The Old Royal Infirmary: Nightingale's Pavilions at Quartermile
Why is it significant?
Along Lauriston Place runs a procession of tall Scottish baronial blocks, with pointed turrets, crow-stepped gables and a central clock tower, linked like the carriages of a stone train. Today they are flats, offices and shops, part of the development called Quartermile.
Key Facts
| Place | The Old Royal Infirmary: Nightingale's Pavilions at Quartermile |
|---|---|
| Address | Lauriston Place, Edinburgh EH3, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.94410, -3.19350 |
| Part of Walk | Surgeons, Skeletons and Dolly the Sheep: Edinburgh's Southside of Medicine and Science |
| Generated | Generated |
Along Lauriston Place runs a procession of tall Scottish baronial blocks, with pointed turrets, crow-stepped gables and a central clock tower, linked like the carriages of a stone train. Today they are flats, offices and shops, part of the development called Quartermile. For more than 120 years, this was the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh.
The hospital opened in 1879 to designs by David Bryce, who died before it was finished. Its shape was the latest medical thinking: separate ward pavilions with tall windows facing each other across open courts, so that air and light could pour through every ward. That was the gospel of Florence Nightingale, who had watched soldiers die of filth and fever in the Crimean War, and her views were sought as the plans took shape.
Nightingale's influence went beyond the bricks. In the 1870s nurses trained at her own school in London were sent north to reform nursing at the Infirmary, turning a job once done by untrained, overworked attendants into a disciplined profession. In a world without antibiotics, the wards fought tuberculosis, diphtheria and infection with little more than fresh air, carbolic, cleanliness and those nurses.
In 2003 the hospital moved to a new site at Little France, on the southern edge of the city, and the old buildings were stripped back and reborn as homes. Look carefully and you can still read the hospital in the layout: the long pavilions, the tall windows, the gaps between blocks designed for fresh air, now filled with glass buildings and gardens. The maternity unit on this site, the Simpson Memorial Maternity Pavilion, was named after the chloroform pioneer James Young Simpson, and a great many people now living in Edinburgh were born there.
Somewhere in those flats, people now sleep in rooms where surgeons once operated and nurses walked the night rounds by lamplight. Now head east along the northern edge of the Meadows to George Square, the leafy garden square just to the north of the park.