The purpose of the present study is to present the life and work and thought of a remarkable pioneering figure on the Scottish scene over the middle half, broadly, of the eighteenth century, in their dynamic relations with that most extraordinary intellectual awakening and scientific, edu cational, literary and religious development of his time generally known as the "Scottish Enlightenment. " That movement in thought and culture was indeed in more ways than one a unique phenomenon in the history of western culture, comparable, in its own manner and measure, as we shall attempt to point out later, with such history-making movements or epochs as the Age of Pericles in Greece, the Augustan Age in Rome, the Renaissance movement in Italy and Western Europe generally, the up-surge both in science and in letters in England in the seventeenth century, and the contemporary movement in France associated with the Encyclopedists. This Scottish Enlightenment, often also spoken of as the "Awakening of Scotland," was of course more than a movement merely on the intel lectual and cultural level. It had also political bearings and was rather directly conditioned by events and changes in the political arena, begin ning with the Union with England in 1707; and even more directly was it accompanied and conditioned by social and economic changes which were in a short span of time to transform the face of this far-northern country almost beyond recognition.

Marshall Hall was trained as a physician in the early nineteenth century, scientifically oriented, University of Edinburgh Medical School. The son of a Methodist cotton manufacturer and bleacher at Nottingham, Hall believed that in science lay the future for progress in medicine. Following early work on diagnosis, on women's disorders and on blood-letting, Hall came to specialise in the nervous system and in particular on the concept of reflex action. For Hall, who proposed a mechanistic explanation of reflex action, Galenic animal spirits and souls in decapitated creatures were out. A superb experimentalist, Hall strove to establish experimental medicine (physiology) as the basis of the medical curriculum instead of anatomy, the long standing domain of the surgeons. They were among the strongest critics of Hall's vivisection procedures, despite his efforts to establish a Code of Practice. Hall was involved in several controversies within and without the Royal Society where he was victimised by its Physiological Committee. He addressed a range of social and public health issues including the abolition of slavery, and devised a new method of resuscitation and a more sensitive physiological test for strychnine detection. He also proposed plans for improving and linking sewage disposal and the transport system of the metropolis.