Four scientists remembered in stone

Pasteur, Lister, Hunter and Jenner feature on the Queen’s Buildings of Cardiff University

I have often passed Cardiff University’s Queen’s Buildings in Newport Road, usually when I am on the bus and stuck in traffic. And the stone faces above the door always intrigued me. So much so that I went there on a day off a while back to take some pictures and find out more. This post explores what I discovered about the building and the scientists over the door…

The Queen’s Buildings

First the building itself. It’s a “listed” building so there is lots of architectural information on the listed buildings website here.

The oldest part was built in 1915 by EM Bruce Vaughan of Cardiff, as the Department of Physiology of the Welsh National School of Medicine, which explains why the men over the door are medical scientists, even though the building now houses the Cardiff University School of Engineering. This was one of the last Gothic Revival buildings in Cardiff, originally planned as part of a quadrangle but not completed.

A wing was added on the west side in 1964 by Sir Percy Thomas & Son and on the east side by Wyn Thomas & Partners in 1987-93, but I am most interested in the central tower of the building.

The Queen’s Buildings, with the 1964 red-brick extension just visible on the far right and the 1980s concrete extension on the left

The 1980s block

The entrance to the Queen’s Buildings

In the middle above the door are a couple of shields…

The shield on the right seems to be University College, Cardiff, with the motto Nerth Gwlad Ei Gwybodaeth (‘the strength of a country is its learning’) but I don’t know what the shield on the left represents. It seems to have the lions of 13th century Llywelyn the Great’s arms, with the now common motto Cymru am byth (‘Wales forever’)

On the left above the door are busts of Pasteur and Lister and a full-length statue of Asclepius

Asclepius – the god is famous for his staff with entwined snakes, now used in the logo of many medical organisations

Asclepius in Greek

On the right is a full-length statue of Hippocrates and busts of Hunter and Jenner

Hippocrates – the ancient physician is known as ‘the father of modern medicine’ and doctors still use his Hippocratic oath, which did not, by the way, originally include: ‘First do no harm’

Hippocrates in Greek

But now to the scientists, in chronological order. Most of the information is from Wikipedia…

John Hunter

John Hunter (1728 – 1793)
Hunter was a Scottish surgeon, born in Lanarkshire, the youngest of 10 children.

In his youth he helped his brother-in-law as a cabinet maker but when he was 20 he went to London, to assist with dissections at his brother William’s anatomy school. For a while he was an Army surgeon and in 1764 set up his own anatomy school in London and practised as a surgeon.

He was an early believer in the scientific method in medicine. While in the Army he opposed the common practice of opening up gunshot wounds wide to remove the gunpowder, as this was risky in the dirty conditions. Later he carried out tooth transplants, studied pregnant women and was something of an expert on venereal diseases.

John Hunter in a painting by John Jackson in 1813, after an original by Sir Joshua Reynolds – source: Wikipedia

Hunter was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1767 and in 1776 became surgeon to King George III. In 1790 he was appointed Surgeon General to the armed forces. The Hunterian Society of London is named after him and the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons still has his collection of anatomical specimens both human and animal.

Hunter’s wife, Anne Hunter (née Home), was a poet. They had four children, but two died before the age of five. Hunter died of a heart attack in 1793, aged 65, during an argument at St George’s Hospital over the admission of students.

He was a teacher and friend of Edward Jenner, another of our stone heads.

Edward Jenner (1749 – 1823)

Edward Jenner

Jenner was an English physician and scientist and is often called “the father of immunology”. He pioneered the world’s first vaccine, for smallpox. The very word “vaccine” comes from Variolae vaccinae (smallpox of the cow), the Latin name Jenner gave to cowpox.

Jenner was born in Berkeley, Gloucestershire, son of the local vicar and the eighth of nine children. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed for seven years to a surgeon in Chipping Sodbury.

In 1770 he moved to St George’s Hospital in London, to complete his medical training under the great experimentalist John Hunter. The two men became lifelong friends. In 1772 at the age of 23, he went back to Berkeley as a doctor.

Jenner was elected fellow of the Royal Society in 1788, after he published a study of the cuckoo. In the same year he married Catherine Kingscote. She was a daughter of Anthony Kingscote, on whose land he had experimented with balloons.

He earned his MD from the University of St Andrews in 1792 and his work added to the understanding of angina.

Inoculation or “variolation” was already common, but was risky as it meant taking scabs from someone with smallpox and rubbing them on the broken skin of someone without the disease, to try to bring on a lesser infection. Jenner himself had undergone this as a youngster.

Edward Jenner advising a farmer to vaccinate his family, in a painting from around 1910 – source: Wikipedia

Noting that milkmaids were generally immune to smallpox, in 1796, as part of a series of experiments, he took pus from a milkmaid with cowpox, a less virulent infection, and inoculated his gardener’s eight-year-old son with it. The boy later proved immune to smallpox. Jenner also showed the cowpox pus could be used person to person, with no need to go back to the infected cow.

Eventually vaccination was accepted and in 1840 the British government banned variolation and offered free vaccination using cowpox.

