History of the Johnstones, 1191-1909, with ... - Electric Scotland

WILBERFORCE'S LETTER 267
malignant fever in Kidderminster in 1756, and published a book on the subject,
quoted in Germany and France, and of which a whole edition had been sold
out ;
that since then it had been in common use not only among the
apothecaries but among the shopkeepers and manufacturers of Worcestershire ;
that the younger James quoted his father's book in his thesis, " De Angina
Maligna," printed at Edinburgh in 1773, and added his own views as to the
success of this mode of correcting contagion in a publication in 1779; that
when Edward was a student at Edinburgh the men's portion of the hospital
was filled with soldiers of the Duke of Buccleuch's regiment suffering from
typhus fever, and the young man recommended his father's invention, which Dr
Hope at once ordered to be used, but discontinued it the next day as it made
some of them cough. Nothing daunted, Edward alluded to it in the next
medical exercise set him by Dr Hope as to how to cure a suppositious case. No
notice being taken of this anonymous paragraph, except that Dr Carmichael
Smyth procured Johnstone's Book on Fevers, John, by the advice of Sir William
Pulteney, wrote to Mr Wilberforce, who had presented Dr Smyth's petition to
the House, and also to Mr Addington, the Prime Minister (afterwards Lord
Sidmouth), himself the son of a physician, and to Sir Joseph Banks. He said
he did not wish to stop or divide the grant claimed by Dr C. Smyth, but it was
not just that his father's discovery should be entirely ignored. Wilberforce
answered from the House of Commons, March 23 : " Dr Johnstone's character,
I assure you without a compliment, gives too much weight to whatever comes
from him not to make me desire on every ground of receiving any elucidation
he can give to any subject."
Johnstone died while the Committee was sitting, and a letter from Dr
Percival, of Manchester, to John observes : " You have vindicated the claim of
your late excellent father to a very important discovery in a manner which does
honour to your abilities, candour and filial piety, and I am confident that the
public will approve your exertions on this occasion, and that even my friend Dr
Carmichael Smyth will find in what you have done no cause of umbrage or
complaint."
The matter might have rested there, even when the Committee gave the
solicited reward to Dr Smyth, had he not written to Wilberforce, with something
like a sneer, that James's death, and Edward's and Henry's illness, proved
the inefficacy of their father's treatment.
This was in answer to John's pamphlet, " Account of the Discovery of the
Power of Mineral Acids in a State of Gas to Destroy Contagion " (March 1803),
which he forwarded, with copies of his father's and brother's books on Fever and
Diphtheria, to the Committee presided over by Mr Wilberforce, through Sir
William Pulteney. The last approved of John's zeal in the matter, but
reminded him of the critical state of public affairs, which prevented any private
question from receiving notice at that moment.
John, being absorbed with business consequent on his inheritance of
Galabank and his large practice, did not hear of Dr Smyth's letter, or that
it had been printed after the Parliamentary custom, till his father's old friend,