TYSON, EDWARD

(b. Bristol, England, 20 January 1650/1651; d. Lodnon, England, 1 August 1708)

Comparative anatomy, medicine.

Tyson was born into a good Church of England family of some means. After attending private schools in Bristol, Tyson entered Magdale̤ Hall,, Oxford, in 1667 where he was strongly influenced by Plot. From Oxford he received the B.A. in 1670 and M.A. in 1673. During this six-year period Tyson performed many dissections on diverse animals and worked in botany, being influenced by Grew’s The Anatomy of Vegetables Begun (1672). In 1673 Tyson began medical studies, receiving a bachelor of medicine degree from Oxford in 1677. In the same year his first publication appeared in Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire.

Ready to begin practicing medicine, Tyson moved to London in 1677 and took up residence with his brother-in-law Richard Morton, in whose house he carried on various experiments, particularly in anatomy. He soon became affiliated with several members of the Royal Society and began publishing in the Philosophical Transactions in February 1678. Almost immediately Tyson developed a close relationship to Hooke, who made numerous references to Tyson in his Diary. During his first several years in London, Tyson published a handful of papers on morbid anatomy and pathological subjects in the Philosophical Transactions and Bartholin’s Acta medica et philosophica haf- niensa..

Tyson’s first major contribution in comparative anatomy, published in 1680 under the title Phocaena, or the Anatomy of a Porpess. . ., was a description of a dolphin. A full quarter of the forty-eight pages is pages is devoted to“A Preliminary Discourse Concerning Anatomy and a Natural History of Animals,”in which Tyson presents his ideas on the importance of comparative anatomy and gives an outline for a proposed natural history of animals. Tyson criticizes the earlier encyclopedic style of natural history, which placed more emphasis on other authors than on the natural objects. He argues for beginning with the simplest animals and ascending through each of the tribes of animals. Here and in other of his anatomical works Tyson repeats his belief in the Great Chain of Being as seen in a gradation between all animals and the existence of intermediate types between each of the major groups. Tyson thinks his“Porpess”is the transitional link between the fishes and the land quardrupeds. This“Preliminary Discourse”contains a clear expression of the principles and methodology of comparative anatomy. In these ideas and the role it played the“Discourse”is very similar to the admirable, anonymous, introductory essay by Claude Perrault in Mémoires pour servir àI’histoire naturelle des animaux (1671–1676). These two essays did much to set the style and direction for the significant quantity of comparative anatomical work in the late seventeenth century in Paris and London. Whether Tyson was acquainted with the work of Perrault and “the Parisaians”in 1680 is indeterminable, although likely, since he had reviewed for the Philosophical Collections the Mémoires pour servir à I’histoire desplantes (1679), also produced under the auspices of the Paris Academy of Sciences.

Like“the Parisians,”Tyson well recognized that before a general natural history of animals could be written there had to be an accumulation of observations and descriptions of many different kinds of animals. The starting point for such a project should be very good descriptions of representative animals, which can serve as reference points and points of comparison for many similar animals. He thought his description of the“Porpess”might serve as the representative of the cetaceans. Through arrangements made by Hooke–who attended the dissection and did the drawings that were later engraved and published in Tyson’s Phocaena–Tyson was able to dissect the dolphin in November 1679. Tyson hoped the description he presented of his“Porpess”would serve as a model and provide inspiration for others. It was a good description on which others could build and which could help serve as the basis for a general natural history. The following year, in his preface to the English edition, which he arranged to have translated, of Swammerdam’s Ephemeri vita (London, 1681), Tyson repeated the idea that studies of individual species would be the basis of any general natural history.

By 1681 Tyson was well established in London as a comparative anatomist and as a physician. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society (1679), received a doctorate of physics from Cambridge and was admitted a candidate of the Royal College of Physicians in 1680, and was elected to the first of many terms on the council of the Royal Society (1681). In 1683 Tyson was appointed one of the two curators of the Royal Society who were responsible for providing demonstrations at each meeting. Tyson was also elected a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians; later he served as a censor of the college. The following year Tyson was appointed to two positions which had just become vacant–the Ventera readership in anatomy at the Surgeons Hall, from which he retired in 1699, and physician to Bethlehem and Bridewell Hospitals (now the Royal Bethlehem Hospital), where he also later served as a governor. In 1686 Tyson was elected a member of the Philosophical Society of Oxford.

After 1680 Tyson published just over two dozen works, mostly in the Philosophical Transactions, about half of which dealt with natural history. The balance of his output described several pathological cases, instances of monstrous development, and abnormal births. In 1683 Tyson described the anatomy of a rattlesnake, which had been brought to England from Virginia. This very thorough description may then have been the most complete study of any reptile. Later in the same year he described both the broad tapeworm and the roundworm of man as well as a specimen of the Mexican warthog. Because decomposition had begun on the latter, Tyson concentrated on the animal’s dorsal scent gland. Glands, and particularly scent glands, were a subject of recurring interest to Tyson. His first publication (1677) was on scent glands. Over many years he gathered information on human and nonhuman glands, which he brought together in“Adenologia,”the manuscript of which was never published and has been lost.

In 1685 Tyson contributed two descriptions, of a shark embryo and of the lumpfish, to John Ray’s edition of Francis Willughby’s History of Fishes (1686). Also in 1685 Tyson supplied a considerable amount of comparative-anatomical material to Samuel Collins for the latter’s A Systeme of Anatomy. In his own Myotomia Reformata (1694) William Cowper published Tyson’s discovery of the preputial and coronal glands in the glans penis of man. This discovery is perhaps the only thing for which Tyson may be remembered in medicine.

