Background

Archibald Pitcairne was born on February 25, 1652, in Edinburgh, Scotland. Pitcairn was the son of Alexander Pitcairn, a merchant, and a magistrate.

Education

Pitcairn was first urged by his father toward a clerical career and entered the University of Edinburgh in 1668 with that intention, graduating with the Master of Arts degree in 1671. By the time of his graduation, however, Pitcairn had already decided on a career in law. He began his legal studies in Edinburgh, then moved to Paris, where his interests widened to include medicine.

While in Paris, Pitcairn spent much time with a group of medical students, even joining them on their hospital rounds. He returned to Edinburgh and was stimulated by his close friend David Gregory to take up mathematical studies, which he pursued with verve and some ability. He returned to Paris about 1675 and resumed his medical studies. On 13 August 1680 Pitcairn obtained a Doctor of Medicine from Reims, then returned to Edinburgh.

Pitcairn was granted a second Doctor of Medicine by the University of Aberdeen in 1699.

Career

After obtaining his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1680 from Reims University, Pitcairn then returned to Edinburgh, where in 1681 he joined in the founding of the Royal College of Physicians as probably the youngest of the original fellows. On 4 September 1685 he and another physician, James Halkett, were invited to join Robert Sibbald as the second and third medical professors at the University of Edinburgh. Although Pitcairn does not appear actually to have delivered any lectures, he was awarded the title of a professor because of his “abilities and great qualifications.” Pitcairn’s good fortune was altered with the Glorious Revolution, for his family had long been identified with the Stuart cause.

In March 1692 Pitcairn visited Newton at Cambridge. Their conversation doubtless covered a wide range of topics, and Newton gave Pitcairn an autograph copy of “De natura acidorum.” The essay was not quite complete, and Pitcairn, after adding a few lines and two short remarks, gave the manuscript to Gregory.

Pitcairn’s visit to Newton seems to have occurred on his journey to Leiden, where in November 1691 he had been invited to become a professor of the practice of medicine at an annual salary of 1,000 guilders. Although the post was a prestigious one, Pitcairn’s interest in it probably derived equally from the opportunity it provided to leave Edinburgh honorably. He delivered his inaugural lecture on 26 April 1692. Later that year he was granted the right to lecture on the institutes of medicine and to participate in bedside teaching. All was not success and enthusiasm in Leiden, however. Pierre Bayle reported that Pitcairn’s lectures were unpopular because of their abstruse and mathematical character. In the summer of 1693 Pitcairn left Leiden for a holiday in Scotland, from which he never returned.

In 1693 he returned from Leiden and became closely identified with Stevenson’s group in the College. Fed by both professional rivalries and contemporary political and religious differences, bitter factional disputes continued until, in 1704, Pitcairn and those who sided with him were reinstated at the College and an Act of Oblivion was passed, deleting from the minutes all references to these extended quarrels. Although restored to his fellowship, Pitcairn subsequently attended few College meetings.

Achievements

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  Archibald Pitcairne was a celebrated physician and scholar. His publications, such as Solutio problematic de historicis; seu de inventoribus dissertatio (1688), De sanguinis circulatione in animalibus genitis et non genitis (1693), Dissertatio de curatione febrium (1695), Dissertatio de legibus historiae naturalis (1696), Epistola Archimedis ad regem Gelonem Albae Graecae, reperta anno aerae Christianae 1688 and numerous satirical verses on the Church, as well as his latin verses demonstrate his remarkable talent.
  
  In 1701 he was elected to the Royal College of Surgeons (Edinburgh), a rare honor for a physician.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Elementa Medicinae Physico-mathematica 1718
  • The Phanaticks 1691
  • Tollerators and Con-Tollerators 1703
  • Opuscula Medica 1771
  • Epistola Archimedis ad regem Gelonem, Albæ Græcæ reperta 1688

Religion

By remaining a devoted Episcopalian, at a time of great friction between at the Presbyterian establishment, and by his outspoken and scathing criticism of all things Presbyterian, Pitcairn made a lot of enemies.

Politics

Pitcairne was a loudly avowed Jacobite.

Views

Pitcairn’s principal intellectual campaign, for a “mathematical physick,” was publicly launched in his inaugural lecture at Leiden. He called upon physicians to abandon all false philosophies and to rely instead in theory and in practice only upon such principles as cannot possibly be called in question by “Mathematicians and Persons who are the least entangled with Prejudice.” His model science was mathematical astronomy. The physician, Pitcairn asserted, must learn to avoid crude hypotheses and “physical causes,” like the best mathematical astronomers, Newton and Gregory, who produced the undeniable mathematical laws that interrelate celestial phenomena.

The full meaning of Pitcairn’s call for radical medical change became clearer in subsequent lectures at Leiden. He was really aiming at a theory closely similar to that recently published by the Italian iatromechanist Lorenzo Bellini in his De urinis el pulsibus et missione sanguinis (1683). Bellini claimed that the prime fact of life was the circulation of the blood and that illness was merely one form or other of impaired circulatory hydraulics. In fevers, for example, there was a fault in the blood, whether in “motion, quantity or quality.” A typical symptom, excessive perspiration, resulted from “an augmented Velocity of the Blood… [which produces] a greater Number of Particles set at Liberty, and if they can perspire, and be perceived by the Touch, will appear to be greatly augmented in Efficacy and Quantity.”

