We enjoyed having Beth with us for 10 days, and we are sorry to see her go. The good news is she made it home safely.
The first order of business was to return our rental car as we would not need it in Edinburgh for the next two days. Having accomplished that we took the tram back to the Royal Mile where we started our sightseeing with a hop-on hop-off bus tour. (We find these tours useful for getting a sense of the city and planning what to see and do.) We opted for the bus with the live tour guide who was very interesting and gave us some good tips on things we missed yesterday. (An interesting bit of trivia was that the Royal Mile is longer than 1 mile. It’s what our tour guide calls a “Scottish mile”; or what we might call a “country mile”.)
A chimneysweep’s paradise
Edinburgh Castle
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Wayne’s interest in the Surgeons’ Hall Museum was piqued by Beth’s and Peggy’s discussion, last night so that was the next stop on our tour. Royal College of Surgeons was established in 1505. The Surgeons’ Hall Museum first opened in 1697. Since it was not large enough to exhibit John Barclay’s and Sir Charles Bell’s collections, a new museum opened in 1832. The displays reminded us of what an amazing machine the human body truly is. We are also grateful for the advances in medicine over the years especially dentistry.
The exhibits started off with information about human comparative anatomy. It was amazing back in the 1600s amount of information the surgeons and anatomy scholars could get it just from studying other animals which was necessitated due to the difficulty of getting human cadavers. However, there were grave robbers who provided human cadavers to medical students for a substantial fee. In fact, for a while, grave robbing became a small cottage industry. (Another bit of trivia: in Scotland, it was a crime to steal a cadaver with its clothes, but if you left the clothing behind, it was not a crime. This was because the crime consisted of stealing someone else’s property, and the clothes were the property of the dead person, but the dead person was not property. There was also the case of two enterprising men, Burke and Hare, who operated a boarding house and would kill their borders (in such a way that you couldn’t identify the cause of death as murder) and sell the bodies to the medical students. When they were finally caught, Hare turned evidence against Burke and went free while Burke was hanged.
The museum is replete with numerous specimens of every conceivable part of the human anatomy, many of which show signs of disease or injury1. (When you see all the things that can go wrong with the human body, it makes you wonder how we manage to survive.) The Museum has a wonderful display of the history and advances in medicine and dentistry from Hippocrates through current treatment modalities. There is also an excellent exhibit on anesthesia and pain medicine and an exhibit on Joseph Lister and the development of antiseptic practices to prevent infection. Finally, there was an interesting exhibit about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who had attended Edinburgh Medical School from 1876 to 1881. His character, Sherlock Holmes was based in part on his forensic professor, Joseph Bell.
Following our tour of the Surgeons’ Hall Museum, we made arrangements for a ghost and ghouls underground tour and then went in search of food. We found a Burgers and Brew place that had the best barbecue ribs. After that, we went back to our apartment hotel and caught up on some things before time for our 8 p.m. tour.
It was dark when the ghost tour started. Our tour guide was a marvelous story teller and was very much in character wearing a black cape. He started off demonstrations of punishments for various crimes back in the 18th century, using volunteers from the group to “demonstrate” some of the punishments from whipping to hanging. Then we went deep underground through crypts and passage ways. In one crypt a small boy named Jack, who had dropped a toy down a hole, had gone after it, lost his way and ultimately died there. It is said that his is a very friendly ghost and we might feel a cold sensation or a little person trying to hold our hand. Alas, no one reported hearing or sensing any apparitions the night of our tour. The tour ended with libations in a cellar pub where our guide regaled us with more stories,
The ghost tour ended a little after 10 PM and we walked back to our apartment (about a mile). Fortunately, we weren’t accompanied by any spirits or other apparitions and we arrived safe and sound.
1 Unfortunately, photos are not allowed in the museum, so we will have none to post.
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