Edinburgh Medical Walkabouts

Arthur Conan Doyle

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  • Memorial Plaque for Arthur Conan Doyle

  The origins of the iconic literary character of Sherlock Holmes can be traced back to 1800s Edinburgh, where his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, was born at Picardy Place on the 22nd of May 1859.
  
  
• While studying medicine at the University of Edinburgh in the 1880s, Conan Doyle encountered Joseph Bell; a surgeon and lecturer at the School of Medicine, who notoriously emphasised to his students the importance of logic, observation and deduction when making diagnoses or conducting forensic investigation.
  
  
• After being taught by Bell as a student, Conan Doyle went on to clerk for him at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, where he was able to observe his practice further. It is thought that in this context, Conan Doyle was able to gain the necessary inspiration from Bell on which to base the character of Sherlock Holmes as a brilliantly observant private detective.
  
  
• In his autobiography, Conan Doyle detailed examples of times where Bell had shown remarkable deduction skills in his work. In one instance, Bell determined that a patient had been recently discharged from the army, and was Scottish but had been based in Barbados, just from looking at him and noticing his mannerisms.
  
  
• Bell also participated in a number of criminal trials. In fact, Bell was even consulted by Scotland Yard on the famous Jack the Ripper case in London in 1888.
  
  
• The character of Sherlock Holmes was first introduced to the world by Conan Doyle in 1887, with the publication of the story A Study in Scarlet. Following initial success, Conan Doyle wrote a number of other novels and short stories focusing on the life of the character.
  
  
• The resulting and ongoing popularity of the fictional detective can still be seen today in the numerous films, TV shows and adaptations that have been developed over more than 100 years. This lasting legacy reflects the significant contributions made to medicine, criminal investigation and the genre of crime fiction in real life Edinburgh by Joseph Bell and Arthur Conan Doyle.
  
  

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Bodysnatching

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  • New Calton Cemetery Watchtower

  Throughout the 1700s and 1800s, Edinburgh was at the global forefront of medical teaching and practice, with the prestigious Medical School gaining a reputation for pioneering techniques and the provision of important practical experience.
  
  
• This growing success meant that by the early 1800s the demand for cadavers on which to perform practical anatomical demonstrations had soared and supply was insufficient.
  
  
• The lack of supply was partly due to the fact that, at that time, the only legal way to obtain bodies for dissection was to use those of executed criminals, or others who had died of natural causes. Additionally, the number of death sentences given was decreasing, while medical schools in other parts of Scotland were also developing a similarly increasing need for bodies. This combination of circumstances meant that, in order for medical teaching in Edinburgh to continue at its existing rate and standard, practitioners turned to alternative methods of obtaining the necessary supplies.
  
  
• The fact that teaching staff became willing to pay for bodies without asking questions led to financial motivation for individuals to meet the demand. This resulted in an illegal trade, where one of the most popular methods of obtaining cadavers was to rob the graves of recently deceased individuals.
  
  
• Grave-robbing, or body snatching as the practice was commonly known, became so common in Edinburgh that it led to the introduction of infrastructure designed to deter criminals from digging up burial sites. In a number of graveyards throughout Edinburgh, watchtowers, gates, and metal bars and cages - known as mortsafes - were erected to prevent access to fresh bodies, and many examples of these can still be seen today.
  
  

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Discovery of Chloroform

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  • Portrait of James Young Simpson
    
    

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  • Engraving at James Young Simpson's home, 52 Queen Street
    
    

  • James Young Simpson and Chloroform

  James Young Simpson is one of the most well-known medical names in Edinburgh’s history. Perhaps his most significant achievement was his contribution to obstetrics through his discovery of chloroform as an anaesthetic to be administered to women during labour.
  
  
• Simpson was born in Bathgate, a town about twenty miles from Edinburgh, to village bakers. He showed early promise as an academic and his family committed themselves to financially supporting his college education. Simpson began studying at the University of Edinburgh as an arts student in 1825, aged 14. Two years later, he began his medical studies.
  
  
• By 1839, Simpson had established a successful private practice in general medicine and obstetrics. As he made a name for himself, his patient base expanded to include not only the residents of Edinburgh’s cramped Old Town but, increasingly, the residents of the wealthy New Town.
  
  
• Around this time, Simpson also began lecturing on obstetrics at the University of Edinburgh and in 1840 he was elected Professor of Midwifery.
  
  
• Anaesthesia was a new development in the medical profession, consisting of inhalations of ether. Ether, however, was both flammable and potentially fatal to patients. As Simpson had always been concerned with the issue of surgical pain, he began experimenting with other potential solutions. In 1847, Simpson and his assistants, George Keith and James Matthews Duncan, began the search for new forms of anaesthetic. After experimenting with numerous ineffective substances, the three men finally got their hands on chloroform.
  
  
• They tested inhaling the sample and quickly fell to the ground and upon further attempts agreed chloroform was the solution they had been searching for. Today, a plaque on this house on Queen Street commemorates the site where Simpson and his assistants made their discovery.
  
  
• In November 1847, Simpson made his Announcement of a New Anaesthetic Agent, and began using chloroform in obstetrics the following year.
  
  
• Chloroform had its dangers; overdoses and adverse reactions led to increased regulation. However, it was safer than contemporary alternatives such as ether, and so chloroform quickly became the anaesthetic of choice amongst doctors and patients. Nevertheless, there was still some opposition to its use in obstetrics because many viewed pain during childbirth as natural. Unless the delivery was particularly difficult or required surgery, commentators believed there was no need to administer anaesthetic. Simpson ignored these objections and insisted on using chloroform during regular childbirth.
  
  
• Simpson’s discovery of chloroform as an anaesthetic was a success. He received many accolades and his position both in Scotland and internationally was heightened by various prestigious appointments. In April 1853, Queen Victoria gave birth to her eighth child with the successful administration of chloroform. This quickly silenced all opposition to Simpson and his stance on pain-free childbirth.
  
  
• Although he never again received the same acclaim as with his discovery of chloroform as an anaesthetic, Simpson dedicated his time to his private practice in addition to important medical causes including the improvement of hospital conditions and hygiene to prevent infection, and, in his later years, promoting the right of women to enter the medical field.
  
  
• In 1850, Simpson became President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. He is remembered as one of Scotland’s most famous and important medical figures.
  
  

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The Edinburgh Seven

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  • Plaque commemorating the Edinburgh Seven
    
    

  • The Edinburgh Seven

  The Edinburgh Seven were a group of pioneering women who studied medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
  
  
• In March 1869, Hastings born Sophia Jex-Blake applied to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Although the university’s medical faculty accepted her application, the University Court deemed that it would need to set up separate classes to cater for her learning, as they believed it would be inappropriate for her to study with male classmates. On the grounds that this would be an unfeasible arrangement for one woman, the university rejected her application.
  
  
• Undeterred, Jex-Blake advertised in the Scotsman newspaper looking for other women who wished to study for medical qualifications. Jex-Blake hoped that if the university would not cater to teaching one woman, they might do so for a group of women. The first women to respond and to join her in applying were Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson and Emily Bovell. They became known as the Edinburgh Seven.
  
  
• In October 1869 this group of determined women were the first female students to matriculate at any British university.
  
  
• The women faced abuse and obstruction as they attended lectures and classes. In 1870, animosity towards the women culminated in a violent riot outside Surgeons Hall on Nicolson Street where angry protesters attempted to prevent the women from sitting their anatomy exam.
  
  
• In 1873, and with the mere presence of the women at the University of Edinburgh causing controversy, the Court of Session, Scotland’s highest civil court, ruled that the university had acted beyond its powers in allowing the women to matriculate in the first place and the Edinburgh Seven were legally barred from graduating.
  
  
• Between 1877 and 1879, five of the Seven gained their medical qualifications from universities in Europe. Furthermore, the Seven helped set up medical schools for women and continued to campaign for legislation that would recognise the right of women to study and practice medicine. A major victory came when the government, led by MPs sympathetic to the women’s cause such as Russell Gurney, passed the Medical Act in 1876. This Act enabled British medical authorities to examine and license female candidates to practice medicine.
  
  
• Almost 20 years after the Medical Act was passed the University of Edinburgh allowed its first women to graduate in 1892. Elsie Inglis, a former pupil of Sophia Jex-Blake, was one of Edinburgh’s early women graduates and went on to become a revered Scottish doctor and surgeon.
  
