Surgeons, Skeletons and Dolly the Sheep: Edinburgh's Southside of Medicine and Science

From the first anatomy theatre and the Surgeons' Hall riot to Darwin's lecture halls, Conan Doyle's medical school, Nightingale's infirmary, the Meadows and the old vet college: how Edinburgh taught the world to heal

Edinburgh · 11 stops · 26 min audio · Generated October 2026

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

   High School Yards, Edinburgh EH1 1LZ, UK

   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.

2. 2. Surgeons' Hall: Playfair's Temple and the 1870 Riot

   Nicolson Street, Edinburgh EH8 9DW, UK

   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.

3. 3. Old College: Where Darwin Fled the Operating Theatre

   South Bridge, Edinburgh EH8 9YL, UK

   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.

4. 4. National Museum of Scotland: Dolly the Sheep and the Hall of Light

   Chambers Street, Edinburgh EH1 1JF, UK

   Along Chambers Street two museums stand shoulder to shoulder: a long Victorian palace with tall arched windows, and beside it a modern castle of golden sandstone with a round tower on the corner. Together they make the National Museum of Scotland, and somewhere inside, behind glass, stands the most famous sheep who ever lived.

   The Victorian half began as the Industrial Museum of Scotland, founded in 1854 to show off science, engineering and the natural world. Prince Albert laid its foundation stone in October 1861, only weeks before his death, and it opened in 1866. Its great hall is a cage of slender iron and glass in the spirit of the Crystal Palace, and on a bright day it fills with light like a greenhouse. The modern building beside it followed in 1998.

   Now, the sheep. Dolly was born on 5 July 1996 at the Roslin Institute, a few miles south of the city, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, taken from the mammary gland of a six-year-old ewe. The scientists named her, with a wink, after the singer Dolly Parton. When her birth was announced in February 1997, newspapers around the world talked about cloned humans, and governments hurried to write new laws.

   Dolly lived a sheep's life at Roslin and gave birth to six lambs of her own. In 2003, aged six, she developed a lung disease and was put to sleep, and her preserved body was given to the museum. Her real legacy is not a flock of copied sheep but the science of reprogramming cells, which feeds into research on stem cells and regenerative medicine today.

   The street outside has its own story of improvement. It is named after William Chambers, publisher and Lord Provost, who drove the clearing of crowded old closes to lay it out in the 1870s, and his statue still stands in the middle. Walk west to the end of Chambers Street, turn left down Bristo Place, and in a couple of minutes you reach a wide paved square beside a great domed hall.

5. 5. Bristo Square: McEwan Hall, Teviot and the Edinburgh Seven

   Bristo Square, Edinburgh EH8 9AG, UK

   Before you spreads a wide paved square that is half skateboard park, half crossroads of student life, and beside it rises a great half-round hall with a dome, like a Renaissance theatre that wandered north and decided to stay. That is the McEwan Hall, and next to it stands Teviot Row House, all turrets and gables.

   The hall was a gift from William McEwan, a brewer and member of parliament, and it opened in 1897 as the university's graduation hall, its interior covered in painted murals celebrating learning and the arts. Teviot Row House opened in 1889 and is generally said to be the oldest purpose-built students' union in the world. For most of its first century, it was strictly for men.

   Which brings us back to the Edinburgh Seven. In 1869 Sophia Jex-Blake, Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson and Emily Bovell matriculated at the University of Edinburgh, the first group of women to enrol at a British university. After years of hostility, the courts ruled in 1873 that the university should never have admitted them, and none of them received an Edinburgh degree. Several qualified abroad and went on to practise medicine anyway.

   Then, in July 2019, a century and a half later, the university awarded the Edinburgh Seven posthumous honorary degrees in medicine, at a ceremony right here in the McEwan Hall. Seven of today's medical students walked across the stage to receive them on their behalf. Few graduations in that hall can have carried more weight.

   One more ghost before you go: a few steps north, on Lothian Street, the teenage Darwin lodged at number 11 during his Edinburgh years, though that house has long gone. Now walk round the side of the McEwan Hall to Teviot Place, where a grand Italian-style building faces the street with a tall arched gateway.

