Edinburgh Medical School

Abstract

Beddoes was a student in Edinburgh at a high peak of the intellectual life of the city. The middle years of the eighteenth century were the time when Scotland was pre-eminent in philosophy, in medicine and in science. David Hume spent the last years of his life in Edinburgh; Adam Smith was still lecturing in Glasgow; the professors who taught Beddoes were among the foremost men of the time in medicine and chemistry. It was an elegant and literary city too, at least in the squares and broad streets of the New Town where the well-to-do lived in houses decorated and furnished by Robert Adam. Here fashionable society lionised a young man whose fresh new songs captivated his hearers, Robert Burns, already famous after the publication in 1786 of his early poems. Their popularity brought Burns to Edinburgh while Beddoes, just one year his junior, was still planning his future. Enthusiastic and eager for new ideas, soon to be optimistic sympathisers with revolutionary changes in France, both these young men could easily be seen at this time as “romantics”. But for all his enthusiasm and hopefulness, Beddoes belonged in many ways to the eighteenth century; his ideas related to the philosophy of Locke and Hume and often seem at odds with his impetuous temperament.