Visiting the Chamber of Curiosities

The Surgeons’ Hall Museum in Edinburgh was the location for another ‘Recording Memories’ exercise last month.

Since being launched by the Research Advisory Group last year, our Recording Memories work stream has been gradually gaining momentum. Following a pilot event in London’s Science Museum in Autumn 2022, members of the Edinburgh group supported the initiative last month with a visit to the Surgeons’ Hall Museum.

The Museum has over 25,000 artefacts, including wet and dry specimens, surgical instruments and personal ephemera. It is a treasure house of medical history stored within a purposebuilt museum building and supported by one of the greatest medical libraries in Europe.

Although the demand to use specimens in the College’s examinations has declined, the research uses have widened. The collection is now used for forensic anthropology, DNA research and the study of human anatomy. Its uses also extend beyond science as it regularly attracts artists who draw the human body.

Group Members enjoyed a self-guided tour of the History of Surgery Museum and Anatomy Lab that included a range of sensory exhibits (to test smell) and a video theatre about the history of surgery. Highlights included a section on Joseph Lister and Antisepsis, James Young Simpson and Chloroform and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who modelled Sherlock Holmes on Dr Joseph Bell, one of his medical school professors.

Following the tour, members shared their experiences at Café 1505 (next to the Museum). One (who had been Blue Badge guide after being a civil servant) remembered taking groups of doctors around the museum forty years ago. Another recalled that the first successful kidney transplant in the world had taken place there around 1957 by Sir Michael Woodruff.

Further Recording Memories exercises are in the process of being arranged but if you are interested in participating in a future activity please contact Fellowship Office with your contact details.

Below: Board Director and Edinburgh Group Chair Liz Beedie (pictured centre in pink) with Edinburgh Group members at the Surgeons Hall Museum