Old College: Where Darwin Fled the Operating Theatre

Why is it significant?

Stand facing the great arched entrance of Old College and look right up: on top of the dome a gilded young man holds a torch aloft, the figure of Youth carrying the light of knowledge. Then step through the arch, and the traffic noise falls away into a broad, calm quadrangle of pale stone.

Key Facts

Open the walk

Stand facing the great arched entrance of Old College and look right up: on top of the dome a gilded young man holds a torch aloft, the figure of Youth carrying the light of knowledge. Then step through the arch, and the traffic noise falls away into a broad, calm quadrangle of pale stone.

Robert Adam designed Old College in 1789, but money ran out and war intervened, and it was William Henry Playfair who finished the quadrangle decades later. The dome itself arrived only in 1887. So the university where Charles Darwin studied medicine, from 1825 to 1827, was still partly a building site. He arrived aged sixteen, with his older brother Erasmus, sent by a father who wanted another doctor in the family.

Darwin hated it. The lectures bored him, and the operating theatre horrified him. Surgery was done without anaesthesia, and he later recalled watching two operations at the hospital, one of them on a child, and rushing away before they were finished. He never went back. Relief came twenty years too late for him: in 1847 James Young Simpson tested chloroform on himself and his friends around his dining table in Queen Street, and the whole company woke up on the floor.

Yet Edinburgh made Darwin all the same. He learned to preserve birds from John Edmonstone, a freed slave from Guyana living nearby, a skill he used on the voyage of the Beagle. He walked the shores of the Forth with the zoologist Robert Grant, studying sea creatures, and in 1827 he presented his first scientific discovery, about the larvae of a tiny marine animal, to the student Plinian Society. The future author of On the Origin of Species began as an Edinburgh dropout.

Old College has darker ghosts. In January 1829, the day after William Burke was hanged, his body was publicly dissected in the anatomy theatre here, and students nearly rioted to get in. His skeleton is still kept by the university. Now walk west along Chambers Street to the long Venetian-style facade of the National Museum of Scotland.