Academic literature on the topic 'Great Britain History, Military 1789-1820'

The lives of students in all periods of history are difficult to recapture. Only scattered correspondence and occasional diaries can normally be found to give us a firsthand look at their experiences. Less satisfactory but still useful are the accounts of teachers, often written long after the events they describe, as well as the memoirs of former students, usually composed with nostalgia toward the close of their careers. Enough evidence does exist, however, to provide at least some glimpses into the student culture of past eras. In this chapter, we trace the social origins of medical students from about 1780 to 1820 and describe something of their lives in and out of the classroom as well as give some account of medical teachers and teaching of the same period. No more uncertain time in the life of a medical student can be imagined than the unsettled years after 1780. Both Europe and America were convulsed by war during much of the period and by fears of the spreading revolution in France. Students everywhere were being pressed into military service; academic enrollments dropped on both continents; and demands for military surgeons had become desperate. Deans and directors of medical schools pleaded with governments to spare their students from army service. In 1799, for example, the director of the French school at Montpellier asked his counterpart in Paris to join him in a last effort to save students from the huge call to arms of that year. Some medical schools were suddenly closed during the years of war; others were reorganized; and everywhere standards fell rapidly. Most of the small number of American schools were forced to shut down during the War for Independence and were then slow to reopen. In Great Britain, the hope of recruiting more medical students needed for war service was dashed by “the reality of low pay, lack of respect and the physical dangers facing most recruits.” In revolutionary France, the medical schools were officially closed early in the Revolution; the title of doctor was disdained by equalitarian reformers; and near chaos prevailed in the hospitals.

In the nineteenth century, the allure of the past of the Great Civilizations was soon to be contested by an alternative—that of the national past. This interest had already grown in the pre-Romantic era connected to an emerging ethnic or cultural nationalism (Chapter 2). However, its charm would not be as enticing to the lay European man and woman of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, who were much more under the influence of neoclassicism (Chapter 3). The Western European nations had no monuments comparable to the remains of Greece, Rome or Egypt. Before the Roman expansion into most of Western Europe in antiquity, there had been few significant buildings, apart from unspectacular prehistoric tombs and megalithic monuments whose significance was unrecognized by the modern scholar. Roman remains beyond Italy were not as impressive as those found to the south of the Alps. Because of this it seemed much more interesting to study the rich descriptions the ancient authors had left about the local peoples and institutions the Romans had created during their conquest. Throughout the eighteenth century the historical study of medieval buildings and antiquities had also increasingly been gaining appeal. In Britain their study instigated the early creation of associations such as the Society of Antiquaries of 1707, but even this early interest did not lead to medieval antiquities receiving attention in institutions such as the British Museum, where they would only receive a proper departmental status well into the nineteenth century (Smiles 2004: 176). In comparative terms, the national past and its relics were perceived by many to be of secondary rate when judged against the history and arts of the classical civilizations. During the French Revolution and its immediate aftermath, for example, the national past would not be as appreciated by as many people and antiquarians as that of the Great Civilizations (Jourdan 1996). This situation, however, started to change in the early nineteenth century. There were three key developments in this period, all inherited from Enlightenment beliefs, which were the foundation for archaeology as a source of national pride. The effects of these would be seen especially from the central decades of the century.