Surgeons' Hall: Playfair's Temple and the 1870 Riot
Why is it significant?
Tall Ionic columns, a broad flight of steps and a pediment that would not look out of place in Athens: you are standing in front of Surgeons' Hall, home of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh.
Key Facts
| Place | Surgeons' Hall: Playfair's Temple and the 1870 Riot |
|---|---|
| Address | Nicolson Street, Edinburgh EH8 9DW, UK |
| Geo Coordinates | 55.94670, -3.18510 |
| Part of Walk | Surgeons, Skeletons and Dolly the Sheep: Edinburgh's Southside of Medicine and Science |
| Generated | Generated |
Tall Ionic columns, a broad flight of steps and a pediment that would not look out of place in Athens: you are standing in front of Surgeons' Hall, home of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh. Behind those railings is one of the oldest surgical colleges in the world... and a museum that is not for the squeamish.
The college traces its roots to 1505, when the town council granted the barber-surgeons of Edinburgh their charter, confirmed by King James IV the following year. The building is younger: William Henry Playfair, the architect of the National Gallery on the Mound, finished it in 1832 as a temple to science. The museum inside holds centuries of anatomical and pathological specimens, and among its strangest exhibits is a small pocketbook said to be bound in the tanned skin of William Burke.
On 18 November 1870 these steps saw one of the ugliest scenes in the history of British medicine. Sophia Jex-Blake and her fellow students, the women remembered as the Edinburgh Seven, arrived to sit an anatomy examination. A crowd of male students was waiting. They blocked the gate, hurled mud and abuse, and someone pushed a sheep into the examination room.
The women did not turn back. With a few sympathetic male students forming an escort, they went in, sat the exam and walked out again through the mob. The Surgeons' Hall riot made the newspapers across Britain and won them a wave of public sympathy, even though the university would later refuse them their degrees. Their long fight helped force open the doors of medicine to women across the country.
Look up at those calm columns again and remember that both stories belong to the same building: the science, and the sneering. Now walk back north along Nicolson Street to the vast domed university building on your left, at the corner of Chambers Street.