A Ticket to Learn

These small cards raise lots of questions about the lives of the students, teachers and parallel institutions that helped make Edinburgh one of the world's great centres of medical education.

Our podcast discusses these cards, allowing us a glimpse into what it was like to be a medical student at Edinburgh in a wonderfully unglamorous era.

The display featuring these items closes on 30 October 2026.

A ticket to the classroom

In the 19th century, medical students in Edinburgh purchased a literal ticket to enter their class. 

These cards noted the subject being taught, the name of the lecturer and the student's own details, providing a record of the courses they attended.

The cards held in our collections span several decades. They cover teaching at a range of Edinburgh institutions and feature the names of some of the most important figures in the history of Scottish medicine, including podcast favourites such as James Young Simpson, Joseph Lister and Robert Knox.

For a modern audience, a ticket is easy to think of as something that gets you through a door, but these cards suggest something richer. They advertise the authority of the lecturer, the prestige of the institution and can indicate the popularity of the subject. 

Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of class tickets is that they can help us reconstruct a medical student's education. A card tells us that a student attended a particular class, but several cards could indicate a full curriculum. 

The absence of a card could encourage us to look elsewhere to find a student’s classroom. In Edinburgh’s case, this often takes us to Paris or the continent - known for encouraging their students to go further afield and return to graduate.

The Edinburgh Medical School

Edinburgh's reputation as a centre of medical education developed rapidly during the eighteenth century. Acknowledging that medical education was not always the neatly structured programme we recognise today, this week’s podcast episode considers how Edinburgh was a preferred education centre for this exact reason.

The University of Edinburgh's Faculty of Medicine was founded in 1726, and within decades the city had become internationally renowned for medical teaching. It rivalled teaching models established by schools such as Leiden, and was part of an attempt to boost both the local economy and city-wide welfare by attracting overseas students to study in Scotland, rather than forcing Scots to be trained and graduate entirely elsewhere.

The Edinburgh Medical School became one of the most prestigious contemporary centres for medical education in the world, attracting students from far beyond Scotland. Edinburgh encompassed a flexible curriculum in comparison to contemporary institutions.