Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh

“ Great is the responsibility of the weak and cowardly, the lazy and double-minded,—the “unstable” who call themselves impartial.
At this stage, wisely or not, the women were advised to apply for permission to work in the wards of the Royal Infirmary. This was the only hospital in Edinburgh large enough to fulfil the requirements of the General Medical Council for registration as a medical practitioner, and the women were entitled to the privilege in virtue of their Matriculation tickets. They knew that some of the doctors were in their favour. ”

“ In Edinburgh he became chairman of the board of directors of Leith Hospital, and worked hard to secure its extension to a hundred beds to satisfy the academic teaching requirements. He was also elected a manager of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, where he was particularly interested in the improvement and extension of the operating theatres. ”

“ Boyd was also instrumental in promoting another great Edinburgh institution, the building of the New Royal Infirmary on the west side of the Meadow Walk, the largest and best equipped hospital in Europe. ”

“ The doors of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary have also been thrown open to women, though under some restrictions, and excellent clinical instruction is given to them there by two of the best and most popular teachers in the city. ”

“ Others, sick at heart, throw up their commissions altogether. That noble institution, the Edinburgh Infirmary, is almost bankrupt, and never has received the slightest assistance from the public purse ”

“ Other institutions are the Royal hospital for sick children, the home for crippled children, the Royal maternity hospital, and the deaf and dumb asylum. Though Trinity hospital no longer exists as a hospital with resident pensioners, the trustees disburse annually pensions to certain poor burgesses and their wives and children; and the trust controlling the benevolent branch of the Gillespie hospital endowment is similarly administered.
Industries.—Although Edinburgh is a residential rather than a manufacturing or commercial centre, the industries which it has are important and flourishing. ”

“ It was necessary, too, that hospital instruction should be provided, and to this end, S. J.-B. approached the authorities at Leith.
“The very large number of students at the Edinburgh Infirmary,” she wrote to Dr. Struthers, “make it almost impossible that women should there get opportunities of study, and (as there is no other suitable hospital of sufficient size in Edinburgh) I am anxious to ascertain whether the Directors of the Leith Hospital would entertain the idea of admitting them to opportunities of clinical study in their wards. ”

“ It is funny the stimulating effect a big school has on a hospital. The Royal here is nearly as big and quite as rich as the Edinburgh Royal, but there is no pretence that they really are in their teaching and arrangements the third hospital in the kingdom, as they are in size. The London Hospital is the biggest, and then comes Edinburgh, and this is the third. ”

“ Most of the good London hospitals, however, are so besieged with would-be probationers that we often think a girl is wise who enters a first-rate infirmary by preference. The Birmingham Infirmary and the Brownlow Hill Infirmary, Liverpool, are both most excellent, and several London Infirmaries, notably those in Chelsea and St. ”

“ We do not pretend to offer any opinion on the question of mixed classes, or on the medical education of women; but we consider that, as the University of Edinburgh has admitted those ladies as students of medicine, and as they have now been engaged for some time in striving honourably and successfully to gain a knowledge{151} of our profession, it is great injustice to attempt to bar their further progress by refusing them permission to attend the practice of the Infirmary. ”

“ The Lords Select Committee reported that:—
“The evidence on the whole appears to indicate a general recognition of the high standard of efficiency attained by the best of the new infirmaries.
“The poor do not generally regard the infirmary as they do the workhouse; they look upon it rather as a State-supported hospital; they come to the infirmary, are cared for, cured, and go out again without feeling that they are tainted with pauperism.” ”

“ The demands made by an infirmary upon the public drainage system, although formidable enough, are not so great as those of an ordinary town district of similar extent, for the population inhabiting the eleven acres of infirmary ground will be much less than that of adjoining spaces occupied by dwelling-houses. But the liability to infectious excreta makes the hospital drainage of special importance, even in an infirmary like ours, where infectious cases are not received. ”

“ We become, in a special degree, sensible of this truth when we see the house of a royal personage sunk amidst the impurities of a narrow close in the Old Town of Edinburgh. Such was literally the case of an aged pile of buildings on the north side of the Castle-hill, behind the front line of the street, and accessible by Blyth’s, Nairn’s, and Tod’s Closes, which was declared by tradition to have been the residence of Mary de Guise, the widow of James V., and from 1554 to 1560 regent of this realm. ”

“ Many cases of accident were conveyed directly to their own homes; many cases of sudden illness were conveyed either to the hospital or their own homes, and he did not think he was over-estimating it when he said that fifteen hundred cases occurred every year in Edinburgh which would benefit from a speedy and comfortable means of conveyance from the place of accident to the place of treatment. In the formation and working of such a society, he would give all the help he could. ”

“ The victory was not assured, however, as perhaps they had hoped when they entered Edinburgh, for though for a time everything went well, and the preaching seems to have been followed by the greater part of the city, the Queen, ever active, though never striking any decisive blow, had received reinforcements from France, and to the great alarm of the Congregation had begun to fortify Leith, forming a strong garrison there of French soldiers, and making a new stronghold near enough to be a perpetual menace to Edinburgh almost at her door. ”

“ During the following recess, the committee presented a petition to the Town Council, requesting, on behalf of the Society, the grant of a considerable portion of ground in the direction we have already indicated. This petition was both strongly recommended and favourably received, but was eventually declined, from what (now, indeed) fully appears to have been a just apprehension, that its admission would occasion an injurious encroachment on the Royal Infirmary, the limits of which Institution have all along been too much circumscribed. ”