  

London School of Medicine for Women

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  Having been barred from graduating from the University of Edinburgh, in 1874 Sophia Jex-Blake founded the London School of Medicine for Women to provide medical training for women. There, she was joined by other members of the Edinburgh Seven, including Isabel Thorne who dedicated the next three decades of her life to the running of the school. In founding the school, the women of the Seven joined forces with Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify in Britain as a doctor.
  
  

Elsie Inglis

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  Elsie Inglis was a Scottish physician, surgeon and suffragist. A former pupil of Sophia Jex-Blake at the London School of Medicine for Women, Inglis was one of the University of Edinburgh’s early women graduates, gaining her medical qualification in 1899.
  
  
• Inglis gained fame during the First World War due to her contribution to the Allied war effort, setting up hospitals on the Western Front under the banner of her Scottish Women's Hospitals Committee. On the 26th of November 1917, having spent a year treating wounded Serbian soldiers in Russia, Inglis died a day after arriving in Newcastle, having been forced to return to Britain after succumbing to cancer. In July 1925, in the Abbeyhill area of Edinburgh, The Elsie Inglis Maternity Hospital opened as a memorial to Inglis’ work. The hospital closed in 1988, and a nursing home was built on the site, reusing some hospital buildings and retaining the Elsie Inglis name. A part of the former hospital was also refurbished as a nursery. The nursery and nursing home are now joined by new housing developments on the site.
  
  

Edinburgh Seven plaque – image copyright RCPE 2022
Elsie Inglis - image copyright RCPE 2022
London School of Medicine – image copyright Wellcome Collection – CC BY 4.0

Water Cures

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  • St. Bernard’s Well on the Water of Leith
    
    

  • Water Cures

  Physicians recommended water for a wide range of medical purposes. You could swim in it, bathe in it or drink it. There were vapour baths, mineral baths, salt baths and plunge baths.
  
  
• St Bernard’s Well can be found on the Water of Leith, between Dean Village and Stockbridge.
  
  
• This natural spring was discovered in 1760 and rapidly became popular with citizens of Edinburgh suffering from a variety of medical conditions. The foul tasting, sulphurous water was claimed to be a cure for all manner of ailments from general aches and pains to blindness.
  
  
• The building in the form of an Ancient Greek temple that now sits over the well was built in 1789. It surrounds a statue of Hygeia, the Greek goddess of health.
  
  
• Springs and spas were popular across Europe at this time for the medicinal properties that their waters supposedly contained whether drunk or bathed in.
  
  
• For the wealthy and fashionable, this could involve trips to areas such as Bath or Leamington Spa or overseas, to the thermal springs of Switzerland and Germany.
  
  
• Many of these sites had previously been identified as holy wells or sites of spiritual healing. With the rise of Protestantism, healing by religious authorities became healing by medical ones. Health spas, as a result, were much more common in Protestant countries than in Catholic ones.
  
  
• Because there was so much money to be made off these spas, there was much rivalry between them about whose water was best. The spa business was both very commercial and very competitive – with towns such as Brighton, Buxton, Harrogate and Scarborough competing with one another for primacy.
  
  
• Scotland was not immune to such a business opportunity either and major spas were set up in Aberdeen, in Fife, Ross-shire and on Broughton Street, in Edinburgh’s New Town.
  
  
• For the less well off, water cures could take place in tubs in their own homes, or swimming in the Water of Leith and Leith harbour. Although, as one Edinburgh doctor noted, ‘from this often drowning could result’.
  
  
• Outdoor baths or Safety Baths were common in the mid-1800s – these were an enclosed area of river or harbour where bathers could swim without risk of being carried away by a current.
  
  
• In the 1700s and 1800s bathing huts, or bathing machines, were also popular and could be seen in sites around Edinburgh, including Portobello. These were wooden carts which allowed people to change into their bathing clothes inside, in privacy, and then they were rolled out into the sea, so as few people as possible would see you in your bathing suit.
  
  
• More public bath houses began to be established in Scotland from the 1850s onwards, following the enactment of the 1846 Act to Encourage the Establishment of Public Baths and Wash-Houses. Industrialisation, overcrowding and unhealthy working conditions meant that bath houses were seen as an essential resource for the population.
  
  

Victoria Public Baths, Leith

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  Victoria Public Baths in Leith opened in 1899. The customers of this bath were very different to those of the private baths. Because many Leith homes lacked bathrooms, the facility contained not only a swimming pool but also individual baths and public laundry facilities. The individual baths remained in use up to the 1970s.
  
  

Warrender Baths, Marchmont

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  The Warrender baths in Marchmont were opened in 1886. These were the result of private enterprise by some local residents who bought the land, commissioned an architect and paid for their development. The emphasis was on fitness and leisure rather than on promoting cleanliness and hygiene.
  
  
• Private baths such as this were more akin to private member clubs than modern-day swimming pools. A Turkish Bath, opened in 1861 at 90 Princes Street, occupied a similar role with a billiard room, music room, reading room and lounge area. Using its facilities, according to its promotional material, could cure influenza, bronchitis, indigestion and gout.
  
  
• Many early baths, including this Turkish Bath, were what was called ‘fill and empty’ baths. What this meant was that first-class swimmers swam earlier in the day, in clean water, and then swimming got cheaper towards the evening as the water got dirtier.
  
  

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Ragged School

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  • Former Edinburgh Ragged School, Ramsey Lane
    

  The original Ragged School was established in 1847 by preacher and reformer Dr Thomas Guthrie in a small room on Castle Hill in a building that is now part of the Camera Obscura. The open Bible above the door with the inscription ‘Search the Scriptures’ (John 5 verse 39) was part of the school decor and the school Bible is still kept on the site.
  
  
• In his autobiography, Guthrie wrote that, ‘Five-and-thirty years ago, on first coming to this city, I had not spent a month in my daily walks in our Cowgate and Grassmarket without seeing that, with worthless, drunken and abandoned parents for their only guardians, there were thousands of poor innocent children, whose only chance of being saved from a life of ignorance and crime lay in a system of compulsory education.’
  
  
• Children caught up in vagrancy and crime in the early 1800s were imprisoned, flogged and even hanged. Reformers, like Guthrie, believed that money spent on the out-of-date prison system was being wasted and campaigned for better funding and education for children at risk. He planned to solve this issue by creating a boarding school that could house 45 poor children of both sexes, although most children didn’t board overnight. The school provided a basic education as well as occupational work such as shoe making and household management.
  
  
• Dr Thomas Guthrie died on the 24th of February 1873. As well as friends and supporters, many former students of his Ragged Schools attended his funeral.
  
  

Ragged Schools

• Ragged schools were charities set up for the free education of the very poorest children in Victorian Britain. They were usually set up in working-class areas.
  
  
• They initially taught reading, writing and arithmetic, although later more technical and industrial subjects were also taught.
  
  
• The first ragged school was set up in the 1840s in London. By the 1860s there were hundreds of ragged schools across Britain. It became fashionable for the wealthy to support the schools and so their numbers, and size, grew in the following decades.
  
  

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Grassmarket Gallows

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  • Covenanters Memorial Stone at Grassmarket Gallows

  Edinburgh’s Grassmarket was a traditional site for public executions. Plaques and memorials near the execution site commemorate a few of the many people who were executed there. One of the most famous executions which took place in the Grassmarket was that of Margaret Dickson.
  
  
• Margaret was born in Musselburgh around 1702, and later sold fish there alongside her husband who was a fisherman. When her husband abandoned her in 1723, she moved to Kelso in the Scottish borders and found work in an inn. There, she began an affair with the innkeeper’s son, and upon discovering she was pregnant, attempted to conceal this fact from her employer to prevent her dismissal. While it is not known if the baby was still-born due to a premature delivery, or died shortly after birth, the child was later found abandoned on the banks of the River Tweed.
  
  
• Margaret was later arrested, charged, and convicted, either for causing the death of the child or for hiding the body. She was sentenced to death and was hanged in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket on the 2nd of September 1724. Following the pronunciation of death, Margaret’s body was prepared for transportation back to Musselburgh. However, the journey was interrupted by a banging coming from inside the coffin, and once the lid was lifted, the procession was astonished to find her alive.
  
  
• After much debate about what to do with her, it was concluded that, as she had been hanged and pronounced dead, Margaret’s sentence had been fulfilled and she was therefore beyond further prosecution. Her apparent ability to return from the dead earned her the title of Half-Hangit Maggie, and the medical miracle which occurred did not stop her from enjoying many more years of life.
  
