Hospital Life in Enlightenment Scotland: Care and Teaching at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh (Cambridge Studies in the History of Medicine)

This is a complete account of institutional life in an eighteenth-century British hospital. Using a multitude of surviving documents, the author presents an intimate view of the experiences of the sick poor and their physicians at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh between 1750 and 1800. The first voluntary institution of its kind founded outside London, the Infirmary is examined within the context of the Scottish Enlightenment and the tenets of British philanthropy. The experiences of patients and staff are followed from the admitting room to the various wards, the teaching section to the operating theatre. Admission routines, history-taking, diagnoses, and treatment are meticulously reconstructed with the help of registers, minutes of meetings, lecture notes, and nearly 100 individual clinical histories preserved in casebooks.