A live opossum was taken to London from Virginia in 1697. Its death in April 1698 provided Tyson with the material for one of his best anatomical descriptions. Fortunately for Tyson the specimen was a female, and he focused on the peculiarities of the reproductive system. He described the marsupium and the marsupial bones. In this paper, also published in 1698 as a separate work, he reiterates the principles of comparative anatomy, which he set forth in his Phocaena. In 1704 Tyson published an anatomy of a male opossum, on which Cowper collaborated with him.

In 1699 Tyson published his best-known work, Orang-Outang, Sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared With That of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. The animal described was actually a young (two to three years old) chimpanzee. The term “orang-Outang”is a native Malaysian term for“man of the woods”and was long used as a generic term for the larger nonhuman primates. Similarly,“ape”was applied to many of the Old World, tailless monkeys, as with the macaque still known as the“Barbary ape.” Tyson was ably assisted on the Orang-Outang by Cowper, who did the section on myology, did the drawings for all of the plates, and mounted the skeleton, which is now at the British Museum (Natural History).

Generally the anatomical description is quite thorough and competent, particularly considering how little comparative, nonhuman primate material was then known in Europe. For comparative material Tyson relied quite heavily on the description of monkeys in Alexander Pitfeild’s English translation of the Parisians’ Mémoires. Tyson concluded with a table of the ways his“Pygmie”more resembled a man than an ape, and vice versa, concluding that it belonged between man and the apes. He was surprised that the orangutan’s brain was so similar to that of man, because there is so much difference between a man’s soul and the soul of the brutes that one would expect a greater difference in their respective organs of the soul. For Tyson, comparative anatomy was a means of understanding and of determining the order of the animals on the Great Chain of Being. Tyson repeatedly emphasizes how close the structure of his Pygmie is to that of man and that the Pygmie is the closest approach of the animal kingdom to the rational qualities of man. While the notion of the Great Chain has a history that long antedates Tyson, he did, in this first anatomical description of one of the great apes, clearly identify an occupant for the rung immediately below man. The identification of such gradational links was one of his objectives for comparative anatomy.

The last section of Tyson’s Orang-Outang is devoted to“A Philological Essay Concerning the Pygmies of the Ancients.”In this major, early contribution to the study of the folklore of the primates Tyson tried to demonstrate that the many references to assorted, but similar, creatures in ancient literature really referred to a nonhuman primate such as his orangutan. Two years later Tyson did a similar philological study regarding the mantichora (a mandrill in the genus Papio), which remained unpublished until Montague’s biography of Tyson. Apparently Tyson intended this and other material on primates to be an appendix to the Orang-Outang. After the publication of the Orang-Outang, Tyson published several more papers in the Philosophical Transactions, the most interesting of which was on the male opossum and a fish, the yellow gurnard (sea robin).

By no means all of Tyson’s scientific work appeared in print. There are many references in the records of the Royal Society to the research that Tyson was doing. These are sometimes referring to specimens turned over to Tyson for dissection (in one case the Society bought an ostrich for him to dissect), and sometimes are Tyson’s reports. In the“Tyson Folio”at the Royal College of Surgeons are Tyson’s research notes from numerous dissections as well as original drawings for his papers, both published and unpublished.

Tyson did not publish a large number of either anatomical or medical works, of which the most important was the Orang-Outang. Tyson carried on an active medical practice from 1677 until his sudden death in 1708. During much of this period he lectured on anatomy at Surgeons Hall and served as physician to Bethlehem and Bridewell Hospitals, where a wing is named in Tyson’s memory. Tyson was a quiet man of orderly habits who occurs seldom in contemporary references and correspondence. Apparently his chief delight came from his studies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works. Tyson’s two major writings were Phocaena, or the Anatomy of a Porpess, Dissected at Gresham College: With a Preliminary Discourse Concerning Anatomy, and a Natural History of Animals (London, 1680); and Orang-Outang, Sive Homo Sylvestris: or, the Anatomy of a Pygmie Compared with That of a Monkey, an Ape, and a Man. To Which Is Added, A Philologocial Essay Concerning the Pygmies, the Cynocephali, the Satyrs, and Sphinges of the Ancients. Wherein It Will Appear That They Are All Either Apes or Monkeys, and Not Men, as Formerly Pretended (London, 1699). A facs. ed. of Orang-Outang (London, 1966) has an introduction by M. F. A. Montague; a 2nd ed., entitled The Anatomy of a Pygmy (London, 1751), also included several of Tyson’s shorter writings. Most of Tyson’s other writings appeared in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. A complete bibliography of Tyson’s writings appears in Montague (see below).

At the Royal College of Surgeons, in folio vol. no. 324, are preserved a number of MSS by Tyson and many drawings of his dissections. The British Museum (MS Sloane 2770) has Tyson’s MS of the myology portion of his anatomy lectures. At least six partial syllabi of his anatomy lectures exist at the British Museum and the Bodleian Library.

II. Secondary Literature. The standard source for Tyson’s life is M. F. Ashley Montague, Edward Tyson, M. D. F.R.S. 1650 - 1708 and the Rise of Human and comparative Anatomy in England (Philadeophia, 1943). Montague exhaustively searched the contemporary literature and records for references to Tyson, and has brought his results together in this volume. A bibliography of Tyson’s writings is included.

Wesley C. Williams