Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 22.djvu/144

 his life he was fond of the study of metaphysics, and imbibed the doctrines of Coleridge, which gave a colour to the whole of his subsequent thoughts and speculations’ (Obituary in Proc. Roy. Soc. vol. xvi. p. xiv). In November 1830 his father, to save a surgeon's premium, apprenticed him to Nasmyth, an Edinburgh surgeon-dentist; the indenture was cancelled at Goodsir's request before the legal term, but he continued to assist Nasmyth and took charge of the practice in his absence in 1835. At the same time he attended Knox's classes in anatomy and some of the university medical classes. He learned practical surgery from Syme and practical medicine from Macintosh, both of the ‘extra-mural’ school. His decided turn for dissection and for making preparations, casts, &c., attracted notice. In 1835 he obtained the license of the Edinburgh College of Surgeons (he did not take the M.D. degree), and joined his father in practice at Anstruther, where he spent the next five years. His first piece of scientific work, and one of his best, grew out of his dental practice; it was a careful and elaborate memoir ‘On the Origin and Development of the Pulps and Sacs of the Human Teeth,’ published, with figures, in the ‘Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal,’ January 1839, but read in abstract at the British Association in the previous autumn. It gave him an assured place among the rising men of science, for it furnished a consecutive account of the process of human dentition. His five years' practice at Anstruther was varied by researches in marine zoology, geology, and archæology, by lecturing now and then at St. Andrews and Cupar, by keeping up with the newer writings in anatomy and physiology, and by making a considerable collection of pathological specimens. In May 1840 he went to Edinburgh, and established himself, along with one (or two) of his brothers, with Edward Forbes [q. v.], and with G. E. Day, in a half-flat at the top of the house 21 Lothian Street, which became well known as ‘the barracks,’ and cost 17l. a year. It was the chief meeting-place of a coterie known as ‘The Universal Brotherhood of the Friends of Truth,’ to which belonged Samuel Brown, George Wilson, John Hughes Bennett, and others, as well as the inmates proper; the club had been started by Edward Forbes some years before on the model of a German students' club (rose and black ribbon across the breast), but had to be reconstituted on a more select and less convivial footing. After about a year of unattached work Goodsir was appointed (in April 1841) curator of the museum of the College of Surgeons, in which capacity he gave courses of lectures upon the specimens, illustrated by his own microscopic researches. The original studies were afterwards communicated to the Royal Society of Edinburgh and other societies. In May 1843 he transferred his services to the university as curator of part of the museum, to which office he added that of demonstrator of anatomy in 1844, and the care of the rest of the museum in 1845. On the death of Monro tertius in 1846 he became a candidate for the valuable chair of anatomy, declaring that he would yield his claims to no one in Britain except Owen; he was elected by vote of the town council (22 to 11). With his appointment to the professorship Goodsir became less active as a writer of scientific memoirs. Beginning with his researches on the growth of the teeth (1838), and ending with his embryological paper on the suprarenals, thyroid, and thymus sent to the Royal Society and printed in the ‘Philosophical Transactions,’ 1846, he brought out thirty papers, most of them short, dealing with original points in development, in zoology, and in microscopic physiology and pathology. The more important of these were collected into a small volume (‘Anatomical and Pathological Observations,’ Edinburgh, 1845). The volume contained also two or three papers by his brother Harry Goodsir, who sailed the same year with Franklin's expedition and perished with it. This small collection was all that Goodsir ever published in book form, and it was mainly on it that his reputation for original research rested at home and abroad. The paper on ‘Centres of Nutrition’ has affinities to a certain part of the cell-doctrine afterwards worked out by Virchow, who dedicated the first edition of his ‘Cellular-Pathologie’ (1859) to Goodsir ‘as one of the earliest and most acute observers of cell-life both physiological and pathological.’ The memoir on ‘Secreting Structures’ was also important, and remains of interest still, although his conclusion ‘that secretion is exactly the same function as nutrition’ is too much in the transcendental manner. Other noteworthy papers are those on the placenta, on the structure, growth, and repair of bone, and on the amphioxus. A subordinate discovery, that of the sarcina ventriculi, or vegetable spores in the human stomach, brought him more credit with the profession at large than his researches did. His writings subsequent to 1846 were mostly on the morphology of the skeleton and the mechanism of the joints; his various plans for some great and comprehensive work were never carried out.

On entering upon his duties as professor of anatomy his enthusiasm for his subject soon