Said to be a brilliant scholar, Lawrence was the translator of several anatomical works written in Latin, and was fully conversant with the latest research on the continent.

[6] Lawrence helped the radical campaigner Thomas Wakley found the Lancet journal, and was prominent at mass meetings for medical reform in 1826.

[11] Both Samuel Coleridge and John Keats were also influenced by the vitalist controversy[12] Despite reaching the height of his profession, with the outstanding quality of his surgical work, and his excellent textbooks,[13] Lawrence is mostly remembered today for an extraordinary period in his early career which brought him fame and notoriety, and led him to the brink of ruin.

Abernethy also published his lectures, which contained his support for John Hunter's vitalism, and his objections to Lawrence's materialism.

[15] In subsequent years Lawrence vigorously contradicted his critics until, in 1819, he published a second book, known by its short title of the Natural history of man.

[16] The book caused a storm of disapproval from conservative and clerical quarters for its supposed atheism, and within the medical profession because he advocated a materialist rather than vitalist approach to human life.

It was "the first great scientific issue that widely seized the public imagination in Britain, a premonition of the debate over Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, exactly forty years later".

However, faced with persecution, perhaps prosecution, and certainly ruin through the loss of surgical patients, Lawrence withdrew the book and resigned from his teaching position.

[25] The meetings were called to protest against the way surgeons abused their privileges to set student fees and control appointments.

In his opening speech Lawrence criticised the by-laws of the College of Surgeons for preventing all but a few teachers in London, Dublin, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen from issuing certificates of attendance at preparatory lectures.

But, true to form, Wakley soon saw Lawrence's rise in the college as providing him with an inside track into the working of the institution he was hoping to reform.

He had for many years declined such honours, and family tradition was that he finally accepted to help his son's courtship of an aristocratic young woman (which did not succeed).

He appears to have allowed himself to be frightened by this, and is now merely a practising surgeon, who keeps his Sunday in the old English fashion, and has let physiology and psychology alone for the present.

[31] Looking back in 1860 on his controversies with Abernethy, Lawrence wrote of "events which though important at the time of occurrence have long ceased to occupy my thoughts".

In 1838 Darwin referred in his "C" transmutation notebook to a copy of Lawrence's "Lectures on physiology, zoology, and the natural history of man", and historians have speculated that he brooded about the implied consequences of publishing his own ideas.

He is omitted, for example, from many of the Darwin biographies,[37] from some evolution textbooks,[38] essay collections,[39] and even from accounts of pre-Darwinian science and religion.

[40] Although the only idea of interest which Darwin found in Lawrence was that of sexual selection in man, the influence on Alfred Russel Wallace, was more positive.

"The men who took up the challenge of Lamarck were three English physicians, Wells, Lawrence and Prichard... All three men denied soft heredity (Lamarckism)"[41] This account is not too accurate in biographical terms, as Lawrence was actually a surgeon, Wells was born in Carolina to a Scottish family, and Prichard was a Scot.

The later publication of Robert Chambers' Vestiges and Matthew's Naval timber[42] was more explicit; the existence of the whole group suggests there was something real (though intangible) about the intellectual atmosphere in Britain which is captured by the phrase 'evolution was in the air'.

There were radical medical students and campaigners in both Edinburgh and London, the two main training centres for the profession at the time.

[43] It is the allegiance to hard inheritance or to natural selection which distinguishes Lawrence, Prichard and Wells, because those ideas have survived, and are part of the present-day account of evolution.

Lawrence's ideas on heredity were many years ahead of their time, as this extract shows: "The offspring inherit only [their parents'] connate peculiarities and not any of the acquired qualities".

However, Lawrence qualified it by including the origin of birth defects owing to influences on the mother (an old folk superstition).

[44][45] However, the number of places in the text where Lawrence explicitly rejects the direct action of the environment on heredity justifies his recognition as an early opponent of Geoffroyism.

The discussion drawn from stratigraphy is interesting: Refers to Cuvier, Brongniart and Lamarck in France, and Parkinson in Britain in connection with fossils: Chapter VII raises the issue of whether different races have similar diseases (p162 et seq) and ends with a list of reasons for placing man in one distinct species.

Lectures of 1818, Chapter IX: On the causes of the varieties of the human species: He shows clearly in several places that differences between races (and between varieties of domesticated animals) are inherited, and not caused by the direct action of the environment; then follows this admission: So, after insisting on empirical (non-religious) evidence, he has clearly rejected Lamarckism but has not thought of natural selection.

At least five people have been claimed as the first to use the word biology:[49] Direct contradiction of the Bible was something Lawrence might have avoided, but his honesty and forthright approach led him onto this dangerous ground: Passages such as these, fully in the tradition of British empiricism and the Age of Enlightenment, were no doubt pointed out to the Lord Chancellor.

[52] Ealing Park is described by Pevsner as "Low and long; nine bays with pediment over the centre and an Ionic one-storeyed colonnade all along.

On 4 August 1823, Lawrence married Louisa Senior (1803–1855), the daughter of a Mayfair haberdasher, who built up social fame through horticulture.

Lawrence suffered an attack of apoplexy whilst descending the stairs at the College of Surgeons and died on 5 July 1867 at his house, 18 Whitehall Place, London.