“ For many generations the charitable foundations for the teaching and training of youth were a conspicuous feature in the economy of the city. Foremost among them was the hospital founded by George Heriot—the “Jingling Geordie” of Scott’s Fortunes of Nigel—the goldsmith and banker of James VI. At his death in 1624 Heriot left his estate in trust to the magistrates and ministers of Edinburgh for the maintenance and teaching of poor fatherless sons of freemen. ”

“ What an Augean stable for a weak woman to cleanse! Then again nothing annoys the public more than to open the doors of its whited sepulchres. Of course, it was no use to condemn the present system without putting something better in its place. The workhouse infirmary was far better in one sense; there, the object was to help the patient to get well as speedily as possible, and take himself off the books; but there attaches a stigma to the infirmary from which the hospital is free, yet the hospital must be reformed on the model, in some respects, of the infirmaries. ”

“ Husbands ill-using wives, their punishment by the Stang, 589. Ilay, Earl of, admitted as an extraordinary Lord of Session, 341; curious anecdotes of in connection with the Post-office, 266. Immorality and impiety ascribed to Scotland by General Assembly in 1691, 41; efforts to restrain, 342. Improvers [Agricultural] Society of, 484, 580. Incestuous connections severely treated, 59, 354. Inchbrakie, George Graham of, makes a riot, 24; Patrick, the young laird, kills the Master of Rollo, 117. Infanticide and concealed pregnancy, 26. Infirmary at Edinburgh, its origin, 557. ”

“ Drugs were also sold by ignorant persons. Another document refers to the judicatories of the kingdom for an account of ‘the frequent murders committed by quacks, women, gardeners, and others.’ The king, desiring to put a check on these evils, ordered the parliament to frame an act for the erection of a College of Physicians in Edinburgh, to be composed of seven doctors and professors of medicine, who should be incorporated, and without522 whose warrant no one should practise medicine in or near the city ”

“ Hence arises the sense of the Duke of Rothes’s remark when a Covenanting prisoner proved obdurate: ‘Then e’en let him glorify God in the Grassmarket!’—the deaths of that class of victims being always signalised by psalm-singing on the scaffold. Most of the hundred persons who suffered for that cause in Edinburgh during the reigns of Charles II. and James II. breathed their last pious aspirations at this spot; but several of the most notable, including the Marquis and Earl of Argyll, were executed at the Cross. ”

“ It was opened in 1901 as a hospital for women, with a dispensary and out-patient department, admitting cases of accident and general illness as well as maternity patients. After nine years, it was decided to draft the general cases from the district to the Edinburgh Hospital for Women and Children, and The Hospice devoted all its beds to maternity cases. ”

“ As no other person would sit in the same seat, he always had a pew to himself. He regularly communicated; but here the exclusiveness of his fellow-creatures also marked itself, and the clergyman was obliged to serve a separate table for the hangman, after the rest of the congregation had retired from the church.
The last Edinburgh executioner of whom any particular notice has been taken by the public was John High, commonly called Jock Heich, who acceded to the office in the year 1784, and died so lately as 1817. ”

“ In 1584 the city Magistrates issued orders for finding a commodious place for a leper-house.26 In 1589, they passed an Act for building such an institution at Greenside, and apparently with money granted to them for that purpose, by John Robertson, a merchant in Edinburgh, and others, in pursuance of some previous vow.27 On the 23d November 1591, five leper inhabitants of the city were consigned to this hospital.28 Two of the wives of the lepers voluntarily shut themselves up in the hospital along with their diseased husbands. ”

“ In these scenes of war Florence Nightingale began her great work, which has raised nursing to the rank of a skillful profession. Private charity also extended help to the sick, and King James’s favorite goldsmith, George Heriot, secured an honorable remembrance in Edinburgh by founding the large hospital which bears his name. Neither has the State forgotten its duty to the sick, not only in providing infirmaries, almshouses, and other institutions, but certainly, in later times, in furnishing hospitals for the poor at the public expense. ”

“ The west side of the cemetery of St Giles’s was bounded by the house of the provost of the church, who, in 1469, granted part of the same to the citizens for the augmentation of the burying-ground. From the charter accompanying the grant, it appears that the provost’s house then also contained the public school of Edinburgh.
In the lower part of the churchyard [78] there was a small place of worship denominated the Chapel of Holyrood. Walter Chapman, the first printer in Edinburgh, in 1528 endowed an altar in this chapel with his tenement in the Cowgate ”

“ Many of the anecdotes of the surgeon’s life in old Edinburgh turn on this question of anatomy. Until the Anatomy Act of 1832, that science was terribly hampered by the want of subjects. The charter of 1505 provided an allowance of one body annually, which was almost ludicrously insufficient, hence body snatching became almost a necessity, perhaps among the surgeons themselves it was counted a virtue, but they dared not say it openly. On 20th May 1711, the college solemnly protested against body snatching. ”

“ When the University of Edinburgh admitted women to the examinations for degrees in medicine, Dr. Inglis graduated M.B., C.M. in 1899. From that date onwards her practice, her political and suffrage work, and the founding of the Hospice in the High Street of Edinburgh, as a nursing home and maternity centre staffed by medical women, occupied a life which grew and strengthened amid so many and varied experiences. ”

“ The scientific ardour which from an early period of its history had characterised the medical faculty in Scotland, and particularly in Edinburgh, may be said to have created the necessity for resurrectionists or body-snatchers, and the fact that the research so needful to the happiness and comfort of humanity was being conducted under such unfortunate auspices, and debasing restrictions, gradually awoke the community to a sense of what they owed to themselves and to those whose ultimate object was the general good. ”