One of the largest pathology collections in the world, including a pocketbook bound in the skin of the murderer William Burke.
The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh has been collecting since 1699. The result is one of the largest and oldest pathology collections in the world, housed in Playfair’s 1832 building on Nicolson Street and reopened after refurbishment in 2015.
Edinburgh was the leading centre of medical teaching in Europe for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and this museum is the physical residue of that.
The Wohl Pathology Museum
Two galleries of specimens arranged by system — tumours, aneurysms, tuberculosis, gunshot wounds, developmental anomalies — most of them collected before the treatments that would now prevent them existed. It is a museum of what disease used to do to people, and it is presented straight, with clinical labels.
Many visitors find it fascinating. Some find it distressing. Both are reasonable and the museum is clear at the door about which it is.
Burke and Hare
In 1828, William Burke and William Hare murdered sixteen people in Edinburgh and sold the bodies to the anatomist Robert Knox for dissection, at a time when the only legal supply of corpses for teaching was executed criminals and demand vastly exceeded it.
Hare turned King’s evidence and walked free. Burke was hanged in January 1829 before a crowd of 25,000 and — with a symmetry the court intended — his body was publicly dissected. His skeleton is at the University’s Anatomical Museum; here you will find his death mask and a pocketbook bound in his tanned skin.
The case led directly to the Anatomy Act of 1832, which regularised the supply of bodies for teaching.
Joseph Bell and Sherlock Holmes
Dr Joseph Bell, a surgeon here, taught Arthur Conan Doyle at Edinburgh and was famous for diagnosing patients’ occupations and histories from observation before they spoke. Doyle said outright that Bell was the model for Sherlock Holmes. There is a section on him and on the beginnings of forensic medicine.
The dental collection
A separate gallery on the history of dentistry, which is both more interesting and more alarming than it sounds.
Practicalities
Ticketed. Photography is not permitted in the pathology galleries, for obvious reasons. Allow ninety minutes. There is a café and a good shop.
More Museums
National Museum of Scotland
Dolly the sheep, the Lewis chessmen and a Victorian glass hall, all free, with a roof terrace almost nobody finds.
Scottish National Gallery
Titian, Vermeer, Velázquez and the skating minister, free, in two Playfair temples on a bank of earth dug out of the New Town.
Scottish National Portrait Gallery
A red sandstone cathedral to Scottish faces, with a processional frieze of national history round the entrance hall.