Physicians' Gallery Blog

Each recipe roughly followed the same order: purpose, ingredients and how to make the medicine, then how to use it and for how long. They were written in prose, with no clear delineation between ingredients and methods. As noted in Part 1, full transcription became necessary to accurately summarise them, but each recipe had something valuable to add to the picture.

Looking at this book, no one would guess its contents.

The brown leather cover shows its age through signs of use but the spine, cracked in places, holds strong; yet the cover is bland, displaying no title, no author. By turning the cover, the mystery grows. The reader is greeted by a multitude of indecipherable lines, which comes together to form nearly sixty handwritten medicinal recipes. 

Addiction is interwoven with colonialism. Enslaved people in the United States produced the tobacco, sugar and coffee which enabled European habits. Across Asia, the British East India Company was given unprecedented powers by the British government to force their will on entire nations – including the right to print money, run private armies and even declare war. 

Addiction arrived in waves. At first doctors prescribed alcohol and opium to their patients. In the early 1800s, when the dangers of pure opium became too obvious to ignore, doctors started to replace it with a new wonder-drug. This drug was morphine – an opium derivative. When morphine itself proved addictive, doctors began to substitute another opioid – heroin.
 

What we mean by addiction is ever changing. In 1600s Britain, reading books was seen as addictive. You could also be addicted to astrology or to writing poetry. In the 1700s many doctors were concerned about the addictive properties of coffee and tea, while opium and cocaine could be bought over the counter without a prescription.

It’s not often these days that we make a truly astonishing discovery about the history of our College, but in late June 2025, researchers in the Heritage team made such a discovery. For as long as anyone can remember, Dr Ella Pringle has been recognised as the first female Fellow of the RCPE. A specialist in maternity and child health in Edinburgh, she passed the MRCP Edinburgh in 1925 and was elected a Fellow on the 5th February 1929. The astonishing discovery made by the researchers in the Heritage team was that a Dr Justina Wilson was elected a Fellow of the College on the 1st May 1928!

Prohibition was enacted into law in Canada, Norway, Finland and the United States. Despite strong lobbying, no similar legislation was passed in Britain. A series of mostly unsuccessful laws were passed in Britain in the late 1800s with titles like the ‘Habitual Drunkards Act’ and the ‘Inebriates Act’. 

Queer ecology is an area of study that focuses on the ways that the ecological world is queer. The study affirms that queerness is a part of the natural world, and that plants and animals don’t always conform to societal norms and binaries. 

Caring for animals, treating them and curing them, has been essential to human survival for thousands of years. Human reliance on animals for food, load-bearing work and transportation meant that animal wellbeing has always been key to human wellbeing.

Animals were studied in the ancient world, most famously by Aristotle who classified fauna according to scala naturae – the idea that the natural world could be arranged on a scale like the rungs of the ladder, each organism in its rightful place according to its degree of ‘perfection’.

Animals appear everywhere in human societies, both in a physical sense and as cultural metaphors and myths. When the first animals were domesticated, they stopped being just the predators...

Who Was Sophia Jex-Blake? Dr Sophia Jex-Blake (1840 – 1912) was a trailblazer. She fought hard for women’s rights and was a pioneer of social change from within the...