Medical Tourism in Victorian Edinburgh

Speaker: Professor Martin Willis (Cardiff University)  

This talk focuses on an under-represented area of medical history: the depiction of places of medicine in 19th-century travel guides. Across a huge range of travel guides, written for strangers of all stripes, Edinburgh was illuminated as a city of medicine past, present and future. Investigating these travel guides reveals how Edinburgh's medical spaces and places were constructed and reimagined for new global audiences, and how they contributed to an idea of Edinburgh as a city, and to Britain as a nation.