Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh

The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh was founded in 1681 by the Scottish physician Robert Sibbald with the purpose of licensing physicians to practice within Edinburgh, regulating the medications in apothecaries throughout the city, and garnering respect for medicine as a profession. The College was established after the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, which was founded in the sixteenth-century. The two institutions shared a slight rivalry during their early years.

When I visited the Royal College, I spent a couple hours in the library browsing through texts on the "Edinburgh Seven," a group of women who sought admission to the Edinburgh Medical School (now the University of Edinburgh Medical School) in the late nineteenth-century. While the women were accepted to attend the medical school in 1869, most professors arranged special lectures for them apart from the male students, or they would strategically sneak the women into their lectures. Due to the fierce opposition from many of the university professors as well as the male students, the women were unable to legitimately graduate from the school and instead obtained certificates citing the completion of their courses.

Despite this apparent failure, the Edinburgh Seven gave a voice to the issue of gender discrimination in the medical school setting. All the women eventually obtained medical licenses in other European countries, while England continued to prohibit granting qualifications to female physicians until the policy was overturned by legislation passed in 1876.

After my research in the library, I got to tour the rest of the building with one of the Royal College's historians. Most of the rooms are extremely majestic, and I hope my pictures below will convey that sense of grandeur.

Entrance to the Royal College

Portrait of Alexander Monro, founder of the Edinburgh Medical School

Portrait of Carl Linnaeus

The Sibbald Physic Garden, which was the first site of Dr. Robert Sibbald's
botanical garden he used to collect plants to make medications.
The bust in the center of the garden is of Sibbald himself.

The "New Library"

The site of the Royal College's archives, where librarians are working on restoring texts