  

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High Street Tolbooth

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  • Heart of Midlothian Mosaic

  This mosaic - referred to as the Heart of Midlothian - marks the entrance to Edinburgh’s old Tolbooth, where, before its demolition in 1817, burgh, parliament and court business was conducted. Although the exact date of the building’s construction is unknown, the structure and the activities that took place within it played an important role in the official operation of Edinburgh for over 400 years. For a time the Tolbooth was used as Edinburgh’s main jail, and was notorious for poor conditions, torture, and executions.
  
  
• Among the institution’s infamous inmates was William Brodie, who was hanged at the Tolbooth’s gallows on 1st October 1788. Brodie had been a cabinetmaker and a respected Edinburgh City Councillor, as well as a Deacon of the Guild of Wrights and Masons. Despite his status as a seemingly upstanding member of Edinburgh society, by night Brodie turned to illegal activities to maintain his lifestyle of gambling, mistresses, and illegitimate children.
  
  
• Along with accomplices he recruited, Brodie used his expertise with locks, bolts, and cabinet mechanisms to break into houses and cupboards to rob and steal. Eventually, the gang of thieves organised a failed raid on the excise office located in Chessel’s Court on the Canongate. After his co-conspirators turned King’s Evidence, Brodie fled to the Netherlands, where he was arrested while attempting to board a ship from Amsterdam to North America.
  
  
• He was brought back to Edinburgh, where an investigation revealed duplicate keys, disguises and weapons had been stashed in Brodie’s home. As a result, he was tried, found guilty, and hanged at the Tolbooth. It is thought that Deacon Brodie, as town councillor, had actually helped raise funds for the construction of the gallows he was later executed on. A tavern has been named after Brodie, which still exists today and is located further down the High Street.
  
  
• As shown by the continued memorialisation of criminals like Brodie, the Heart of Midlothian represents the enduring story of the old Tolbooth and those who were incarcerated and executed in the middle of Edinburgh’s Old Town. It has become customary for locals to spit on the arrangement of stones, and although the reasons for this are unclear, common explanations are that it brings luck, or demonstrates disdain for the despicable individuals who would have been locked up behind the doors of the building it marks.
  
  
• The small mosaic also shares its name with a novel written by Sir Walter Scott, as well as the popular Edinburgh-based football team; the crest of which was modelled on this original Heart of Midlothian.
  
  

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Death and Disease Among Edinburgh’s Royal Residents

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  • The Palace of Holyroodhouse
    

  Even Edinburgh’s royal residents were not immune to the ravages of disease. In 1566 Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, husband and cousin to Mary Queen of Scots, became very ill. Although Darnley was said to have contracted smallpox, both contemporary and modern commentators have speculated that he may, in fact, have been suffering from the sexually transmitted disease, syphilis.
  
  
• Despite estrangement in their marriage caused by Darnley’s apparent involvement in the murder of David Rizzio, one of the Queen’s favourite courtiers, Mary appeared to take her husband’s illness seriously and she sent him to an eminent doctor in Glasgow for treatment. When Darnley returned to Edinburgh in late January 1567, he chose to stay away from the palace at Holyrood and recover instead at a house not too far away near the church of St Mary-in-the-Field (or Kirk O’Field).
  
  
• Contemporary descriptions of Darnley note that he was pockmarked and disfigured (a symptom of both smallpox and syphilis) by his illness and that he wore a veil to cover his face. His choice to keep away from Holyrood was likely an effort to avoid the public eye and reduce royal embarrassment. Darnley’s treatment is said to have included repeated and frequent bathing. Bathing was believed to make the patient sweat, thus excreting the poisons of the disease from the body.
  
  
• It was towards the end of his convalescence that Darnley met his untimely end, although not from his illness. There appeared to have been some reconciliation between Mary and Darnley during his illness, with the Queen attending her husband’s bedside frequently.
  
  
• On the night of the 9th of February 1567, Mary left Kirk O’Field to attend a servant’s wedding at Holyrood. In the early hours of the following morning, there was a massive explosion at Kirk O’Field and Lord Darnley and his manservant were found dead in the garden. It is believed Darnley died either from internal injuries caused by the explosion itself or by strangulation. It is suggested that, having initially survived, Darnley was either dragged or staggered himself from the burning house only to collapse from his wounds or to be assailed further in the garden. In any case, it was obvious he had been deliberately killed. Darnley was not liked by the nobility due to his boorish behaviour and his consuming ambition to obtain the ‘Crown Matrimonial’, – the right to rule equally with one’s spouse – bolstered by his own royal blood connections that linked him to the thrones of both Scotland and England. At his time of death he was 21 years old.
  
  
• Mary’s soon-to-be third husband, Lord Bothwell, was the chief suspect in the arrangement of Darnley’s murder, although he was formally acquitted of any wrongdoing at his trial. It remains unclear whether Mary’s subsequent marriage to Bothwell took place under duress or of her own free will. However, her association with Bothwell only intensified suspicions that she too had a hand in the murder of Darnley, whether this was true or not.
  
  
• Despite general dislike for Darnley at court, the idea that Mary may have been involved in the death of her husband led to her losing the support of the Scottish nobles. Mary fled to England looking for help from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I of England, thus beginning the chain of events that would lead to her long imprisonment in England and eventual execution for treason.
  
  

Syphilis in Scotland

• Lord Darnley, the king consort of Mary Queen of Scots suffered from an illness that manifested in painful sores and lesions on the face and body. Many contemporary and modern commentators believe this was syphilis. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection, and by the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the disease was prevalent across most countries in Europe. This new disease was particularly feared because of the extremely painful and disfiguring symptoms it entailed, in addition to adverse neurological effects suffered by some long-term victims as the infection worked its way into the brain.
  
  
• Syphilis had many names, often misnomers bequeathed upon it by countries wishing to blame its presence on their enemies including, commonly, ‘the French Pox’. In Scotland it was known as ‘grandgore’. By the end of the fifteenth century, the situation in Edinburgh was so serious that James IV passed the Grandgore Act in 1497, forcing those infected by the disease to quarantine on the small island of Inchkeith in the Firth of Forth. They were told not to return until cured (an outcome which was extremely unlikely).
  
  
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  • Illustration of tertiary syphilis by Italian professor, Marco Aurelio Severino
    

  Early treatments for syphilis were ineffective at best and fatal at worst. One sixteenth century treatment for syphilis was guaiacum, or ‘holy wood’, a plant from South America. Victims were also encouraged to bathe regularly in hot water to try to sweat out the poisons of the disease. However, for centuries, the main treatment for syphilis was mercury, applied via ointments to the infected skin, or ingested orally. Many unlucky enough to contract syphilis died from the painful effects of mercury poisoning. Despite a gradual increase in awareness of the toxicity of mercury, it remained in use until the early twentieth century. Finally, in 1943, penicillin was introduced as a successful and safe treatment for syphilis. Penicillin is still used today to treat the disease, and patients can usually be cured by a simple course of antibiotics or injections lasting a few weeks. Today, in addition to being treatable in most cases, the disease is relatively uncommon. However, syphilis has been on the rise in recent years. In Scotland, in 2018, Health Protection Scotland reported that there were 455 recorded cases, a rise of 14% from the previous year.
  
  

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Jekyll and Hyde

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  • Governor’s House on Calton Hill

  Governor’s House is all that remains of Calton Prison, which opened in 1817 and by the time of its demolition in 1930 had earned a reputation for being one of the most brutal places to be incarcerated in Scotland. The original building stood at the current site of St Andrew’s House, which is used as a Scottish Government Office.
  
  
• Among the jail’s many infamous inmates, one individual in particular had a significant impact on Edinburgh and the wider global community. On the 31st of May 1878, Eugene Marie Chantrelle was hanged at the jail following a complex legal process, which ended in a conviction for the murder of his wife.
  
  
• Originally from France, Chantrelle was a failed doctor who later became a French teacher. While living in Edinburgh and teaching at Newington Academy, Chantrelle met and later married one of his students, Elizabeth Dyer. She was pregnant at the time of the marriage and gave birth two months after the wedding.
  
  
• As well as regularly abusing and threatening his wife, in 1877 Chantrelle took out a life insurance policy on her that was worth £1000. On the 2nd of January 1878, Elizabeth was found unconscious by a servant, and later died in hospital.
  
  
• During the ensuing investigation Chantrelle consistently voiced his belief that his wife had been killed by a gas leak. Among the investigators of the case was Edinburgh surgeon and public health official Henry Littlejohn, whose suspicions surrounding the circumstances of the death and Chantrelle’s claims led him to request an autopsy of the body. This was performed by Dr Douglas Maclagan, a professor at the University of Edinburgh. Maclagan’s findings were that Elizabeth had not died as a result of gas inhalation.
  
