Edinburgh’s Medical History
The study and practice of medicine has been a part of Edinburgh’s history for centuries, and the city’s medical school is still an important centre of teaching today. There have been professional organisations for medical practitioners in the city for over 500 years, going back to the incorporation of the guild of barber-surgeons in 1505. It still exists today as the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh – although obviously surgery has come on quite a lot in the meantime! Edinburgh and its medical school played their part in the development of modern medicine and surgery in fascinating (and sometimes grisly) ways over the years, so let’s look back at a few of the city’s most interesting tales.
Burke and Hare
In the nineteenth century, Edinburgh was a global centre of learning and teaching about human anatomy. The study of how the insides of our bodies really work was fairly new at the time, and medicine was moving into a more evidence-based era that called for rigorous scientific enquiry. However, cultural and religious ideas at the time meant that the only bodies legally available for dissection were those of executed criminals – it wasn’t possible to donate your body to medical science as people do today. The burgeoning demand for cadavers at the medical school fuelled a black-market trade in corpses, sold to unscrupulous lecturers by people known as “resurrection men”.
The watchtower in New Calton Burial Ground. Image: Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
As their name might suggest, most of them procured the bodies by digging them up from the city’s graveyards shortly after burial. The trade had a quick turnover, because in the days before refrigeration and artificially preserving bodies you needed a steady supply. You can still see remnants of this gruesome period in some of the city’s historic graveyards, including metal cages (“mortsafes”, designed to lock over a grave) and watchtowers where guards could be paid to look over your relative’s grave.
William Hare. Image: public domain
In 1828, a particularly notorious pair called William Burke and William Hare took things a step further. The men had moved to Scotland from Ireland to work as labourers on the building of a new canal and ended up living together with their wives at a lodging house that Hare ran in the West Port. When a lodger died in 1827 – apparently of natural causes – he left a rent debt behind, and to recover the money Burke and Hare decided to sell his body to Dr Robert Knox at the medical school for dissection. They were paid £7 10s, a sum equivalent to over £500 today, and apparently the professor’s assistant hinted that they would be welcome back if they ever had another body to get rid of.
This was all too easy a way to make money, especially with Hare running a lodging house that was often frequented by poor people who had already fallen through the cracks of society. Burke and Hare drank heavily together and would often entice their victims with alcohol before overpowering them and smothering them when they were drunk. To start with, most of their victims were lodgers at the house, but they became greedier and more careless (and emboldened by the fact that Robert Knox asked no questions, even when they delivered him a body that wasn’t yet cold). They were being paid between £8 and £10 per body – up to about £700 in today’s money – and they got more and more carried away.
William Burke. Image: public domain
Their second-last victim was Jamie Wilson, a local man who lived on the streets and was well known in the area. His feet had a deformity that gave him a noticeable limp and he probably had a learning disability, as he was commonly known as Daft Jamie (an unkind nickname in today’s language but probably meant without malice at the time). When Jamie appeared on the anatomist’s slab, several students recognised him and rumours began to swirl as it became clear he was missing.
But Burke and Hare wouldn’t be caught until they had committed the last of their 16 murders, an Irish woman called Margaret Docherty. Greedy for the money they could make from Margaret’s body, they sent their other lodgers away to another house for the night as they got her drunk. When the other lodgers came back to pick up some belongings, they discovered the corpse and alerted the police.
In the end, it was William Burke who took all the blame. William Hare was convinced to turn king’s evidence (to testify in exchange for immunity) and Burke was the one to hang. As part of his sentence, he was publicly dissected at the medical school. His skeleton is still in the university’s anatomy museum to this day, alongside a small pocketbook made from his skin. William Hare fled the city, and no one really knows what became of him after that. Robert Knox faced no legal consequences, claiming he thought the men simply bought the bodies of people who died naturally, but the stink of the scandal never left him and ultimately destroyed his career.
Just four years after Burke and Hare’s murderous spree in Edinburgh, the Anatomy Act of 1832 was passed, partly as a result of public outcry about the killings. It made provisions for anatomists and universities to legally acquire donated cadavers, virtually wiping out the illegal body trade. The deaths of Burke and Hare’s victims were a direct consequence of the city’s growing medical establishment and thirst for knowledge, and a catalyst for some of the legal changes that helped the study of anatomy move forward in the nineteenth century. Of course, these days all the cadavers studied at the medical school are obtained ethically, with their names recorded in a book of remembrance and a special service held in their honour at Greyfriars Kirk each year – a far cry from the lack of respect shown back in 1828.
James Young Simpson
One of Edinburgh’s most famous historical doctors (and there are many!), James Young Simpson actually studied at Edinburgh medical school from 1827, so perhaps he attended or knew of the classes where Robert Knox dissected Burke and Hare’s victims. He gained his MD in 1832 at the age of 21, and by just seven years later he was Professor of Medicine and Midwifery at the University of Edinburgh. He ended up becoming a specialist in obstetric medicine, and he was considered perhaps the most skilled obstetrician of his day. In 1848 he came up with an improved forceps design for use in deliveries, creating the type that is still most commonly used today.
