Autograph letter signed between George Whipple and Alfred Swaine Taylor c1850s
George Mathew Whipple (1805–1876). Autograph letter signed to Alfred Swaine Taylor (1806-1880), discussing medical science, physiology, and the labours of editorship.
Penshurst, [undated, but c.1850s].
Three pages, closely written in brown ink; very good, old folds only.
A content rich letter from George Mathew Whipple—physician, naturalist, and later Superintendent of the Royal Gardens at Kew—to Alfred Swaine Taylor (1806–1880), the pre-eminent Victorian toxicologist and author of Elements of Medical Jurisprudence, the standard work of reference in British legal medicine for more than half a century.
Whipple poses several physiological questions—sanguineous circulation, the quantity of blood in the human body, perspiration, and other aspects of human anatomy—citing both Taylor’s Elements of Jurisprudence and Mr. Cooper’s recent lectures on lithotomy.
Whipple himself was a man of broad scientific range. Trained in medicine, he became Superintendent of the Royal Gardens at Kew under Sir William Hooker. His later descendants continued the family’s scientific tradition: his relative Robert Stewart Whipple endowed the University of Cambridge’s celebrated Whipple Museum of the History of Science (founded 1944) with his extensive collection of scientific instruments.
Alfred Swaine Taylor, to whom Whipple writes, was equally celebrated in his own field. Described by contemporaries as “the father of English toxicology,” he gave forensic science a new legal and medical precision. His Elements of Medical Jurisprudence (1836) and On Poisons (1848) became authoritative texts for both physicians and the courts; Taylor’s expert testimony was decisive in the great Victorian poison trials, including those of William Palmer (the “Rugeley Poisoner”) and Adelaide Bartlett. His influence was such that by the 1860s virtually every major case of suspected poisoning in Britain passed through his scrutiny.
A rare letter between these two noted scientists.