Edinburgh Medical School

In the 1860s the Medical School of Edinburgh University was constrained within Old College and by 1880 the new Royal Infirmary had been built on Lauriston Place. The construction of new medical buildings began and they were complete by 1884, on Teviot Row, adjacent to the Royal Infirmary. Together they housed the Medical Faculty with proper facilities teaching, scientific research and practical laboratories. The competition to design the University's new buildings was won by architect Sir Robert Rowand Anderson in 1877. After extensive European travel, he decided upon a 'Cinquecento' Italian Renaissance style which he judged more suitable than Greek or Palladian, where the interior would have been constrained by the formal exterior, or mediaeval, which would have been out of keeping with the spirit of scientific medical enquiry. The Medical School was designed around two courts, with a grand public quadrangle at the front and, for discreet delivery of cadavers to the dissection rooms, a second private yard entered from the lane behind.¹.

Go to the original images and discover the Author of these photos

Locate the item on this Google Map.

Many memorial tablets of famous medicine students and teachers of the Medical School, can be seen in the entrance passage and main courtyard of the building:

• Arthur Conan Doyle memorial plaque

• Bright, Addison and Hodgkin memorial tablet

• James Lind's memorial tablet

• James Young Simpson memorial tablet

• John Hughes Bennett's memorial tablet

• Joseph Lister memorial tablet

• Robert Sibbald memorial plaque

• Sophia Louisa Jex-Blake memorial plaque

---

+ Show module Comments

---

Footnotes

1. Retrieved and adapted from Wikipedia on July 2008.