Bodies, inside and out

If for nothing else, Edinburgh's place in history would be secured by the achievement of its medical school. Without Simpson and Lister, and so without anaesthesia or antiseptics, modern medicine would be hard to imagine. It was Alexander Monro Primus and his son Alexander Monro Secundus who really established the Medical School in the 18th century, basing it firmly on practical research and teaching. With the Monroes drawing became part of surgery. This partnership between art and medicine had a much longer pedigree. In the Torrie bronze horse the University holds an important witness to its existence already in the late sixteenth century. Even earlier it was the plates of Vesalius's great treatise on human anatomy that made it so enduring.

In Edinburgh comparative anatomy, natural history and veterinary medicine were closely linked in a fruitful partnership. The Natural History and Anatomical Museums reached the height of their importance in the 19th century. At the same time, and not by coincidence, Edinburgh became a great centre for medical and scientific publication. William Shields' paintings of domestic breeds took the business of observation and record out into the field. Cossar Ewart's experiments with the genetics of the horse turned this kind of inquiry decisively towards the modern understanding of the processes involved, and which a century later led to the successful cloning of Dolly the Sheep. And it may have been the Edinburgh interest in natural history and comparative anatomy that set Darwin on the direction of thought that was eventually to change so profoundly our understanding of the our place in the world.

In practical medicine, the mid 19th century was dominated by the achievements of Lister and Simpson. Such records as the little photograph of Agnes Anaesthesia, who had been the first child born under anaesthetic, is a touchingly human memento of these advancements. In the 20th century this tradition of effective practical medicine was continued by, among others, John Crofton who made such a conspicuous contribution to the control of tuberculosis.