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Medical Instruction & Research at UVa
Dunglison created a distinctive medical course at the University of Virginia. He was the first medical professor in America to add to his standard curriculum a series of lectures on the history of medicine. He also created the University’s first course in medical jurisprudence.
In his first year, Professor Dunglison taught twenty-six of the University’s 123 students. He sought constantly to facilitate their research. He sold many of his own books to the fledgling University library to improve its medical collection. As a lecturer he was famous for his thorough reviews:
He first discoursed at length on the virtues and uses of the different articles, and then recapitulated the whole lecture; or else he recapitulated, equally as fully, at the end of the description of each article. In addition, he examined his pupils once a week on the subjects of that week’s lectures,— not, as he said, to catechise them, but to bring back again whatever might have been forgotten (Bruce, 172-3).
Dunglison was one of the most prolific medical writers of his time. He edited and translated European medical texts, most notably François Magendie’s Formulaire, contributed over fifty original essays and books, published nineteen editions of his famous medical lexicon, and co-edited the first American Dictionary for the Blind. Dunglison’s Human Physiology (1832) established his reputation as the “Father of American Physiology.” The American Journal of Medical Sciences called it “the most complete and satisfactory system of Physiology in the English language.” The eighth and final edition appeared in 1856.
- The University of Virginia, 1827
Dunglison spent relatively little of his time in research, but, in 1832-33, he assisted William Beaumont in his famous study of digestion. Beaumont, who was influenced by Dunglison’s comments on digestion in Human Physiology, sent gastric juices to Yale and the University of Virginia to be examined. Dunglison and Emmet (UVa professor of chemistry) discovered free hydrochloric acid in their samples. In a letter to Beaumont (6 February 1833), Dunglison noted: “We were satisfied, you recollect, in Washington, that free muriatic [hydrochloric] acid was present, but I had no conception it existed to the amount met with in our experiments here”(Beaumont, 74).
Beaumont cited Dunglison’s work in his book, but, against custom and for reasons unknown, he did not send him a complimentary copy. Dunglison recalled that he had to buy a copy from Beaumont in Baltimore for three dollars: “[Beaumont] said he thought, under all the circumstances, I ought to have a copy gratuitously; but took the money” (Radbill, 52).