  
• Later, it was discovered that, as described by the maid who had found her unconscious mistress, the nightdress of Mrs Chantrelle had been stained by vomit. Upon the request of Henry Littlejohn and Douglas Maclagan, additional forensic analysis was undertaken on the item of clothing. The result was the detection of traces of opium, suggesting that her death was due to poisoning.
  
  
• A combination of Chantrelle’s education on the topic of poisons due to his medical training, records proving he had recently purchased opium, the expensive life insurance policy he had taken out and his suspicious insistence that a gas leak had led to his wife’s death, resulted in his arrest. He was later convicted and executed at Calton Prison, and it is likely that his body actually remains buried underneath the west car park of St Andrews House.
  
  
• The story of Eugene Chantrelle, however, did not end after his death. It is thought that, in the same way that Arthur Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes on Joseph Bell, the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson found inspiration in Chantrelle’s ability to hide his extreme violent tendencies. Stevenson had crossed paths with Chantrelle throughout his time in Edinburgh, and it has been said that the two coexisting personalities of the main character in the novel Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde reflected Chantrelle’s unpredictability, and ability to portray innocence while committing horrific crimes. The fascination with the character of Dr Jekyll and his alter-ego meant the book was extremely well received, and subsequent adaptations for the stage, TV, and film have solidified it as one of Stevenson’s most popular works. It is in this way that the actions of Eugene Chantrelle still remain in the popular consciousness of Edinburgh and beyond.
  
  

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Overcrowding

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  • West Bow Well in Edinburgh's Grassmarket
    
    

  • Overcrowding
    
    

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  • The Flodden Wall
    
    

  Edinburgh in the 1600s and much of the 1700s was restricted by the Flodden Wall. This boundary wall was completed in 1560 in response to the Scots army’s defeat at the Battle of Flodden. The Flodden Wall was built to protect the city but as Edinburgh’s population grew it caused major problems and as a result overcrowding became a serious issue.
  
  
• As housing couldn’t spread sideways, it went up instead. Tenements within the city’s walls reached as high as 14 stories – among the tallest buildings in the world at that time.
  
  
• While many of these may have been built for more well-off city dwellers, by the 1800s many of the wealthy had moved out - to newer premises which had been erected in Edinburgh’s New Town. As a result, these older buildings became run down, overcrowded and filthy.
  
  
• Because these tenements had no toilets, there was only one way to deal with waste. Buckets were filled and then simply emptied out of a window, pouring down onto the streets below.
  
  
• In 1749 the so-called Nastiness Act was passed, which decreed that waste could only be tossed out of windows between 10pm and 7am. The person throwing the waste was to call out ‘Gardyloo’ - a corruption of a French phrase meaning ‘watch the water’ – to warn those passing below.
  
  
• What are now two of Edinburgh’s most popular green spaces were once two great lochs. The Nor Loch and Burgh Loch, as they were then known, dominated the city.
  
  
• In the early 1600s, Nor Loch lay in what is now Princes Street Gardens, and Burgh Loch was what is now the Meadows. Burgh Loch supplied much of the city’s drinking water, while Nor Loch was used for important defensive means (as well as providing the city’s sewage and rubbish disposal!).
  
  
• It was in the 1620s that Edinburgh received its first fresh water supply from further afield, piped in via a network of wooden pipes, which were little more than hollowed out tree trunks. The water was transported to the top of the Royal Mile to a reservoir which had been built there. The reservoir building can still be seen on Castlehill today – a tartan weaving mill that goes 5 storeys underground.
  
  
• The West Bow Well, in Edinburgh’s Grassmarket, was the first of the wellheads built to supply water from the new reservoir. Although this new supply brought fresh water into the city, the wells would often run dry and so queues for water were usually very long.
  
  
• Because Edinburgh tenements didn’t have running water a common occupation in the city was that of water carrier, or water caddie. These caddies could be found queuing with their water kegs at the public wells, before travelling throughout the city, along streets and closes, and up and down many flights of stairs, to sell their water to the inhabitants of the tenements.
  
  

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Physic Gardens

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  • Plaque commemorating the Edinburgh physic garden
    
    

  • Physic gardens of Edinburgh

  For many centuries gardens were at the centre of the evolving science and practice of medicine. Modern medicine evolved from medical botany, and gardens for medicinal plants (which were commonly known as physic gardens) were living pharmacies, living laboratories and living study collections. Scotland, and especially Edinburgh, was at the forefront of this innovation.
  
  
• The College of Surgeons, founded in 1505, played host to Edinburgh’s first known physic garden. The garden, established in 1656, was situated at Curriehill House on Drummond Street where the Old Surgeons Hall, built in 1697, still stands.
  
  
• The surgeons’ focus was on human anatomy and invasive procedures, whereas the physicians’ approach was to treat patients with medicines derived from plants. Thus, the physicians needed to develop a medicinal garden of their own.
  
  
• The two founding members of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, Sir Robert Sibbald and Dr Andrew Balfour, established the College’s first physic garden in 1670 on the grounds of Holyrood Palace. Gardener James Sutherland was employed by Sibbald and Balfour to tend and cultivate the garden. Sutherland contributed immensely to knowledge of medicinal plants.
  
  
• A recreation of the Holyrood physic garden is situated behind the Abbey Strand buildings. It was opened to the public by the Royal Collection Trust in 2020.
  
  
• Relatively little is known about the exact location or size of the original physic garden at Holyrood, but it is agreed that the garden gradually became too small for its purposes. To compensate for the lack of space at Holyrood, Dr Andrew Balfour founded a new physic garden to operate concurrently in the grounds of Trinity Hospital - where Edinburgh’s Waverley Train Station now sits.
  
  
• The garden at Trinity was badly damaged by a flood during the Jacobite Rising and siege of Edinburgh Castle in 1689 and by 1763, both the physic garden at Trinity and its parent at Holyrood were disbanded and relocated near the now bustling Leith Walk. This garden was established by Dr John Hope, who managed to acquire funding from the Crown to turn the five acres into a new physic garden and took on the difficult task of transferring the collections of plants from the Holyrood and Trinity sites to the new garden.
  
  
• By 1820, it was once again time for the physic garden to move to larger premises, this time to the Inverleith area where it became the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh. The Royal Botanic Garden is the magnificent result of Edinburgh’s long relationship with physic gardens. The main site at Inverleith Row covers 70 acres and, along with three other smaller sites at Benmore, Logan and Daywick, houses over 270,000 plants. The garden owes its existence to the apothecaries, surgeons and physicians who studied plants for their medicinal properties centuries ago. As a result, the Royal Botanic Garden is now not only a beautiful place for visitors to enjoy the beauty of nature, but an internationally renowned site for botanical research, science and conservation.
  
  

James Sutherland

• • 
  James Sutherland was a talented self-taught gardener, with an expansive knowledge of plants and their uses in botany. He was employed by Sir Robert Sibbald and Dr Andrew Balfour to oversee the royal physic garden at the Palace of Holyroodhouse. Sutherland taught botany to medical students and curated the garden at Holyrood with great success. When the need for expansion led Dr Balfour to found a second physic garden at Trinity Hospital by the Nor Loch (the site of Waverley Train Station today) this too was placed under the watchful eye of James Sutherland. The garden at Trinity is described by Sutherland in his Hortus Medicus Edinburgensis as containing over 2000 plant species. Sutherland’s work in medicinal botany earned him titles and honours during his lifetime. He became King’s Botanist under William III and was the first to be bestowed the title of Regius Professor of Botany for the Royal Garden by Queen Anne in 1710. Sutherland’s enormous contribution to the use of plants in medicine is today internationally recognised indeed, the Sutherlandia frutescens, an indigenous medicinal plant of South Africa, is named after him.
  
  

The Gardener’s Cottage

• • 
  In 1766, when Edinburgh’s royal physic garden was based near modern-day Leith Walk, architects John Adam and James Craig constructed a cottage to serve as the head gardener’s accommodation, the entranceway to the garden, and to host medical lectures for students. When the garden was relocated to the Inverleith site to become the Royal Botanic Garden, Adam and Craig’s Gardener’s Cottage was left behind. Over the years, the building played host to numerous businesses and tenants as Edinburgh expanded around it. Finally, the Gardener’s Cottage was left derelict and was badly damaged by a fire. In 2008, a rescue effort was mounted to save the historically significant Gardener’s Cottage, moving it stone by stone from its original location to the Royal Botanic Garden in Inverleith. The Cottage is now restored to its former glory, admired by visitors from all over the world and reunited with the physic garden it had long ago watched over.
  