Pitcairn relied heavily on Bellini, but he differed in that he consistently embedded his own theoretical statements in an aggressive context. He asserted that the hydraulic theory of sickness and health was the “true” and “mathematical” account of the animal economy; all others were “false,” “hypothetical,” and “philosophical.” Pitcairn’s system had to be correct, he believed, because the terms with which he constructed his theory - fluids, velocities, dimensions of vessels - were all, at least in principle, observable entities. Pathological and etiological theories constructed from them must, therefore, have the same degree of mathematical certainty as to the propositions of Newton’s Principia.

Pitcairn’s radical program also encompassed an assault on the institutes of medicine. Such classic conceptions as “sign,” “symptom,” and “indicant” had no meaning to him. The only basic pathological condition was impaired circulation, from which all symptoms could be logically and inexorably deduced. Similarly, therapeutic methods could be determined with deductive certainty. Remedies worked not by providing some imaginary “alkali” to neutralize a Active “acid”; rather, successful therapy was hydraulic in nature, restoring the circulatory system to good order. The physician could either manage the blood by manipulating its secretory products (perspiration, urine) or, occasionally, by adding material of appropriate kind and quantity directly to the bloodstream.

Pitcairn’s views provoked intense reactions from his medical colleagues. In Scotland, public reaction largely took the form of rival pamphlets bearing such titles as A Short Answer to Two Lyhels Lately Published ... by Drs. Cheyne and Pitcairn (1702). In England, the impact of “mathematical physick” was felt in a less personal, more philosophical way. William Cockburn and Richard Mead, two young physicians who had heard Pitcairn lecture at Leiden, led the way in establishing public support for “mathematical physick.”

They saw Pitcairn's system as part of the quickly rising Newtonian philosophy. Through their papers and books, they helped the “Newtonian” medical system triumph over the “Cartesian” in the early eighteenth-century Royal Society, of which Newton was elected president in 1703. Arguments were advanced along “mathematical” and “corpuscular” lines, and the debate continued for several years. By the second decade of the century, Pitcairn’s views were triumphant not only at the Royal Society but also at the Royal College of Physicians (London).

While members of the Royal Society and the College of Physicians were being converted to the “mathematical” theory of the animal economy, Stephen Hales and James Keill applied sophisticated, quantitative experimental techniques to the verification and extension of the hydraulic system. Much of Hales’s Haemastaticks (1733) was conceived in 1708 as an experimenter’s response to Pitcairn’s new theory.

On the Continent, Pitcairn also exerted a considerable influence. Bellini, from whom Pitcairn derived much of his general style and many specific ideas, was himself stimulated by Pitcairn’s efforts for a “mathematical physick.”

In 1695 he dedicated Opuscula aliquot to Pitcairn. Boerhaave was also greatly impressed by Pitcairn, whom he had heard at Leiden. Later, in his lectures and published works he often referred to Pitcairn's ideas and medical program with respect. He thought mechanical and mathematical reasoning an essential part of medicine but differed from Pitcairn in his stress on the need for a studious empiricism in pathology and therapeutics. Albrecht von Haller showed two crucial traces of Pitcairn’s influence. Many of his physiological ideas were based essentially on Pitcairn’s hydraulic theories; and his methodology, important in his recognition and articulation of the phenomena of irritability, was explicitly Newtonian.

Personality

Pitcairn was a man of great intellect and was in turn mathematician, poet, dramatist, bibliophile, and latinist. He was a great collector of books, so he amassed an extensive library of some 1500 books - this collection survives intact in St Petersburg - which is the principal item in the inventory of the doctor's 'guids and gear' listed towards the end of his testament.

The stories about his over-indulgence in drink are probably exaggerated. He was repeatedly involved in violent quarrels with his medical brethren and others, and once or twice got into scrapes with the government on account of his indiscreet political utterances. Among his friends, however, he was evidently well-liked, and he is known to have acted with great kindness and generosity to deserving men who needed his help. Thomas Ruddiman, the Scottish scholar, for example, was rescued from a life of obscurity by his encouragement and assistance, and by no one was his memory more gratefully cherished. Mead, too, appears never to have forgotten what he owed to his old teacher at Leiden.

Interests

• poetry, drama, book collecting, languages

Connections

Pitcairne was married two times. By his first wife, Margaret, daughter of Colonel James Hay of Pitfour, he had a son and daughter, who died in infancy. By his second wife, Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Archibald Stevenson, whom he married in 1693, he had one son and four daughters. The son, before attaining his majority, engaged in the rebellion of 1715, and was confined in the Tower; but, through the intercession of Doctor Mead with Walpole, he obtained his release. He then entered the Dutch service but died soon afterwards. The second daughter, Jane, married Alexander, fifth earl of Kellie.

Father:

Alexander Pitcairn

Wife:

Elizabeth Stevenson Pitcairn

died in 1734

Daughter:

Elizabeth Pitcairn

died in 1718

Daughter:

Margaret Pitcairn

died in 1777

Daughter:

Janet Pitcairn Erskine

1699–1776

late wife:

Margaret Hay

Friend:

David Gregory

Pitcairne was close friends with David Gregory, a precocious mathematician. They jointly wrote mathematical papers and this background led to Pitcairne championing what became known as the iatromechanical theory of physiology.

References

• Archibald Pitcairne: The Latin Poems
  2009
• Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  1975
• The Early Days of the Royall Colledge of Phisitians, Edinburgh: The Extended Oration of the Harveian Society, Edinburgh
  2016
• The Correspondence of Isaac Newton
  1959
• A Mechanical Account of Fevers
  1970