Dr. John Aitken Carlyle

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In September of 1822 John – Jack to the family now – arrived in Edinburgh to start his studies and to share lodgings with his brother in Moray Street, close to the university. Thomas, who was financing the venture, was tutor to the Bullers at this time. Two months later Thomas wrote Alex to report their progress:

‘Jack and I are living in the most commodious manner here. He gets up first in the morning, worries and bustles about till he has got his accoutrements on , and some victual in him, then sallies forth to teach and to be taught, and I see no more of him till six in the evening. He is busied about many things, full of wonder and contentability, anxious for anatomy and chemical mixtures and the laws of motion. He is also very good natured, and bears wonderfully with me when I grow cross at any time. In short he is a very praiseworthy sloon[1] in all respects as you could wish. There he sits, with his large moon-face right over against me, writing notes and whispering the words before he writes them, or chewing his lips, the very image of contentment!..’(CL. TC/AC 13.11.22)

In later letters Jack is reported to be studying ‘bones and the like’. In the next year they moved to new lodgings at 35 Bristo Street. There were quarrels at times, and Jack wrote to his brother in January of 1824 , admitting that:

‘My ignorance and propensity to Logic-chopping have often annoyed you, but you will forgive me as I was actuated by pardonable motives.’

Thomas taught him proofreading, doubtless with an eye to making use of him with future publications. John spent most of his time on his medical studies, but also read Goldsmith, Scott, Smollett, Fielding, and Cervantes. They argued happily about the relative importance of worldly comforts and mental wealth, with Thomas on the side of worldly comforts, Thomas wrote home to say he was enjoying his brother’s ‘jolly presence…..he is certainly a prime honest “Lord Moon” for all his faults.’ (CL 2 4 24) On holidays at Mainhill, John read the Iliad in the original, sitting with his mother while she wrestled with her older son’s translation of ‘Wilhelm Meister.’

The Thesis

By the end of 1825 John was writing to his brother about his last session of ‘probation’ in Edinburgh:

’For the last fortnight I have devoted a good deal of time to reading works on Mental Diseases. The best work I have got is Pinel’s in French. I think it will be no (sic) difficult to make a respectable enough Thesis on the subject – ‘De Mentis Alienatione.’ The only difficulty will be to make it short enough. I have Morgagni’s Works to find an account of the appearances or depiction of mad people. They are written in a good modern Latin style and may therefore serve another purpose at the same time.’

In the Spring of 1826 he has completed it. Entitled De Mentis Alienatione, it is a work of 19 pages, headed:

‘To Dr. George Baird, SS, TP, for the degree of Dr.

John Aitken Carlyle (Scotus, Chirurigus),

Edinburgh 1826, dedicated to his brother, Thomas.’

It is an essay in general terms about insanity, its history, nature and causes. Written in a mixture of ancient and mediaeval Latin , it begins with a discussion of the danger of violent emotions, such as fear, anger and joy, and of how they may lead to sudden death. There is a need for peace and agreement between mind and body. He distinguishes four kinds of madness: Mania, Melancholy, Imbecility (amentia) and Idiocy (fatuity); the first two can be cured by medical men, the second two are incurable. Mania and melancholy are alike and one can transform into the other. This is a shrewd observation at that date in the history of psychiatry, and may reflect his experience of his mother’s illness There is the same emphasis on bipolar illness later: ‘Insanity can have many symptoms – sadness, silence, some laugh and chatter. Some are suspicious and avoid company and believe themselves surrounded by dangers, Some hear voices, some want to die. Some move from laughter to tears, from spendthrift to miserliness. Some think themselves kings or gods. Some turn against friends ; some have delusions and the sufferer is angry if the delusions are denied. They become unable to judge reality for themselves. They may speak very rapidly. They may hear the voice of an angry God. He also mentions that fevers may trigger mental illnesses. Many of these remarks exactly describe his mother’s illness.

John wrote to his brother:

‘I have given in my thesis and expect my examination at the end of May. I thought it considerably superior to the common run and it was something to have accomplished it without any assistance.’(1826, undated. NLS MS 1775A)

His confidence was justified and he passed his finals and graduated that year.

In 1826 John was the sole member of the family to be present at Templand Farm when Thomas married Jane Welsh. He was soon to spend much time with the newly-weds in their Edinburgh home at Comely Bank; indeed his advice was sought most urgently by Thomas after the first few days of his marriage had proved disastrous. He called on him, ‘all in a maze’, for advice, as a brother and as a doctor, but the outcome is unknown. Jane and he got on well in these early years. They were almost exact contemporaries, and in Edinburgh and at Craigenputtoch he was able to offer her more company than her husband, immersed in his writing.

Postgraduate Studies

In Edinburgh he saw a good deal of Eichtal, uncle of Saint-Simonian Gustave D’Eichtal(1804-1886), and his younger brother Adolphe, and was invited to come to Munich to study. Thomas had met them when he had been in contact with the St Simionists in 1830-31. These offers encouraged John to go to Europe for postgraduate studies, at this period a young doctor’s equivalent of the Grand Tour. .

