Archives

A two year project by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (RCPE), has successfully listed almost 30,000 records in an online catalogue, enabling academics and the public to access a range of fascinating and rare documents from the RCPE’s collection.  These invaluable materials date back to the 17^th Century when the College was established and demonstrate the College leading the way in providing medical services, conducting research and regulating the profession.

The online catalogue includes:

This is a page from a photograph album created by Mary Chapman, a nurse at Royaumont hospital during the First World War. Royaumont was operated by the Scottish Women’s Hospitals from January 1915 to March 1919 at the abbey near Asnières, 30km north of Paris.

This page shows some of the French colonial soldiers from North Africa and the Middle East. There are also three photographs that include Chapman herself with various colleagues.

Over the past few months we have been cataloguing our collection of photographs of the College, these have included photographs of royal visits, College ceremonies and the RCPE’s buildings on Queen Street, dating from the late nineteenth century to today. Especially interesting are the collections dating from before 1950; these include portrait photographs of the College’s presidents from 1895 onwards, in addition to photographs of other notable medical figures such as Robert Knox (1791-1862).

This project, carried out in collaboration with the University of Glasgow, has created an online digital edition of the medical correspondence of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790).

Letters in our archive show that it's been at least 400 years since doctors began discussing the harmful effects of smoking, particularly on young people.  One doctor in the early seventeenth century having gone so far as to write proposing that tobacco should be renamed as “Youths-bane”, given its adverse health effects.

Part of the role of the College has always been to regulate the medical profession, to discipline minor infractions and work to keep out the unscrupulous and unethical – by fining them, removing their College membership, and even pursuing them through the courts at our own expense.  Occasionally the College would employ our own private detectives to hunt down particularly difficult individuals.

As part of the cataloguing of our archive collections, and in commemoration of the centenary of the First World War,  the College has created an online searchable database of the Scottish Medical Service Emergency Committee.

The Committee was established on 12 August 1914 “for the purposes of assisting to meet the immediate difficulties in regard to medical practice among the civil population which have arisen” and was based within the College at 9 Queen Street, Edinburgh.

This drawing, from the mid 19^th century, comes from a volume titled ‘A Collection of Original drawings by Roshard, A Johnson, Gow etc made to illustrate the works of Sir Alexander Morison on Mental Diseases’. The original illustration is housed in our collections.

Joseph Bell is probably best known as the model for Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle worked as Bell’s clerk at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, where he witnessed his use of close observation in making a diagnosis. Conan Doyle went on to base Holmes’ deductive powers on the observational skills displayed by Bell. It was a source of pride to him that he had inspired the character.