High School Yards: The First Surgeons' Hall and Lister's Infirmary

Why is it significant?

You are standing in a quiet, half-hidden courtyard off Infirmary Street, with old stone buildings around you, university signs on the doors and students cutting through with coffee in hand. It looks like nothing much.

Key Facts

Open the walk

You are standing in a quiet, half-hidden courtyard off Infirmary Street, with old stone buildings around you, university signs on the doors and students cutting through with coffee in hand. It looks like nothing much. Yet for about two hundred years this corner was the beating heart of Edinburgh medicine, and some of what happened here would turn your stomach.

One of these buildings is the old Surgeons' Hall, built in 1697 for the Incorporation of Surgeons, with an anatomy theatre where bodies were dissected in front of rows of students. As early as 1505 the surgeons had won the right to the body of one executed criminal a year for dissection... and in practice they never had nearly enough. Across the yard stands the old Royal High School of 1777, where a boy called Walter Scott sat his lessons.

Hunger for corpses created a grim trade. Grave robbers, the resurrection men, dug up fresh burials at night, and kirkyards across Scotland built watchtowers and iron cages to stop them. In 1828 the anatomist Robert Knox ran a popular private school on Surgeons' Square, right here, and paid with no questions asked for the bodies that William Burke and William Hare brought to his door. They were the bodies of people the pair had murdered. Sixteen victims later, the scandal helped change British law.

Just along Infirmary Street stood the old Royal Infirmary, opened in 1741, and it was there, between 1869 and 1877, that Joseph Lister brought his antiseptic method to Edinburgh. He used carbolic acid on wounds, dressings and instruments, and patients who would once have died of infection after an operation began, astonishingly, to walk out alive. Surgeons came from far beyond Scotland to watch him work.

Two worlds, then, in one small yard: medicine built on stolen bodies, and medicine that learned to stop killing its own patients. Walk out to South Bridge, cross at the junction with Chambers Street and Drummond Street, and continue along Nicolson Street to a magnificent columned temple on your left... the surgeons' grand new home.