In 1827, John was ensconced at Comely Bank, studying Spanish and Italian, and spent the winter evenings studying the night sky from an open window, ‘and generally coming down to his porridge about ten with his nose dripping at the extremity.’ John and his brother Alex went to Craigenputtoch in May to prepare it for the arrival of Tom and Jane. Alex found it dirty and smelly, but John, arriving a little later, was more favourably impressed with the house.

Thomas was struggling financially but agreed to fund travels abroad; it cost more than he had bargained for, but he was generous to a fault:

‘Do not, good brother , let thy heart be cast down for the Mammon of this world. A few more hard sovereigns we are yet, thank Heaven, in a condition to furnish. Above all do not neglect dissection and surgery for the sake of any poor thrift there might be in the omission of it. Go on and prosper. Learn all and everything that is to be learned; and if you come home to us a good well-appointed man and physician, we will not think the money ill-bestowed.’

Already Thomas was showing concern at John’s lackadaisical attitude to the practice of his chosen profession. In September John wrote to him thrice in ten days about his plans. Thomas told Alex:

‘so fierce and manifold are his resolutions at present that he is forced to fly to and from with inconceivable rapidity…….College classes begin in Munich with the month of October…he may come back with his humour out, cured of his whim of foreign illumination, and set himself down to practise the cure of diseases like any other honest Christian graduate?’ (TC to AC 11 9 27)

Munich and Vienna

In October 1827, rather old for a postgraduate student, John set off for Munich. He had a partly rough, partly becalmed passage to Rotterdam, then met with a Dr William Laing, an old classmate on his way to France. They visited Leyden and the Hague on foot, then went by boat to Bonn and Cologne. John wrote home to say he was enjoying the land part of the trip more than the sea. Thomas was missing him already: ‘Heaven send the gawsie[1] Doctor back to us. Were it but to chop logic as in old days!’

John stayed with Baron Eichtal ‘as his physician’, but really to study medicine and German literature at the university there. He attended Friedrich Schelling’s philosophy lectures. Schelling (1775-1854) was an idealist philosopher, much influenced by Kant and Fichte. While in Munich he also met Wilhelm von Schlegel, a pioneer of German Romanticism, who had translated Shakespeare, Cervantes, and, interestingly for John’s future, Dante. John wrote to his brother about this encounter in February,1828, with the same pompous style that his brother affected at the same age:

‘The spirit, geniality, clearness and firm precision with which he states his principles, are not lost for me, and will banish that portion of selfsufficient scepticism, which I have imbibed from the conclusions of Scotch philosophy – about the vanity and uselessness of all speculations of the kind.’

Thomas was glad to hear that 'our Bavarian Doctor’ was enjoying and profiting from his time there, and sent some books to the Baron and a box to John. He was expecting John home before the end of the year, and must have been dismayed to hear from him that ‘he could neither have peace in his lifetime, nor sleep quiet in his grave, had he missed six months studying in Vienna.’ He was unhappy, suffering from what his brother, struggling to make ends meet at Craigenputtoch, called ‘Pride and Poverty,’ and was talking of wandering around Germany teaching English. Thomas funded the venture, and John had a second year abroad. He travelled to Vienna partly on foot, partly on the Danube.

By October he was enthusing about Vienna, attending the hospital with its 3000 patients daily, and finding the medical school superior to any he had previously met. He now made the unlikely claim that he could speak German ‘so as not to be known as a foreigner.’ He attended lectures, and clinics on eye diseases and general medicine. In his leisure time he read the Old Testament in Luther’s translation. At home Carlyle told their mother that John’s ‘foreign jaunt’ was costing him ‘ a round sum of money….but had not a whit abated his love of vagrancy, or opened his eyes to the necessity of settling down as a quiet professional man.’ Jeffrey later estimated that Carlyle had expended £240 on his brother’s education.

London

These are the first hints of Tom’s dissatisfaction with John’s way of life, and they were to grow for many years to come. When John returned to Craigenputtoch, he was vague and indecisive about his future. He went, or was dispatched, to London to seek work, but was not energetic in his search for medical work. He wanted to write, like his brother; and his brother, who knew only too well the financial problems of authorship, was irritated that someone with professional qualifications should not pursue them, with their likely security and prosperity. One wonders if John had been steered or manipulated into his medical studies by his brother, keen to see his brother with a profession., lacking the security of one himself. Their parents had wished their eldest son to enter the church; had they no such ambitions for John, less rebellious in religious matters than Thomas? At the back of all their minds there must have the thought that a family doctor would be useful to his family, preoccupied as it now was with health and illness.

So 1830 found John in London, making himself useful by taking Thomas’s essays round editors and publishers, and obtaining some payments from them. He lodged with the charismatic preacher, Edward Irving, an old friend of his brother, and made many new friends. He was offered loans by the Badams and the Montagus to set up in practice, but Thomas advised against them. Meantime he contributed a little to Fraser’s magazine and to other periodicals. From time to time he was asked to give medical assistance: He attended Hazlitt in the last weeks of his life in September,1830; but it was not until the following year that he found regular medical work

[1] gawsie=jolly

[1] Sloon = a lazy fellow

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