Physicians' Gallery

The De humani corporis fabrica of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) is the most famous of all books on anatomy. Its artistic brilliance and its insistence on human, not animal, dissection as the basis for understanding the body has ensured that the work has an honoured place in all major libraries. Less attention has been paid to the revised 1555 edition, while the recent discovery of his annotations f...

Lisa Smith researches gender, health and the household in early modern England and France. In this talk, she discusses the tumultuous relationships of the Newdigates and attempts to piece together a shadowy family scandal from the perspectives of father, daughter and son. She considers the significance of the family’s medical history – old age, ill health and mental illness – as the drama unfolded...

Think you’ve heard all there is to know about Burke and Hare, Edinburgh’s infamous body-snatchers? Janet Philp knows more. Join her as she explores the history around the tale of Burke and Hare, and Dr. Knox, the recipient of their shady undertakings. Janet reveals facts about Burke that have never been published before, raising more questions about the Irish man and his activities. Speaker: Janet...

Edinburgh has a strong history in prosthetics research and development. Over the past 40 years, National Museums Scotland has established a world class collection of prosthetics with examples from the 1960s, for children affected by thalidomide, to contemporary pieces that reflect a move towards personalisation and the flexibility of modern materials. This talk reviews the history of prosthetics i...

Italy, though best known for the birth of the Renaissance, is also renowned for the precocious development of its public health policies in the 16th century. In this talk, Professor John Henderson argues that it is time to re-examine and reassess early modern Italian policies dealing with plague. Henderson’s approach is to examine the often moving and tragic stories of the individuals touched by p...

This talk considers the changing public perception of drugs such as cannabis and the factors which have influenced its longevity, including immigration, diplomacy, medical science, and politics. Speaker: Professor Jim Mills, University of Strathclyde Twitter: twitter.com/RCPEHeritage Instagram: instagram.com/physiciansgallery/ Facebook: facebook.com/PhysiciansGallery TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com...

Louis Wain was a relatively well known British illustrator working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly known for his depictions of cats. It is claimed that ‘cats drove him mad’. This talk will explore the ‘madness’ of both human and animals, the curious cross-codings arising between ‘mad’ people and troublesome beasts, and parallels in the spaces/environments that they have occ...

Can old specimens contain new information? Mütter Museum Curator, Anna Dhody will talk about the ways scientists are looking to the past to improve our future. New technology has emerged that allow researchers access into the past, to see what infectious microbes were responsible for previous pandemics, and hopefully provide insight on how to prevent or combat future ones. Ms. Dhody is also the Di...

Born into a middle-class family in 1578, William Harvey rose to fame as one of Britain’s foremost anatomists, Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of blood rocked the medical world of the time, published in his treatise On the Motion of the Heart and Blood. Physician to King Charles I and a fellow of the Royal College of Physicians of London, William Harvey is one of history’s prominent figures....

Plants have always played a prominent role in the field of medicine since the first recorded examples. From Dioscorides, a Greek physician and botanist who wrote extensively on the subject, to Hippocrates, "the father of modern medicine", medical practitioners of the ancient world recognised the importance of herbal remedies and embraced them. This talk investigates the history of plants in medici...

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

John Dee (1527–1609) was one of the most intriguing figures in Tudor Britain. The model of a Renaissance man, he harboured interests in astrology, alchemy, history, religion, medicine, magic and much more besides. In this talk, Katie Birkwood explores Dee’s life story, thoughts and personality, which survive in the personally annotated collection of his books, now residing at the library of the Ro...

Many exotic plant materials would become household words for the well-to-do during the decades around 1700. A language of curiosity, innovation and invention surrounded attempts to understand, trade in and profit from them. This talk considers some of the ways in which lay consumers, merchants and medical experts appropriated and ‘domesticated’ exotic foods and drugs within the French metropolitan...

How were bizarre reactions to food described before the coining of the term ‘allergy’ in 1906? Symptoms reminiscent of food allergy have been observed since Ancient Greece and Rome, with Lucretius stating that one person’s food could be another’s poison. Many physicians were convinced that reactions to food were responsible for symptoms ranging from asthma to migraine. At the root of debates about...

This talk explores popular reactions to the ‘great influenza’ of 1918-20, primarily in relation to other epidemics of the 19th and early 20th centuries. It will contest scholars’ contention that big epidemics, regardless of the disease, inevitably stirred suspicion and blame of the ‘other’, and that an essential factor stirring that hate rested on the mysteriousness of the disease and medical prac...

Although playing the piano was often seen as a thoroughly respectable pastime for young ladies, for much of the nineteenth century there was serious medical discussion about the dangers of excessive music in girls’ education. Many of the period’s leading psychiatrists and gynaecologists argued that music could over-stimulate the female nervous system, playing havoc with vulnerable nerves and repro...

Speaker: Professor Mark Harrison (University of Oxford) Twitter: twitter.com/RCPEHeritage Instagram: instagram.com/physiciansgallery/ Facebook: facebook.com/PhysiciansGallery TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@physiciansgallery

Speaker: Simon Chaplin (Royal College of Surgeons of England) Twitter: twitter.com/RCPEHeritage Instagram: instagram.com/physiciansgallery/ Facebook: facebook.com/PhysiciansGallery TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@physiciansgallery

The poet and songwriter Robert Burns died in 1796, aged 37. There was no post-mortem and hence no tissue diagnosis. Detractors, commencing with unsigned obituaries, assigned the cause firmly to alcoholism. This talk examines the evidence for a range of alternative diagnoses. Speaker : Professor Emeritus David Purdie (Hull & York University Medical School) Twitter: twitter.com/RCPEHeritage Instagra...

This talk uses the records of the Pathological Society of London, a key institution for the advancement of pathology, to reveal the place and purpose of animals within human pathological anatomy during the later 19th century. While animals, both wild and domestic, accounted for less than 5% of the specimens exhibited at their meetings, they were nonetheless regarded as legitimate subjects of patho...

Grave-robbing and the Burke and Hare murders have become anatomy’s enduring reference points, but during the nineteenth century most bodies were stealthily acquired by medical schools through other means. After the 1832 Anatomy Act a distinctive pattern of corpse procurement was creatively forged in Scotland, through alliances between the country’s anatomists, anatomy inspectors, local law makers,...

Since the late nineteenth century, stress has emerged as a popular means of explaining the onset of both physical and psychological disorders. Yet the definition of stress remains problematic and the manner in which stress might cause disease is still undetermined. This talk traces the history of stress in the twentieth century, exploring scientific theories, clinical formulations and personal exp...

The doctor-patient relationship has changed considerably over the centuries. There have often been cyclical changes: diagnostic improvements leading to increased respect but often followed by disillusionment if there is subsequently no effective treatment. The relationship is especially exemplified in works of art because, as John Berger has emphasised, ‘No other kind of relic or text from the pas...

Contrary to widely believed assertions, the concept of unbiased creation of treatment comparison groups in clinical trials was not ‘a seminal statistical idea’, but was rooted in the much older idea that fair tests of treatments involve comparing like with like, achieved at least 200 years ago using alternate allocation to treatment comparison groups. Strict alternation deals with selection bias a...

This talk looks at how forensic and investigative techniques were used to study epidemics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Speaker: Professor Anne Hardy (University College London) Twitter: twitter.com/RCPEHeritage Instagram: instagram.com/physiciansgallery/ Facebook: facebook.com/PhysiciansGallery TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@physiciansgallery