6. 6. Old Medical School: Joseph Bell and the Birth of Sherlock Holmes

   Teviot Place, Edinburgh EH8 9AG, UK

   Facing Teviot Place is a long, palatial building in the manner of an Italian Renaissance palazzo, with a tall arched gateway leading into quadrangles beyond. It was built in the 1880s, to designs by Robert Rowand Anderson, as the university's new medical school, at a time when Edinburgh was one of the places in the world to study medicine.

   Among the university's medical students in those years was a tall young man from a struggling Edinburgh family: Arthur Conan Doyle, who studied medicine here from 1876 to 1881, as the new school was rising. He helped pay his way by working as a ship's surgeon, once on a whaler bound for the Arctic. And he fell under the spell of one teacher above all, the surgeon Joseph Bell.

   Bell could look at a stranger and tell him his trade, where he had travelled and what was wrong with him, from the cut of his clothes, the calluses on his hands and the way he walked. Doyle worked as his clerk at the Royal Infirmary and watched him do it again and again. When he began writing detective stories, he built his hero on that very method of observation and deduction. Sherlock Holmes appeared in A Study in Scarlet in 1887, and Doyle later wrote to Bell that it was most certainly to him that he owed Holmes.

   Bell was not the only teacher who walked into fiction. The physiologist William Rutherford, with his booming voice and enormous beard, is said to have given Doyle the model for the irascible Professor Challenger of The Lost World. Edinburgh's lecture halls, in other words, handed literature two of its most memorable characters.

   Inside this building, the university's Anatomical Museum still keeps the skeleton of William Burke, the murderer whose victims ended up on the dissecting tables of this city. Now walk west along Teviot Place and Lauriston Place for a few minutes, to a long Victorian hospital with turrets and a clock tower, now turned into homes.

7. 7. The Old Royal Infirmary: Nightingale's Pavilions at Quartermile

   Lauriston Place, Edinburgh EH3, UK

   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.

8. 8. George Square: Scott's Boyhood and a Square Half Lost

   George Square, Edinburgh EH8, UK

   Walk into the gardens in the middle and turn slowly: on one side, a row of plain, handsome Georgian houses; on the other, concrete towers and a long modern library. George Square is a place where two centuries argue with each other across a lawn.

   The square was laid out from 1766 by the builder James Brown, who, it is said, named it after his brother George rather than the king. It was one of the first planned developments outside the crowded Old Town, begun just before the New Town, and for a while it was among the most fashionable addresses in Edinburgh. Judges, lawyers and aristocrats moved in, escaping the stinking closes for fresh air and gardens.

   At number 25 lived the Scott family, and the boy Walter Scott grew up here in the 1770s and 1780s, a sickly child left lame by polio who would become the most famous novelist in Europe. A century later, the family of a medical student named Arthur Conan Doyle lived for a time in the square as well. From these steps the young Scott set off each morning down the hill to the High School you saw at the start of this walk. Two of the world's great storytellers, one square of Edinburgh.

   In the 1960s the university, hungry for space for its sciences, arts and libraries, demolished much of the square, replacing elegant terraces with tower blocks and with the Main Library designed by Basil Spence's practice. The protests that followed helped turn conservation into a cause in Edinburgh, and a good deal of what survives of the old Southside owes something to the anger over this square.

   Today it is the noisy heart of the university, and every August its gardens fill with festival tents and crowds. Leave the square at its southern side, cross into the Meadows, and follow the paths west to the long tree-lined avenue called Jawbone Walk.

9. 9. Jawbone Walk: The Meadows and the 1886 Exhibition

   Jawbone Walk, The Meadows, Edinburgh EH9, UK

   Around you stretches the Meadows, a great green lung of grass and avenues where students lie in the sun, barbecues smoke and footballs bounce. You are on Jawbone Walk, a long path lined with trees, and its odd name is a clue to the summer when this park hosted the world.

   The Meadows were once a loch. The Burgh Loch, a shallow, marshy lake that supplied the town with water, lay here until it was drained in the eighteenth century, largely through the efforts of Thomas Hope, a pioneering agricultural improver. Hope Park, at the eastern end, still carries his name. A muddy loch turned into a promenade: the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment loved nothing more than improving things.