In 1821 Jenner was made physician extraordinary to King George IV, and also became mayor of Berkeley and a justice of the peace.

Jenner died of a stroke in 1823, aged 73, and was survived by one son and one daughter, his elder son having died of tuberculosis aged 21. His wife had also died of TB in 1815.

Louis Pasteur (1822 – 1895)

Louis Pasteur

Pasteur was a French chemist and microbiologist popularly known as the “father of microbiology”.

He is famous for his studies of vaccination and microbial fermentation. He is probably best known for his treatment of milk and wine to stop bacterial contamination, a process now called pasteurisation, but he also reduced deaths from puerperal (childbed) fever and created the first vaccines for rabies and anthrax.

Pasteur was born in the wooded and green mountainous area of Jura in Eastern France, to the Catholic family of a poor tanner. Although not very academic, while still a young man he became professor of chemistry at the University of Strasbourg, where he met and married Marie Laurent, daughter of the university’s rector, in 1849. They had five children, only two of whom survived to adulthood, the other three dying of typhoid.

A painting of Louis Pasteur by Albert Edelfelt, now in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris – source: Wikipedia

He developed such a reputation as a research chemist that in 1854, aged 32, he became Dean of the Faculty of Science at the University of Lille, in a big brewing area. While trying to work out why someone’s beer was going off, he looked at samples through a microscope and found thousands of tiny micro-organisms. He also studied milk, wine and vinegar and was sure they were being contaminated by microbes in the air. The medical establishment ridiculed him.

His experiments showed that in sterilised and sealed flasks nothing ever developed, while microorganisms grew if the sterilised flasks were open. He was ultimately responsible for disproving the widespread belief in spontaneous generation – that living organisms can be produced from non-living matter, even that rats could grow from a pile of dirty rags.

Pasteur later moved to Paris and founded the Pasteur Institute in 1887, staying as director there until his death after a series of strokes in 1895, aged 72. He was given a state funeral.

Joseph Lister (1827 – 1912)

Joseph Lister

Lister was an English surgeon and a pioneer of antiseptics. He is known as the “father of modern surgery”.

He was born into a well-off Quaker family in West Ham, Essex, his father a maker of microscope lenses. Beginning at a Quaker school, he became a fluent reader of French and German and went on to study botany at University College, London. Later he studied medicine and entered the Royal College of Surgeons at the age of 26.

In 1854, Lister became first assistant to surgeon James Syme at Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in Scotland. He left the Quakers, joined the Scottish Episcopal Church, and in 1856 married Syme’s daughter, Agnes. On their honeymoon, they spent three months visiting hospitals and universities in France and Germany! By now Agnes was Lister’s keen partner in the laboratory, too.

While he was a professor of surgery at the University of Glasgow, Lister read Pasteur’s studies of micro-organisms responsible for spoilage. Pasteur suggested three methods to eliminate them: filtration, heat or chemicals. Lister successfully experimented with the third option to sterilise surgical instruments and clean wounds and his results were published in The Lancet in 1867.

He chose carbolic acid, a product of coal tar, believing it would make a good disinfectant because it was used to get rid of the smell of sewage used to irrigate fields. And he thought it was safe because livestock grazing on those fields seemed healthy.

Surgeons had always been very gung-ho about hygiene, but he made them wear clean gloves and wash their hands with a carbolic acid solution before and after operations. Instruments were also washed and the solution sprayed in the operating theatre. He also suggested using non-porous materials for the handles of medical instruments.

Joseph Lister spraying phenol over the wound during an operation – source: Wikipedia

Lister left Glasgow in 1869, returning to Edinburgh as successor to Syme as Professor of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh and continued his work there. Later he moved to King’s College Hospital in London.

He retired from practice and became melancholy after Agnes died in 1893 while on holiday in Italy. But he was president of the Royal Society between 1895 and 1900 and Queen Victoria made him Baron Lister of Lyme Regis in Dorset, where he had a holiday home.

Despite suffering a stroke, he was on hand to advise when King Edward VII needed an emergency appendectomy just before his coronation in 1902.

Lister died in 1912, aged 84, at his country home in Kent. A memorial fund paid for the Lister Medal, seen as the most prestigious prize that could be awarded to a surgeon. So far 27 people have received it.

Lister did not invent Listerine! But his work did inspire American Joseph Lawrence in 1879 to make an alcohol-based formula for a surgical antiseptic which included eucalyptol, menthol, methyl salicylate, and thymol. Listerine is still a big name in mouthwash.

And finally…

I’m not going to make a big thing about these “famous” scientists all being grey men. I suppose that’s the way it was in those days. Were there any women physicians and surgeons in the 18th and 19th century? Possibly not, although I know there were quite a few women botanists and physicists. They, too, were rather underrated. The Royal Society did not have a female fellow until 1945!

So instead of being controversial, I am going to show you a squirrel…

Around the door of the Queen’s Buildings are many little stone animals and leafy borders – but I rather like this little chap…

There are some more images of the bits and pieces of stonework on Bob Speel’s website here.

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