  

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Plague in Edinburgh

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  • Grave of John Livingston
    
    

  • Plague in Edinburgh

  In 1645 Edinburgh was particularly badly struck by an epidemic of plague. Two types of deadly plague ravaged the population at this time: the bubonic plague, which caused the afflicted to break out in large, painful boils, and the pneumonic plague - known as the Black Death - which affected the sufferer’s lungs and respiratory system and caused lymph nodes on the body to swell and turn black.
  
  
• In a secluded courtyard in Morningside, lies the tomb of John Livingston. This peaceful resting place lies near to where Livingston’s house once stood. Livingston was an apothecary and he treated Edinburgh residents suffering from medical ailments, including the plague, before succumbing himself to Black Death during the outbreak of 1645. Apothecaries like Livingston believed that plague was spread through bad air or miasma.
  
  
• To protect themselves from the infectious air they believed spread the disease, plague doctors wore long robes that covered their bodies, and placed herbs and spices in their peculiar beaked masks. In fact, the plague was spread from infected rats to humans through the bite of fleas. Despite a misunderstanding of how the plague spread, the existence of plague doctors and their attempts to treat the contagion show an awareness of the need to protect public health.
  
  
• This is also seen in attempted preventative measures Edinburgh authorities carried out. Those infected by the plague were transported by cart out of the more populated areas of Edinburgh outside the city walls by ‘foul clengers’ to be quarantined or, for the many unfortunate enough to perish from the disease, buried in places such as the Burgh Muir, situated in what is now the Bruntsfield area. On the South Loch, what is now the Meadows, the ‘clengers’ would prepare pots of boiling water and try to sterilise the belongings of the infected by dipping them in the water using long steel rods.
  
  
• Moving the infectious to designated sites away from the general population was a common tactic used by city officials when disease came to Edinburgh. Indeed, Inchkeith, a small, barren island in the Firth of Forth, was used as a quarantine site for victims of infectious diseases such as syphilis and plague several times throughout the 1400s, 1500s and 1600s.
  
  

Apothecaries

• Apothecaries like John Livingston administered medicines to the sick, much like the role of a chemist or pharmacist today. Apothecaries ground up or extracted elements of herbs, plants, and animal components to make compounds or draughts to treat ailments. They would often have access to a physic garden where plants and herbs were grown and cultivated specifically for use in medicines.
  
  

Foul Clengers

• In Edinburgh during time of plague, ‘foul clengers’ or plague cleaners were employed by the city to mitigate the spread of the disease. The clengers were responsible for cleaning an infected person’s house and belongings, transporting suffers to quarantine zones such as the Burg Muir and burying the bodies of those who died of the plague. The clengers also enforced strict quarantine rules which covered a variety of offenses including concealment of plague symptoms within your household, the theft of infected person’s belongings, or visiting a plague sufferer’s house. Many of these offences were punishable ‘under the pane of deid’, meaning that those who did not follow the rules could be executed for their transgressions. The clengers were identifiable by the garments they wore, a white St. Andrews Cross on the front and back of a grey tunic, and by the long staffs they carried. The sight of the clengers in their recognisable clothing and the sound of a bell alerted the people of the city that plague victims were nearby.
  
  

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Robert Sibbald's Grave

• • 

  • Portrait of Robert Sibbald

  • 

  • Robert Sibbald’s grave, Greyfriars Kirkyard

  Sir Robert Sibbald was an eminent physician, geographer and historian. He was born in 1641 to a prosperous landed family and was educated first at Edinburgh’s Royal High School and later at the city’s university.
  
  
• In 1660, Sibbald travelled to Leiden, in the Netherlands, where he learned anatomy, surgery, botany, chemistry and natural philosophy. After eighteen months in Leiden, Sibbald then travelled to Paris where he studied for nine months.
  
  
• After returning from his medical studies on the continent, Sibbald established a botanical garden in Edinburgh. This garden housed over 800 medicinal plants and, after various changes, moves and expansions, this early garden eventually became what is now the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh.
  
  
• Sibbald was also the first Professor of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh and was physician to King James VII. He was also appointed Geographer Royal for Scotland and he wrote books on the topography of Fife and Stirlingshire.
  
  
• Sibbald also played a key role in the foundation of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Early attempts at regulating medicine in Scotland by creating a College of Physicians had been unsuccessful. Sibbald renewed attempts to found a College and held meetings with the leading physicians in Edinburgh.
  
  
• This group shared a commitment to science and medicine and discussed cases, books, philosophy and natural history. The opportunity to found a college presented itself in 1681. For the first time in almost a hundred years there was a royal court in Edinburgh. Sibbald obtained an audience with the Duke of York and presented his petition for the establishment of a College of Physicians. The proposed charter was signed and the Great Seal was appended on St. Andrew’s Day 1681.
  
  
• Sibbald died in August 1722 and was buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh in a vault against the southern wall.
  
  

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Bedlam

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  • Edinburgh Charity Workhouse

  Edinburgh’s ‘Bedlam’ – the city’s first asylum – was erected in 1748 as an extension to the city’s charity workhouse. The inmates held in these cells, according to one witness, were forced to sleep on ‘loose uncovered straw… on a stone floor’.
  
  
• The city’s workhouse was never a workhouse in the English style (a model encapsulated by the fictional works of authors such as Charles Dickens). Inmates were not expected to work, and the charity workhouse was more akin to an almshouse – providing housing for the city’s poor, orphans, the disabled and the elderly. The asylum building was just an extension of the existing workhouse – providing accommodation for individuals classes as ‘lunatics’.
  
  
• It contained cells for paying patients as well as cells for the insane poor. Although whether you were a pauper or a paying patient you were still held in a cell with no opportunity for exercise or fresh air. As a result, recovery rates among the Edinburgh Bedlam’s inmates were extremely low.
  
  

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Braidwood Academy

• • 

  • Remains of Braidwood Academy on Dumbiedykes Road

  Thomas Braidwood taught the children of wealthy families. In 1760 Alexander Shirreff asked Braidwood to teach his 10-year-old deaf son, Charles, how to write. In 1764, he founded Braidwood Academy just south of the Royal Mile along a street called St. Leonards. The building, which came to be known as ‘Dumbie House’, was the very first (private) school for deaf children in Britain and, some claim, in the world.
  
  
• Braidwood House eventually boasted 20 students, including women. Jane Poole, for example, set a major legal precedent when a court accepted her last will as valid, even though she had communicated her wishes to the drafter exclusively by fingerspelling as she was both deaf and blind – a massive victory for legal rights of the disabled in Britain.
  
  
• Braidwood’s teaching methods included existing techniques such as finger spelling and lip reading. His school also promoted utilising hand gestures to communicate in combination with these other methods and this would form part of the foundation for British Sign Language (BSL) which is widely used today and was recognised as an official language in 2003.
  
  
• By 1780, Thomas Braidwood moved to England to begin a new school in Hackney, near London. Braidwood’s house continued to operate as a school until it was shut in 1873 and the building was finally demolished in 1939.
  
  
• The education provided by Braidwood Academy allowed many students, including Charles Shirreff, the opportunity to pursue successful careers in their chosen field. The school became renowned enough to draw pupils from as far away as America, and Sir Walter Scott even mentioned Braidwood Academy in his novel Heart of Midlothian (1818).
  
  
• Little remains of Braidwood Academy, but stonework and a fireplace can still be seen on Dumbiedykes Road in Edinburgh. A plaque is situated on the remaining masonry to commemorate the school’s former location.
  
  

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Burke and Hare

• • 

  • Old Surgeon's Hall

  • 

  • Burke and Hare in Court

  William Burke and William Hare were Irish immigrants who relocated to Edinburgh to work on the Union Canal in the early 1800s. After the two men met and solidified a friendship, Burke and his partner, Helen McDougal, moved into a lodging house in Tanner’s Close run by Hare and his wife, Margaret Laird.
  
  
• In 1827, a lodger in the building named Donald died while owing Hare and Laird an unpaid rent instalment of £4. Due to the widespread awareness of the lucrative trade in cadavers in Edinburgh at this time, Burke and Hare, with the assistance of their partners, decided to take Donald’s body to Edinburgh’s Medical School to sell.
  
  
• They were directed to Old Surgeon’s Hall, which housed the dissection room and offices of Dr Robert Knox; a popular and well-respected professor of anatomy. A successful transaction resulted in a payment of around £7 for the corpse, along with a realisation by Burke and Hare that if they managed to repeat the process, they could make a healthy profit.
  
