Tony Clayton-Lea joined a walking tour of Edinburgh to discover the city's wealth of health
Edinburgh is medicine crazy throughout 2005. You can blame the Quincentenary of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (RCSE) for the increased interest in all things medicinal.
The fascination lays not so much in the technicalities (of which most people outside the medical profession have little or no knowledge) but in the overall admiring view of mere mortals facing up to God and pioneering the kind of work and trail of discovery that has helped mankind to suffer less.
And so it boils down to something as simple as this: when you're of a questioning mind, go on a walking tour. Always look for the lady with the Gladstone bag, it says on the leaflet for the Original Edinburgh Medical Tour - a tour highlighting the city's long medical heritage and continuing contribution to the world of medicine.
We look around for someone suitably Kay Scarpetta-like, and spy Sheila Devlin-Thorp, a smart, witty Irish woman who transplanted her life to the Scottish capital from Magherafelt in the mid-1970s. Her background as a historian and avid reader gave her the cerebral tools to research and devise in 1996 the award-winning Edinburgh Literary Pub Tour; her current tour/walk-based project is somewhat more steeped in, well, blood, bones, intestines and chloroform.
"I thought the Quincentenary was an opportunity to promote the city's contribution towards medicine," says Devlin-Thorp.
"I was also pushed into it through UNESCO awarding Edinburgh the First World City of Literature status. I felt that we were also an important city of medicine, and was keen to pull together all the things I'd read about and researched."
Devlin-Thorpe's idea of a walking tour is, thankfully, not the dull "chalk and talk" type, but rather a hands-on approach. For the past 12 months, she has rummaged through auctions, on eBay ("God knows where else"), and came up with all manner of medical items.
Tradition says it's rude for a gentleman to take a peek inside a lady's handbag, but Devlin-Thorp has no problem displaying the contents of her Gladstone - it's full of old medical instruments.
"When I talk about bloodletting," she says with a straight face, "I have the four-bladed instrument in my hand. When I talk about chloroform I have the mask in my hand. When I talk about the lunatic asylum I have the forced feeding spoon in my hand."
We start the walking tour outside the Royal College of Surgeons main building in Nicolson Street. The college holds the largest collection of medical, anatomical and pathological material in Scotland, while the Surgeons' Hall Pathology Museum is Scotland's oldest.
From there, we head south towards Drummond Street, where we stop outside the Barber Shop, look at the Barbers Pole, and receive (with a mischievous glint in Devlin-Thorp's eyes) a full explanation of bloodletting. After picking ourselves up off the ground and mopping the sweat from our brows, we continue along the street and turn into High School Yards - the site of the first public dissection (1702).
This area, known as Surgeons Square, was home to many famous anatomists, including Robert Knox, who was implicated in the William Burke and William Hare scandal. Irish men Burke and Hare murdered over a dozen poor souls and sold their bodies to anatomists such as Knox. Burke was hanged and publicly dissected in 1829; the schoolboy rhyme of the day went: "Up the close and down the stair/Butt and Ben wi' Burke and Hare/Burke the butcher, Hare the thief/and Knox the boy who buys the beef".
Other buildings in the Surgeon Square area include the old and new surgical hospitals, where pioneering physicians such as James Lister and Sir James Young Simpson worked. Lister pioneered the use of antiseptic surgery (Listerine, anyone?) by using carbolic acid spray in operating theatres. Devlin-Thorp tells us that all operations would begin with the words, "Let us spray", which may or may not be apocryphal. Simpson, meanwhile, discovered in an experiment in 1847 that chloroform could be used as an anaesthetic.
The tour, says Devlin-Thorp, is of the educare et delectare kind - "To inform and to entertain. There is no exam at the end. All kinds of people come on it, which is one of the reasons I make it a pre-booked tour, so that I can tailor it to the needs of the participants.
"Lots of surgeons come to Edinburgh for medical conferences, so I can be more specific if needs be. For a general audience, I can give it the more fun and anecdotal side."
Many overseas surgeons, trained in Edinburgh, says Devlin-Thorp, come on the tours. "They're here as students, drink themselves silly, get through the exams, and go away. But they never really looked at the city when they were here."
The tour, says Devlin-Thorp, is quite a success. "My problem is that I have to leave so much out - I'm not short of material. The hands-on stuff is important, though, as it shows people just how important Edinburgh is in medicine terms."
The Edinburgh Medical Tour is available for pre-booked groups only (minimum eight people; £8.50 per person. Ten per cent of the ticket price is donated to charities). The tour lasts about 90 minutes and can be arranged by tel: (0044) 131-5576970, visiting www.edinburghmedicaltour.com or moreinfo@edinburghmedicaltour.com
• The exhibition, The Healing Touch - 500 years of Scots in Sickness and Health, is showing at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Queen Street, Edinburgh, until November 27th. Admission is free.