Byline Backstory No. 6: Ethereal Inspirations in Scotland—Particular Then General

After winning Pennsylvania’s intercollegiate St. Andrews Society scholarship competition, I studied natural philosophy at Scotland’s University of Edinburgh (1975 to 1976). My physics lab instructor was Edinburgh’s venerable James Kyles, FRSE, who had collaborated with neutron discoverer James Chadwick. As the visiting Andrew Mutch Scholar to the Scottish Universities Research Reactor Centre (photographed by me, left), I recorded Dr. Keith Boddy’s use of particle physics to investigate cadmium poisoning. Decades after these particular inspirations, I would revisit the Scottish capital for general inspiration or, more accurately, general inhalation. In 2004 and then 2014, as a medical antiques courier, I would hand-carry rare acquisitions, c. 1846 Hooper and Squire Ether Inhalers (right upper and lower, respectively) from an antiques dealer in Edinburgh back to Chicagoland’s Wood Library-Museum. (Copyright © the American Society of Anesthesiologists’ Wood Library-Museum of Anesthesiology.)