  
• The duo decided to take a step beyond body snatching and turned to murder to fulfil the demand for bodies. Over the course of 1828, it is thought that at least sixteen people fell victim to the men; many of whom were lured into the Tanner’s Close lodging house, smothered, then taken to Dr Knox for payment.
  
  
• The death of Burke and Hare’s final victim - Margaret Docherty - led to suspicion from other lodgers when she went missing following a night of heavy drinking with the owners. The lodgers refused a bribe offered by Helen McDougal to stay quiet and reported the incident to the police. Despite the removal and sale of Docherty’s body by the culprits, upon a later police inspection evidence of murder was found in the lodging house and the corpse was located and identified at Dr Knox’s anatomy school.
  
  
• Burke and Hare were arrested, along with McDougal and Laird. Interviews and forensic investigations were conducted, and among the specialists appointed to the case was Robert Christison who was a toxicologist, professor of medical jurisprudence, medical advisor to the crown in a number of court proceedings and former President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
  
  
• The four criminals were charged with murder, but William Hare and Margaret Laird were offered immunity for their testimonies against the remaining defendants. The trial was highly publicised and resulted in a not proven verdict for McDougal while Burke was found guilty, sentenced to execution, and hanged on the 28th of January 1829. His body was later publicly dissected at the Medical School, and his skeleton, death mask and items containing part of his skin are still in existence today.
  
  
• Not much is known about the later lives of Margaret Laird, William Hare and Helen McDougal. Dr Knox was never prosecuted for his part in the Burke and Hare murders, but public opinion of him dropped sharply and he eventually resigned or was removed from most of his public positions, before then moving to London.
  
  
• The passing of The Anatomy Act in 1832 had a significant impact on the ways in which bodies were procured for anatomical dissection in medical schools. The Act enabled licensed physicians practicing anatomy to use the cadavers of anyone who gave permission for their body to be donated, or whose body was unclaimed following a natural death. This effectively put an end to the practice of body snatching in Edinburgh, but Burke and Hare remain notorious for their crimes, as do the ways in which their actions intertwined with the medical history of Edinburgh.
  
  

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Dorothea Dix

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  • Memorial of Dorothea Dix

  • 

  • Memorial of Dorothea Dix and other health reformers, Royal Edinburgh Hospital

  Dorothea Dix was an American social reformer born in 1802 in Hampden, Massachusetts (now in the state of Maine).
  
  
• Dix had a particular interest in improving the lives of the mentally ill, spurred on by her experience teaching classes to female prisoners in East Cambridge. Shocked by the squalid living conditions and poor, often cruel, treatment of the mentally ill prisoners in particular, Dix was inspired to carry out a statewide investigation of care for the mentally ill in her home state of Massachusetts. With the support of influential members of society, Dix travelled around Massachusetts for eighteen months visiting poorhouses and prisons and gathering evidence in order to arouse public awareness and sympathy of the plight of the mentally ill. In 1843, she presented her findings to the Massachusetts legislature and a bill was passed approving funding to improve conditions at the Worcester State Hospital. Following this victory, Dix continued to campaign for improvements in care for the mentally ill, expanding her work to numerous other states across America and Canada.
  
  
• In 1854 Dix travelled to Europe where she conducted similar investigations, pushing for change. In Scotland, she was particularly successful, with her in-depth examinations of the poor treatment of the mentally ill in hospitals and prisons across the country resulting in Queen Victoria appointing a Royal Commission to investigate. The so-called Lunacy (Scotland) Act was passed in 1857, setting up district boards to run publicly funded institutions, giving greater powers to local Sheriffs to carry out inspections of conditions, and improving funding.
  
  
• Dix continued advocating for the improvement of treatment of the mentally ill across Europe and the United States. Her quest was temporarily interrupted by the American Civil War, during which she acted as superintendent for the training of U.S. Army nurses. After the war, Dix picked up her campaigning with the same vigour, continuing to advocate for reform until her late seventies when she finally retired, passing away a few years later in 1887.
  
  
• For her work in Scotland, Dorothea Dix’s life-long dedication to improve the lives of those suffering from mental illness is memorialised at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in Morningside. In 1926, Dix’s likeness, along with other reformers of medical and psychiatric care, was sculpted in bronze and mounted on a memorial on the grounds of the hospital where it still stands today.
  
  

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Joseph Black's Home

• • 

  • Joseph Black’s home, 13 Sylvan Place

  Up this alleyway is the house where Joseph Black, physician and chemist, lived around 1740.
  
  
• Black studied at the University of Edinburgh. After a subsequent period living and studying in Glasgow, Black took up the position of Chair of the Institutes of Medicine at the University of Edinburgh. Black was a popular teacher and his lecture courses attracted large numbers of students.
  
  
• Black played a major role in the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, as president and in revising new editions of the Pharmacopoeia, which was a compendium of medical recipes used as a guide for physicians across Scotland and further afield for the treatment of their patients. Black also acted as one of the managers of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh for several years and was one of the founders of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
  
  
• Black had a purpose-built laboratory made for him at the university and carried out a wide range of chemical-based studies there. Among his important contributions to chemistry were the discovery of carbon dioxide and latent heat. He discovered the latter principle when he observed that applying heat to boiling water produces more steam but does not raise its temperature above its boiling point.
  
  
• Black died in 1799 and is buried in Greyfriars Kirkyard.
  
  

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Robert Fergusson

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  • Statue of Robert Fergusson
    
    

  Robert Fergusson was an eminent Scottish poet, a forerunner of Robert Burns. His later poems became increasingly dark and melancholy and when, in the autumn of 1774, he suffered a head injury Fergusson was admitted against his will to the lunatic ward attached to a local poorhouse, known locally as the Bedlam.
  
  
• Fergusson died only a few months after his admission, aged only 24. His cause of death is unknown, although neglect and the absence of basic treatment and care must have contributed.
  
  
• Andrew Duncan, eminent Edinburgh doctor, President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, and a friend of Fergusson, was so appalled by the conditions under which Fergusson was held that he resolved to improve treatment for those suffering from mental illness in Edinburgh.
  
  
• In 1792 Duncan initiated the building of the first hospital in Edinburgh solely for the care of psychiatric patients. It took Duncan 15 years to get approval for the hospital, known as the Edinburgh Lunatic Asylum, see it built and obtain a Royal Charter before it was opened for admissions in 1813.
  
  
• Under the modern title of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital it continues to care for patients to this day. Indeed, the up-to-date department for the treatment of psychological disorders, which opened in 1965, is known as the Andrew Duncan Clinic after the institution’s founder.
  
  

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Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in Fountain Close

• • 

  • Fountain Close

  In the seventeenth century Edinburgh physicians began to meet in their own homes to discuss the regulation of medical practice and ways in which standards in medicine could be improved. These transitory beginnings ended when they bought a property in Fountain Close in 1704.
  
  
• As part of this site the College established the first public dispensary in Britain, providing free medicine for Edinburgh’s sick poor. They also developed a physic garden next to their building on Fountain Close, in order to grow the herbal medicines they distributed.
  
  
• This space, described by the Gentleman's Magazine as an 'excellent physic garden' was not so fetted by Daniel Defoe who, in his work A tour thro’ the whole island of Great Britain, disputed its status by saying:
  
  
• ‘We now enter the city, properly so call’d; in almost the first buildings of note on the north side of the street… narrow wynds and alleys, such as set out in handsome streets, would have adorn’d a very noble city, bit are here crouded together, as may be said, without notice. Here the physicians have a hall, and adjoining to it a very good garden; but I saw no simples [i.e. medicinal plants] in it of value’.
  
  
• The physicians' grounds at Fountain Close also became the site of a Cold Bath House in the mid-1700s. This was another medicinal innovation, in this case giving people access to clean water and basic hygiene in the face of Edinburgh’s notoriously ineffective domestic water supply – even more important for public health than plant-based medicines.
  
  

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House of Refuge/Queensbury House

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  • Queensbury House behind security fence

  Queensbury House at the foot of the Royal Mile was originally commissioned in 1681 by Charles Maitland, Lord Hatton, and was bought five years later upon completion by William Douglas, 1st Duke of Queensbury. The House was magnificent, sporting over fifty rooms and grand, formal gardens. The House served as a luxurious, private residence until the eighteenth century, when it was divided up into tenements.
  
  
• By the nineteenth century, the building was being used for public purposes, including as a military barracks and as a hospital. In 1831, during a period in Edinburgh when there was a high risk of cholera outbreak, the House was used to quarantine incoming homeless poor to prevent the spread of disease throughout the city. A few years later, Queensbury House was operating as a house of refuge, providing food, shelter, and medical care for the poor. The House provided a much-needed lifeline for the poor of the Canongate until the 1940s.
  