   In 1886 the Meadows filled with the International Exhibition of Industry, Science and Art, a vast temporary palace with a dome and halls full of engines, electric lights, manufactured goods and art, plus a reconstructed street of old Edinburgh. Millions of visitors came that summer. The stand of the Shetland and Fair Isle knitters brought a pair of enormous whale jawbones, and afterwards they were set up as an arch over this path... and gave it its name.

   Whalebone arches were once a common sight in Scotland, souvenirs of an industry that hunted whales almost to extinction. These jawbones stood here for well over a century, weathering slowly, until they were taken down for conservation in the 2010s. Other relics of the exhibition survive: at the western end of Melville Drive stand the stone pillars put up by the city's master masons, and nearby a sundial recalls the exhibition's opening.

   Picture it: electric light over the grass, brass bands, crowds in their Sunday best, and science on show as the greatest entertainment of the age. Now head south across the Meadows to Melville Drive, then follow Marchmont Road a short way and turn left into Sciennes Road, to a large late-Victorian hospital building.

10. 10. The Old Sick Kids: A Children's Hospital at Sciennes

    Sciennes Road, Edinburgh EH9 1LF, UK

    In front of you stands a large late-Victorian hospital building, with tall windows, gables and carved stone details, looking out over the quiet streets of Sciennes. For well over a century every Edinburgh family knew it simply as the Sick Kids, and plenty of grown-ups walking past it still remember a ward, a nurse or a plaster cast from inside.

    The hospital was founded in 1860, the first children's hospital in Scotland, in a modest house in Lauriston Lane. Before then, sick children of poor families were mostly nursed at home, or placed in adult wards where they caught every infection going. The founders believed that children were not simply small adults, and that they needed their own doctors, their own nurses and their own beds.

    This building opened in 1895, designed by George Washington Browne, with the same faith in light and air you saw at the Royal Infirmary on Lauriston Place. Its most precious treasure was a cycle of murals by the artist Phoebe Anna Traquair, first painted in the 1880s for the mortuary chapel of the earlier hospital and then recreated here: angels and children, tender and luminous, painted for grieving parents by one of the great artists of the Scottish Arts and Crafts movement.

    Children's medicine changed beyond recognition within these walls. Like the Royal Infirmary, it was paid for over many decades by public generosity, through donations, collections and bequests, until the National Health Service took it over in 1948. Vaccines, antibiotics and modern surgery turned diphtheria, scarlet fever and tuberculosis from common killers of children into rarities. In 2021 the hospital moved to a new building at Little France, beside the Royal Infirmary, closing a chapter of more than 125 years at Sciennes.

    Fittingly, the last stop on this walk is about healing too... but not of people. Follow Sciennes Road east to its end, then turn left and walk north a few minutes to the rambling stone buildings of Summerhall.

11. 11. Summerhall: The Dick Vet and the Road to Dolly

    Summerhall, Edinburgh EH9 1PL, UK

    You arrive at a big, rambling stone building with a fine early twentieth-century frontage, where posters for plays, gigs and exhibitions crowd the doors. Today Summerhall is one of the busiest arts venues in the city. But look closer at its courtyards and long wings: it was built for animals... and for the people who healed them.

    The story begins with William Dick, the son of an Edinburgh farrier, who studied at the veterinary college in London and came home convinced that Scotland needed one of its own. In 1823 he began teaching veterinary medicine in Edinburgh, and his school grew into the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College. In 1916 it moved into these buildings at Summerhall, with dissecting rooms, stables, laboratories and lecture theatres.

    For most of a century, generations of vets learned their craft here, from treating the working horses of a city that still ran on horsepower to the science of farm animals, dogs and cats. Around 2011 the school completed its move to a modern campus at Easter Bush, south of the city, and these buildings were reborn as Summerhall, with performances staged in former lecture theatres and exhibitions in old laboratories.

    And here the walk closes a circle. At Easter Bush the Dick Vet now works side by side with the Roslin Institute, today part of the University of Edinburgh, the same institute where Dolly the sheep was born. From anatomy theatres supplied by grave robbers to a cloned sheep in a glass case, the Southside has watched almost the whole story of modern medicine and biology unfold.

    Think back over the walk: the surgeons' first hall, the women pelted with mud at Surgeons' Hall, Darwin running from the operating theatre, Bell reading strangers like books, Nightingale's nurses and the children of Sciennes. The Meadows are just round the corner... a good place to sit on the grass and let it all settle.