joint publications on marine biology soon followed.

In 1840 Goodsir was appointed conservator of human and comparative anatomy in the university museum. He returned to Edinburgh and bought an apartment at 21 Lothian Street which he shared with Forbes. Their home became the headquarters of the Universal Brotherhood of Friends of Truth, a fellowship formed by Forbes some years before and in which Goodsir enjoyed the high rank of Triangle. (The site is now occupied by part of the Royal Scottish Museum.) Goodsir became a member of the Wernerian Society of Edinburgh, the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, the Anatomical and Physiological Society, and the Royal Physical Society, actively participating by communicating papers and holding office.

In 1841 Goodsir succeeded William Macgillivray as conservator of the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons, Edinburgh, and he initiated a series of lectures based on the collection. Some of these lectures were the basis of his Anatomical and Pathological Observations (1845) and include fundamental observations on cell structure, a subject for much debate at that time. Goodsir recognized the importance of cell division as the basis of growth and development. He differentiated between the embryonic growth centers of organs and the permanent “centers of nutrition” of the tissues, and established that cells are the active structures involved in glandular secretion. He thus anticipated by a number of years the work of Rudolf Virchow, who dedicated the first edition of his Cellularpathologie (1859) to goodsir “as one of the earliest and most acute observers of cell-life both physiological and pathological.”

In May 1843 Syme offered the curatorship of the university anatomy and pathology museum to Goodsir, who willingly accepted. His brother Harry, a contributor to Anatomical and Pathological Observations, assumed his post at the College of Surgeons, but was later lost with John Franklin’s polar expedition. Goodsir’s fourth brother, Robert, twice voyaged to the Arctic in search of the expedition.

It was Goodsir’s ambition to create a teaching museum second to none in Britain. By October 1845 he could report that “an individual studying the collection from the first to the last series may acquire a knowledge of the science from the structures themselves, instead of from books.” The collection had been greatly supplemented by zoological specimens collected by Forbes, Harry Goodsir, and himself. Over a thousand carefully dissected and injected specimens were testimony to Goodsir’s skill. He became demonstrator of anatomy in May 1844, and in December 1845 was appointed curator of the entire university museum. He communicated a paper “On the Supra-Renal, Thymus and Thyroid Bodies” to the Royal Society, London, in 1846 and was elected a fellow the same year.

With the retirement of Alexander Monro (Tertius) in the spring, a vacancy arose for the chair of anatomy, to which Goodsir had long aspired. Having provided satisfactory evidence of his fitness for anatomical teaching and—even more important in the Edinburgh of 1846—of his religious orthodoxy, Goodsir was elected. From that time he was less active as a scientific author, devoting himself instead to the reorganization of anatomical teaching. He emphasized the tutorial system and his methods came to be regarded as the best in any British university or medical school. He dearly wanted to illustrate his theoretical teaching with practical demonstrations in the surgical wards of a hospital and moved to a larger house in anticipation of becoming a consultant surgeon. When a vacancy did occur at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, Goodsir’s application was turned down, leaving him a bitterly disappointed man.

In 1850 he started the Annals of Anatomy and Physiology, which contained original papers by his pupils and others. After three numbers had been issued the journal was discontinued in 1853, when Goodsir was obliged to withdraw for a year from active work. During the previous summer Goodsir had undertaken the natural history course in addition to his other duties. The extra imposition wore him out and at the end of the course he was “shrunk in features, worn in body, shattered in nerves, and almost a helpless invalid.” His health had been deteriorating for a number of years and he now needed a complete rest. He spent a year in Germany and France, being treated for incipient paralysis. During this time he studied German and Italian language and literature. He returned to Germany in 1857 to study ichthyology and subsequently visited the Continent on several occasions to purchase physiological apparatus; he was the first to introduce these costly instruments to Scotland.

Disappointed in his hospital aims, Goodsir moved again, became careless in his domestic habits, and avoided visitors. The paralysis affecting his legs increased until he was able to walk only by concentrating intently on his feet. He keenly felt the loss of his friend Forbes, who had died in 1854. Restlessly he moved twice more before finally settling in the dingy cottage where Forbes had died. There, attended only by his sister, he became more and more of a hermit. But he did not rest from his work.

He began to concern himself with the mathematics of form, trying to perceive an underlying “crystal” arrangement of the fine structure of muscle, bone, and other tissues and organs. This led him to formulate a theory of the triangle as the universal image of nature—the mathematical figure from which both the organic and inorganic worlds are constructed. It is perhaps not without significance that the triangle was one of the outward signs by which Forbes’s Universal Brethren were recognized. As his body became increasingly weak Goodsir’s speculations became more metaphysical. He drew his strength from the triangle theory of formation which he hoped to complete as the greatest of his works.

Against all advice he commenced his usual course of lectures in November 1866, but before the end of the year he had to give up and confine himself mainly to bed. He died in March 1867, his triangle theory unwritten, and was buried alongside the grave of Forbes.

The significance of Goodsir’s contribution to anatomical knowledge should be measured not only by his published writings, but also by his lucid practical demonstrations and inspirational teaching. Many valuable discoveries were incorporated in his lectures but never published. Before him (with the notable exception of John Hunter, whom Goodsir took for a model) anatomy had been regarded as a means to an end—medical practice; Goodsir had the perspective to make it a science in its own right.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Goodsir’s papers are listed in the Royal Society, Catalogue of Scientific Papers, II (1868). Most were republished posthumously in W. Turner, ed., The Anatomical Memoirs of John Goodsir, F. R. S., 2 vols. (Edinburgh, 1868), which contains a number of unpublished lectures, including the ten lectures, “On the Dignity of the Human Body, Considered in a Comparison of Its Structural Relations With Those of the Higher Vertebrata,” delivered to the class of anatomy in 1862; two unpublished papers on marine zoology; the full texts of some papers published in abstract only; and an appendix of selected observations from his notebooks on morphology and the action of muscles. The Anatomical and Pathological Observations (Edinburgh, 1845), which includes some work by Harry Goodsir, was also republished in the Anatomical Memoirs.

Other works for which Goodsir was responsible are Annals of Anatomy and Physiology, vol. I, nos. 1–3 (1850–1853); his ed. of Adolph Hannover, On the Construction and Use of the Microscope (Edinburgh, 1853); W. Turner, Atlas of Human Anatomy… the Illustrations Selected and Arranged Under the Superintendence of John Goodsir (Edinburgh, 1857); and his MS on the myology of the horse, which was incorporated in J. Wilson Johnston and T. J. Call, Descriptive Anatomy of the Horse… Compiled from the Manuscripts of Thomas Strangeways…and the late Professor Goodsir (Edinburgh, 1870).

II. Secondary Literaturs. A comprehensive biographical memoir by H. Lonsdale is prefatory to vol. I of the Anatomical Memoirs. This memoir is the source for the quotations in the text and for the entry in Dictionary of National Biography, XXII, 137–139. A concise account of Goodsir’s work is given by H. W. Y. Taylor in Report of Proceedings. The Scottish Society of the History of Medicine (1955–1956), pp. 13–19. Goodsir’s reputation among his contemporaries is evidenced by the Testimonials in Favour of John Goodsir… Candidate for the Chair of Anatomy in the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1846), which also includes extracts from medical reviews of Anatomical and Pathological Observations. Obituaries are in Edinburgh Medical Journal, 12 (1867), 959–962; Transactions and Proceedings of the Botanical Society of Edinburgh, 9 (1868), 118–127; and Proceedings of the Royal Society, 16 (1868), xiv-xvi.

David Heppell