  
• After the Second World War, Queensbury House served as a hospital for the elderly until the mid-1990s when it was incorporated into the new Scottish Parliament buildings. Efforts were made to restore the building’s original appearance and some of its earliest features have survived including a grand fireplace.
  
  

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Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

• • 

  • Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh on Queen Street

  • 

  • Cockerels and serpents

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  • Statues

  The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, founded in 1681, moved to these premises in the mid-1800s. The 9 Queen Street property was designed by the architect Thomas Hamilton who was also the architect of the Burns Monument on Calton Hill, George IV Bridge, and the Bedlam Theatre, then a church.
  
  
• Outside the entrance to 9 Queen Street you can see cockerels on the caps of the lights as well as serpents entwined around staffs on the exterior wall of the building. Both the cockerels and the snakes are symbols associated with Aesculapius. Cockerels were ritually sacrificed to Aesculapius while the snakes, according to mythology, were acquired by this god from his temple.
  
  
• Aesculapius is also represented in the left most sculpture of the three on the exterior of the building. Aesculapius was worshipped by the Greeks as the god of healing and founder of medicine.
  
  
• The central statue, directly above the entrance, is of Hygiea who was the daughter of Aesculapius. She personified health and was one of the most important gods in the pantheon alongside her father.
  
  
• The final statue, on the right, is of Hippocrates who was a Greek physician and the originator of what is now called Hippocratic medicine. In his lifetime he was renowned as a teacher.
  
  
• Inside the College’s new main entrance, redesigned to allow for disabled access, is the Physicians’ Gallery. Here, temporary exhibitions are held on a range of themes from medical history. Topics covered include alchemy, mental health, botany, forensics and food. Objects, books and manuscripts from the College’s unique collections of medical and scientific material are on display.
  
  
• Entrance to the Physicians’ Gallery is free of charge. All other areas of the College are not open to the public without advance booking.
  
  

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Anatomical Museum

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  • Anatomical Museum, Lecture Theatre

  The Anatomical Museum contains 12,000 objects and specimens. It is part of the University of Edinburgh and tells the story of the university’s 300 years of anatomical teaching.
  
  
• The museum’s collections are varied, covering pathology, anatomy, phrenology, pharmacology, anthropology, ethnography, forensics and zoology. There are human skeletal remains and preserved specimens.
  
  
• The museum was founded and developed by the Monro dynastry, three generations of men all named Alexander Monro who did much to advance the study of medicine in Edinburgh.
  
  
• One of the most notable exhibits is the skeleton of famed mass murderer William Burke, who supplied the anatomy teacher Dr Robert Knox with bodies for dissection.
  
  
• Perhaps most impressive of all though, is the inside of the anatomy lecture theatre. Next door to the museum itself, it is open to the public when not in use for teaching purposes. The lecture theatre was designed alongside the rest of the Teviot Place medical quad in the 1870s by the architect Sir Robert Rowand Anderson. In these buildings, facilities for teaching, scientific research and practical laboratories were combined.
  
  
• The medical school was designed with a grand public quadrangle at the front and, for discreet delivery of cadavers to the dissection rooms, a second private yard entered from the lane behind.
  
  
• The anatomy lecture theatre itself was based on the design of the renowned lecture theatre in Padua in Italy. Its steeply tiered benches raising above a central dissecting table allowed students a good vantage point to witness dissections.
  
  

Image copyright Annie Caldwell – CC BY-SA 2.0

Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh

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  • Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in the 1800s

  The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh was established in 1729 and is the oldest public hospital in Scotland. After extensive fundraising by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, from churches, businessmen and landed gentry, the funds raised were spent leasing a small house located in the Cowgate area of Edinburgh’s Old Town. Known by various names, including the Hospital for the Sick Poor, the Physicians’ Hospital, and Little House, this early version of the hospital only contained four beds.
  
  
• The little hospital had a wide reach, however. Its first patient had travelled from Caithness for treatment and subsequent admissions included individuals from across the highlands and islands, including as far removed as the Shetland Islands.
  
  
• While new infirmaries began to spring up across Britain the Scottish model, initiated by the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, was quite different from the English one. The Edinburgh infirmary, unlike most of its English counterparts, did not exclude those suffering from venereal diseases such as syphilis, nor did it exclude unmarried pregnant women. While most English infirmaries refused to treat those suffering from infectious diseases, the Edinburgh infirmary admitted people suffering from conditions such as smallpox, cholera and typhus.
  
  
• As the infirmary’s funds, and patient numbers, grew it moved several times over the following century until it settled in purpose-built premises on Lauriston Place, close to the Meadows, in the 1870s.
  
  
• Before the foundation of the National Health Service in 1948 the infirmary acted independently from government – under the control of its managers, physicians, and the donors who supplied the funds which kept it afloat.
  
  
• In 1998 work began on new premises for the Royal Infirmary and, in 2003, the last of the patients were moved from Lauriston Place to the new infirmary situated outside the city centre.
  
  

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Royal Hospital for Sick Children

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  • Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Sciennes Road

  The Royal Hospital for Sick Children, or ‘The Sick Kids’, as it was often known, cared for children and young people for over 150 years.
  
  
• The Hospital for Sick Children opened at 7 Lauriston Lane in 1860 and was the first dedicated children's hospital in Scotland. It was what was known as a voluntary hospital, which meant a hospital funded by charitable donations rather than government or municipal funds. The limited funds available meant that the premises on Lauriston Lane were leased, rather than purchased, and the hospital only had eight beds for patients.
  
  
• These premises did not match the level of demand for the hospital’s services and so a fundraising drive began to fund a new, larger, hospital. As a result, the hospital was able to purchase Meadowside House and was granted a royal charter by Queen Victoria, making it the Royal Hospital for Sick Children. This new hospital building had 40 beds and a separate fever ward. The hospital expanded in 1870 with a new wing which added a further 30 beds.
  
  
• Increasing demand, along with an outbreak of typhoid fever on the wards, led the hospital to seek new premises once again. In 1890 all patients were temporarily moved to Plewlands House in Morningside while a more permanent home was sought.
  
  
• In 1895 a new purpose-built hospital in Sciennes Road, costing over £50,000, was opened to patients.
  
  
• The Royal Hospital for Sick Children closed in March 2021 and a new hospital, the Royal Hospital for Children and Young People, opened in Little France, close to Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary.
  
  

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Royal Public Dispensary of Edinburgh

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  • Illustration of Edinburgh’s Public Dispensary

  The Edinburgh dispensary was the first public dispensary in Scotland. It was founded in 1776 by the physician Andrew Duncan.
  
  
• The dispensary provided free medical advice and treatment to the poor of Edinburgh, including to those excluded from the city’s infirmary by their regulations and financial constraints. While infirmaries more often treated working age men, dispensaries, such as the Edinburgh dispensary, treated many women, children and the elderly.
  
  
• The dispensary also housed Andrew Duncan's private teaching practice. Students would pay a fee to listen to Duncan’s lectures regarding the treatment of the dispensary patients and these fees went towards purchasing medicine for the dispensary.
  
  
• The dispensary was run as a charity and donations were received from local incorporated trades (such as the Society of Masons and the Society of Tailors). Private individuals from across Britain, including friends of Duncan, also donated money to support the dispensary’s work.
  
  
• Andrew Duncan went on to other notable achievements including becoming President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh in 1790 and founding the Royal Edinburgh Hospital in 1809.
  
  
• The dispensary received a royal charter in 1818, becoming the Royal Public Dispensary of Edinburgh. Following the foundation of the National Health Service the Edinburgh dispensary was subsumed into the University of Edinburgh and became the centre of a new General Practice Teaching Unit. In this new form, it continued Andrew Duncan’s model of combining patient treatment with student education which he established almost 200 years earlier.
  
  

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Joseph Lister's Home

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  • Black and white photograph of Joseph Lister

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  • Joseph Lister’s home, 11 Rutland Street

  Operations in the 1800s were enormously risky - even if the surgery was successful, many patients later died due to infection. Pioneering surgeon Joseph Lister had a special interest in the prevention of infection after surgery.
  
  
• Lister was born in 1827 to a Quaker family in West Ham, London. He qualified as a surgeon at University College London and moved to Scotland in 1853 where he worked under James Syme, Professor of Surgery at the University of Edinburgh. Syme was impressed with Lister, and the two developed both a close working and good personal relationship. Lister also fell in love with Syme’s daughter, Agnes, and made the decision to leave his Quaker religion and become a Scottish Episcopalian so that the two could marry.
  
