Surgeons’ Hall Museum and the University of Edinburgh have collaborated on a major new exhibition examining the city’s 300-year history of medicine and anatomical teaching.
Edinburgh: City of Medicine, 300 Years of Edinburgh Medical School opens at Surgeons' Hall Museum on Friday 3 April 2026 and will run until Easter 2027.
The exhibition invites visitors to reflect on who was being dissected for teaching in the 18th and 19th centuries, whose remains were taken, who was excluded from formal medical training and practice and how that history continues to shape medicine today.
Visitors will encounter objects including a Shetland blood horn and a cast of William Burke’s brain.
The University is loaning more than 20 objects from its Anatomy collection and University Archives, many of which have not been displayed in public before.
Historical items on display include artefacts from several innovators of medicine, including Joseph Lister, James Young Simpson and James Syme.
Also on display are ceremonial gifts given to the University by some of the communities who have recently had ancestral remains repatriated to them.
Shaping medicine
Founded in 1726, Edinburgh Medical School grew during the Scottish Enlightenment and played a central role in shaping modern approaches to medical education.
While its influence has been significant, historic practices in medicine also raise difficult questions about how progress was achieved.
The exhibition will investigate how the comparative study of human anatomy across races and nations during the colonial era drove significant expansion of Edinburgh’s anatomical collections, with human remains gathered from across the world.
It will also spark conversations on how the pressures of anatomical teaching created different forms of exploitation closer to home.
Visitors will also be able to find out more about those excluded from formal medical education and practice, including a group of women who have become to be known as the Edinburgh Seven.
The group, which included pioneering figures such as Sophia Jex-Blake and Edith Pechey, were the first women to matriculate as undergraduates at any British university in 1869, but were ultimately prevented from graduating.
Human anatomy
Elsewhere, the importance of human bodies to medical teaching and changes to ethical frameworks around body donation will also be explored.
Telling the story of today’s voluntary donors, Edinburgh’s “silent teachers” of anatomy, items on display will include contemporary examples of patient-led donation, including a piece of surgical mesh donated by a patient for teaching and interpretation.
On display for the first time will be a piece of skin believed to have come from William Burke, on loan from the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum.
Burke was hanged after he and his accomplice, William Hare, carried out at least 16 murders in the 1820s and sold the bodies on for use in anatomy teaching.
The murders exposed a medical culture in which consent was neither sought nor required.
Important milestone
The exhibition forms part of a year-long programme of events to mark three centuries of medicine at the University of Edinburgh.
Events, exhibitions and experiences will explore the Edinburgh’s history in shaping modern medicine, highlight the Medical School’s community and set the stage for future innovations in medical education and healthcare.