James Young Simpson. Image: public domain
James Young Simpson lived at 52 Queen Street, and he and his friends would experiment with different chemical substances in his drawing room to try and find new anaesthetics (at least that was their story…) In November 1847, they decided to give chloroform a try. Probably by sheer luck alone, the dose they took made them feel euphoric, then knocked them out but didn’t kill them – which chloroform is perfectly capable of doing. The discovery helped to cement Simpson’s name in medical history and quickly became standard practice for surgeries. Seeing the potential for obstetric medicine, Simpson began using chloroform with patients in labour. This was a controversial step in the Victorian era, when there was still a prevailing belief that childbirth “should” be painful as a result of women’s sin. But by 1853, even Queen Victoria herself had used chloroform in labour, and it wasn’t really acceptable to suggest that the queen was doing something wrong!
James Young Simpson died in 1870, but not before demonstrating that he continued to be a modern man of science. In 1869, when Sophia Jex-Blake was campaigning for women’s admittance to the medical school, he wrote a letter of support for her cause. As a former President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, his word held real sway with the medical faculty, and his support must have been a factor in the decision to allow Jex-Blake and six other women to matriculate (even though in 1874 they wouldn’t let them graduate – but I’ll do a whole post on that next week!)
James Young Simpson’s forceps in the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow. Image: Stephencdickson, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Simpson’s legacy is still felt today: his forceps are still in use, his work on anaesthetics aided the discovery of modern methods, and the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary’s centre for reproductive health is still named for him. In fact, generations of Edinburgh babies (including me!) have been born in hospital wards named for James Young Simpson since the Edinburgh Royal Maternity and Simpson Memorial Hospital was first established in 1879. By the time of this death, he was so celebrated in his field that he was offered a burial spot in Westminster Abbey, but his family chose to bury him closer to home in Warriston Cemetery, where you can still visit his grave.
For a fantastic piece of historical fiction about James Young Simpson’s time in Edinburgh, I highly recommend Ambrose Parry’s crime novels. “Ambrose Parry” is the nom de plume of Scottish author Chris Brookmyre and Dr Marisa Haetzman, who is a consultant anaesthesiologist and medical historian (and also Chris Brookmyre’s wife). They’re brilliant stories and a meticulously researched look at the period that really brings Victorian Edinburgh alive.
Dr Elsie Inglis
Because women were excluded from university and from the medical profession in Britain until the late nineteenth century, Edinburgh’s recorded medical history was pretty male dominated for hundreds of years. Of course, women did contribute in many ways throughout that entire time, whether it was through informal nursing and midwifery, providing medicinal plants or carrying out their own scientific study before the universities would admit them. The vast majority, however, were never going to be celebrated by the medical establishment for their work (in fact, it’s only 100 years since the Royal College of Physicians permitted women to become full members).
Dr Elsie Inglis. Image: Balfour, Lady Francis, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Dr Elsie Inglis was amongst the first wave of women doctors to qualify in the late nineteenth century. She began training at Sophia Jex-Blake’s Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women when it was established in 1887 (Jex-Blake herself had been forced to get her own medical qualifications abroad when the University of Edinburgh refused to award degrees to the female students) and qualified as a doctor in the 1890s. She was a passionate advocate for women’s medicine, and in 1894 she set up a women’s hospital with a fellow woman doctor, Jessie MacLaren MacGregor. Although none of these pioneering medical women have statues in their honour (yet!), you can find a small plaque of Elsie Inglis on 219 High Street, where their hospital was. Inglis was from a wealthy family, and she would often waive fees for poorer patients and even sometimes pay for them to recuperate in the fresher air at the seaside.
Elsie Inglis (front) and other SWH staff, 1916. Image: Ethel Moir, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
As well as being an advocate for women’s medical care, Inglis was also a committed suffragist. She was secretary for the Edinburgh National Society for Women’s Suffrage, and she worked closely with Millicent Fawcett and the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies to advocate for women’s right to vote. As part of their work, they also established the Scottish Women’s Hospitals for Foreign Service – medical units staffed by female personnel. During the First World War, they would go to the front to provide medical care to the wounded. Elsie Inglis approached the War Office to offer their services in 1914. The units were ready to go, organised and funded, but her offer was met with rejection, and Dr Inglis was instructed to “go home and sit still”. She remained undaunted, and eventually the French government took her up on the offer. The medical teams she set up would go on to serve in France, Belgium, Russia and Serbia, where Inglis herself led a unit and is remembered to this day as a heroine of the First World War. She was awarded some of the country’s highest honours, and a memorial to her was erected in Mladenovac.
Elsie Inglis was serving on the front in Russia in 1917 when she was evacuated back to Britain due to ill health. She died on the 26th of November in Newcastle upon Tyne, just a day after arriving back by boat. Despite the rejection of the Women’s Hospitals at the beginning of the war, by 1917 her contribution was greatly appreciated. Her body lay in state in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, and members of the British and Serbian royal families attended her funeral. For many years, there was a maternity hospital in Edinburgh named after her, although it closed in 1988. There is talk now of putting up a statue to Elsie Inglis and all she achieved in her remarkable life, and there are few people more deserving!
These are just some of the thousands of fragments of medical history scattered around Edinburgh, a place that is still home to some of the world’s most cutting-edge medical research today. If you’re interested in learning more, check out the fascinating medical history blog from Surgeons’ Hall Museums. The museum itself is also well worth a visit when things open up again – it has an amazing and horrifying pathology collection that’s not for the faint of heart – and in the meantime they have a virtual tour available on their website. I’ll be back with some more medical history next week, talking about the first women to matriculate at the university’s medical school in 1869: Sophia Jex-Blake and the Edinburgh Seven.
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