When University College London (then, University of London) chose its first set of academics, Professor Robert Edmond Grant (1793-1874) was elected to the post of Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy in 1827. He delivered his first lectures in October 1828. Grant remained in this post at University of London for the rest of his life.
As noted in an obituary, Grant famously never missed a lecture. Grant lived on Euston Grove, a few minutes walk from the main building at University of London, now UCL Wilkins Building.
Key to Grant’s teaching was the practice of demonstration, as shown in his Outlines of Comparative Anatomy (1841). Zoology is studied using specimens, not books. To support his teaching, Grant amassed a substantial zoological collection. Some of those items survive today, assembled in the much-expanded later UCL Grant Museum of Zoology.
Grant’s lectures in comparative anatomy had value for medical students. As with all teaching at the University, Grant’s lecture schedule was advertised in London’s newspapers. Below is an announcement of a lectures series for Summer 1829, which appeared in The Times (London).
Advertising Lectures by Professor Robert Edmond Grant
Full text of advertisement from 1829 April 22
Further Reading
On Robert Edmond Grant
- Adrian Desmond. 2004. Robert Edmond Grant (1793-1874). Oxford Dictionary of Scientific Biography. 10.1093/ref:odnb/11286.
- Sarah Parker. 2006. Robert Edmond Grant (1793-1874) and his Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy (London: Grant Museum of Zoology, UCL). ISBN 9780955219108.
- Wikipedia entry for “Robert Edmond Grant” provides a solid overview.
On Grant’s approach to zoology and comparative anatomy
- Gowan Dawson. 2016. Show Me The Bone: Reconstructing Prehistoric Monsters in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). ISBN 9780226332734.
- Toby Appel. 1987. The Cuvier-Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades Before Darwin (Oxford: Oxford University Press). ISBN 0195041380.
On Grant’s social and political moment
- Adrian Desmond. 1989. The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). ISBN 0226143465.
- Desmond, Adrian. (1984). Robert E. Grant: The Social Predicament of a Pre-Darwinian Transmutationist. Journal of the History of Biology 17(2): 189-223.