  
• In 1860, Lister was appointed Chair of Surgery at the University of Glasgow and surgeon at Glasgow Royal Infirmary. It was here, with his wife Agnes assisting in his laboratory, that Lister started to develop his approach to preventing infection in patients who had undergone surgery. Lister was particularly inspired by the work of French chemist Louis Pasteur. Pasteur’s germ theory asserted that microorganisms were responsible for the spoiling of food and the fermentation of liquids such as milk and beer. Lister believed putrefaction, or sepsis as he called it, was similarly the result of living germs and bacteria entering the wounds of patients before, during, and after surgery. The solution to this problem, Lister believed, was to develop an ‘antiseptic’.
  
  
• In 1866, Lister started experimenting with carbolic acid as an antiseptic. He wanted to create a chemical barrier that would kill bacteria before it could enter the patient’s wounds. Lister started to use carbolic acid to sterilise medical equipment, spraying it on surgical instruments, soaking bandages and dressings in it, and developing weaker solutions of the chemical for hospital staff to use as a hand wash. Lister published his findings, noting that there was a marked reduction in post-surgery infection related deaths following the introduction of these practices at Glasgow Royal Infirmary.
  
  
• In 1869, Joseph and Agnes moved back to Edinburgh where Lister succeeded his father-in-law, James Syme in the position of Professor of Surgery, and set up his own surgical practice in Charlotte Square. Lister found that his work had its critics, with many believing that antiseptics were unnecessary or ineffective. Determined to prove that his methods were not only effective, but life-saving, Lister continued to promote the use of carbolic acid as an antiseptic in surgery, performing public operations and publishing papers on his findings.
  
  
• Lister took up post as Professor of Clinical Surgery at King’s College, London in 1877 where he worked until his retirement following Agnes’s death in 1893. Throughout his career, he continued to publicise the use of antiseptic in medical procedures. Lister’s contribution to making surgery safer, and to the general improvement in hospital hygiene can be counted among the greatest medical achievements in history. His methods, though they have been developed and improved over the past two centuries, serve as the basis of modern infection control in hospitals, saving countless lives.
  
  
• During his lifetime, Lister was recognised several times by Queen Victoria during her reign, finally appointing him Baron Lister of Lyme Regis in 1897. Queen Victoria’s successor Edward VII selected Lister as one of the twelve members of the Order of Merit on the occasion of his coronation. Lister is further remembered in Edinburgh by a plaque affixed to the east wall of the University’s Teviot Medical School and, internationally, after the founders of an anti-bacterial mouthwash decided to honour Lister’s legacy with their product, ‘Listerine’.
  
  

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Surgical Instrument Makers

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  • Paolozzi Restaurant, 59/61 Forrest Road

  The expansion of medical training centres during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attracted surgical instrument makers to the vicinity of teaching hospitals. Surgeons and students alike needed a place to purchase high quality surgical instruments. In Edinburgh by 1880, construction of the new Royal Infirmary buildings was completed on Lauriston Place, followed swiftly in 1888 by the University of Edinburgh’s Teviot Medical School built nearby. In premises on Forrest Road opposite the new medical school, renowned surgical instrument makers Archibald Young & Son Limited set up trading.
  
  
• In 2020, the owners of the new Paolozzi restaurant on Edinburgh’s Forrest Road announced that they would be keeping a ghost sign revealed on the frontage of the building whilst renovating the premises. The sign reads ‘Surgical Instrument Makers’, set on a green background, and is a remnant of when Archibald Young & Sons Limited traded at the location. The close proximity of Archibald Young & Sons to the Teviot Medical School - still part of the University, although it now serves the History, Classics and Archaeology department - and new efforts to preserve the ghost sign, serve as an important visual reminder of the integral and long-standing relationship between medical professionals and their instrument makers.
  
  

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Royal Victoria Dispensary

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  • Plaque commemorating the Royal Victoria Dispensary

  This plaque marks the site where the first tuberculosis clinic in the world was opened in 1887.
  
  
• This clinic, formally titled the Victoria Dispensary for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest, was established by Robert William Philip.
  
  
• Philip was born in Glasgow in 1857, the youngest son of a minister of the Free Church of Scotland. A decade after Philip’s birth his father was transferred to Edinburgh and the family moved. Philip attended the University of Edinburgh before travelling to Leipzig and Vienna to study embryology and gynaecology.
  
  
• After returning to Edinburgh, Philip became a house physician at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and assistant to the professor of medicine at the university.
  
  
• The methods Philip developed at the Victoria Dispensary were informed by his understanding that tuberculosis was both a transmissible and a systemic disease. Philip argued that the best way to treat tuberculosis was to build up the immune system of patients to enable them to resist the infection. He advocated fresh air, nutritious diet and clean surroundings. In the 1890s Philip’s dispensary expanded and moved to a new location. In 1894 the Victoria Hospital for Consumption was opened at Craigleith, to provide institutional treatment for more advanced cases of tuberculosis.
  
  
• Philip continued advocating for reforms surrounding tuberculosis and his views on surveillance and hygienic supervision became commonplace in public health thinking by the end of the First World War. A national tuberculosis scheme was adopted in Edinburgh and Philip remained a consultant and expert advisor. In 1917, a trust endowed a chair of tuberculosis at the University of Edinburgh and Philip became its first occupant.
  
  

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Dolly the Sheep

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  • Dolly the Sheep on display at the National Museum of Scotland

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  • National Museum of Scotland
    
    

  Cloning is a scientific process to pass on genetic traits and information from one living organism, such as a plant or animal, to another. In the 1990s, in Edinburgh, a team at the Roslin Institute focused their cloning experiments on sheep. These scientists wanted to see if they could clone a new animal from the single cell of an existing adult. If successful, this would be a major breakthrough because scientists had previously thought that adult cells would not contain sufficient information to provide for the creation of a whole new animal. Although sheep had been cloned before, this had been from the cloning of embryonic and foetal cells.
  
  
• However, in 1996, Dolly, a Finn Dorset sheep was born. Dolly, named after music legend Dolly Parton, was created from a single mammary cell from another adult sheep. Development was overseen by the Roslin scientists in a lab for six days before the newly created embryo was transferred to Dolly’s surrogate mother, a Scottish Blackface. The announcement of Dolly’s successful birth by the Roslin Institute in 1997 proved that mammals could be cloned from existing adults, not just embryonic or foetal cells. The technique used to create Dolly later became known as somatic cell nuclear transfer (SCNT).
  
  
• The birth of Dolly ignited public debate about the ethics, possibilities, and limitations of mammalian cloning. Dolly was the only successful clone born out of 277 embryos. Furthermore, it was discovered that Dolly’s telomeres, which are found in DNA to protect it from damage, and which degrade over time, were shorter than expected for a sheep her age. It was thought that Dolly might be ageing prematurely because she was created from an adult sheep and that the telomeres did not “renew” during her own development.
  
  
• Despite her fame, Dolly lived a relatively normal life at the Roslin Institute. She lived with a flock of sheep and during her lifetime gave birth to several lambs with a Welsh Mountain ram called David. She suffered from arthritis in her later years, and was euthanised in 2003 after tumours were discovered in her lungs. Dolly has been taxidermied and preserved and is currently on display at the National Museum of Scotland, on Chambers Street in Edinburgh.
  
  

Image copyright Toni Barros – CC BY-SA 2.0

Physicians’ Hall

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  • Physicians’ Hall on George Street

  This building, on the site of what is now The Dome restaurant, was the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh’s first New Town home.
  
  
• The Physicians’ Hall, completed in 1781, was part of a general move which took place at this time of eminent organisations, and wealthy individuals, from Edinburgh’s increasingly dilapidated Old Town to the newly developed New Town.
  
  
• The architect of the Physicians’ Hall, James Craig, was also responsible for designing the layout of the city’s New Town, with its grid layout of wide streets, large parks, and open squares. The hall itself was intended to be part of a larger complex of buildings and rival Register House as the New Town’s most impressive public edifice.
  
  
• Unfortunately, the lengthy, and expensive, process of planning, designing and building these new premises resulted in a building with a life span of only 54 years. The great cost of the hall’s exterior had exhausted the College’s finances leaving no money to finish the interior of a building.
  
  
• The College’s finances did not improve until 1842 when they accepted the Commercial Bank’s offer to buy the George Street premises.
  
  
• The Commercial Bank promptly demolished Craig’s Hall and (rather confusingly) replaced it with a remarkably similar looking building.
  
  

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