Scottish Gifts to Modern Medicine: A Window Into National Pride
On Thursday, millions of Scots will take to the polls to place a vote on a ballot that plainly asks, “Should Scotland be an independent country?” Recent surveys suggest that 48% of Scottish voters plan to answer, “Yes.”
One key ingredient in the movement for independence is national pride. As Scottish reporter Christopher Harress, 30, said, “There is clearly a point of pride and certainly an element of stubborness about Scots and this drive for independence.”
Scottish national pride is colorful and complex, but one clear pillar is the country’s contributions to modern society. Author Arthur Herman boldly titled his book about Scotland, How the Scots Invented the Modern World. In the bestselling work, he writes, “If you want a monument to the Scots, look around you.” He’s right: Scottish engineer John Logie Baird first demonstrated a working television in 1926; Alexander Graham Bell was a Scottish 29 year old in 1876 when he invented the telephone; the first recorded instance of artificial refrigeration (a fridge) was unveiled by Scottish physicist and chemist William Cullen.
The innovations were groundbreaking, but it is not their existence alone that makes Scots proud, nor is it the underdog story of how “this small, underpopulated, and culturally backward nation rose to become the driving wheel of modern progress,” as Herman writes. Rather, it’s often the humble and curious spirit driving the progress. Harress explained, “Scotland’s contribution to the modern world is an obvious point of pride for all Scots, but the underlying narrative to those inventions and discoveries says as much about Scotland today as it did 100 or 200 years ago. They were not pioneered out of search for profit or fame, but purely for the development of our fellow men and women.”
This point is well pronounced in the country’s contributions to modern medicine. For example, it was by mere accident that Sir Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin. There was a dirty dish in his lab, contaminated with an organism that causes blood poisoning. He noticed, however, that an area of the dish had been colonized and cleared. He continued to research the responsible natural bacteria, which he named penicillin. He was knighted for his achievement and won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1945, but he did profit financially.
In the 1970s, Scottish Professor John Mallard led a team based at the University of Aberdeen. They were responsible for technological advances that led to the widespread introduction of MRI. Mallard went on to receive many high honors. But in 2009, he handed over his collection of medals to a historic medical society. He said, “My wife Fiona and I hope that the medals and awards which have been given to me will serve as a permanent reminder of the terrific stir and excitement, which that work here caused at the time, in the scientific and medical world.”
Dolly the sheep, the first successfully cloned animal, was created at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh. She was born on July 5, 1996. The cloning itself was one of the biggest scientific achievements of the decade, but Scottish embryologist Dr. Ian Wilmut was not satisfied; it was not the fame that drove him. He said, “It will enable us to study genetic diseases for which there is presently no cure and track down the mechanisms that are involved.”
Similarly, Dr. James Black did not set out to become famous. According to his New York Times obituary, “Dr. Black said he lived an unplanned life, coasting and daydreaming through most of his school years. He went into medicine, he said, largely because he was excited by the physiology textbooks that an older brother, William, a doctor, brought home.”
But Black’s invention of the beta-blocker propranolol is considered to be one of the most important contributions to clinical medicine and pharmacology of the 20th century. The game-changing heart and stomach medications that Black pioneered — now among the most prescribed in the world — have extended and saved millions of lives. Quite humble in his nature, though, Black preferred to stay out of the public limelight. The Telegraph reported, “Certainly, no man on earth earned more for the international pharmaceutical industry.” Oddly, though, Black derived little personal financial gain from his inventions.
Fleming, Mallard, Wilmut and Black didn’t pursue their discoveries for the rewards of fame or money. Each assumed his lot in life and acted upon the opportunity and responsibility it handed him. Much in the Scottish spirit, they did not seek or demand credit. Perhaps this explains, too, why it’s not widely known that Scotland was also behind general anesthetic, ultrasound, the discovery of insulin and the development of the typhoid vaccine.
As Herman wrote, “Being Scottish is more than just a nationality or a place of origin or clan or even culture. It is a state of mind, a way of viewing the world and our place in it.”
