Surgeons' Hall, Edinburgh

Surgeons' Hall is the headquarters of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, and this building also contains its medical museum, library, and archive. The structure before you was designed by William Henry Playfair and completed in 1832; it is a category A listed building. Look at the substantial stone exterior: it gives this working college a distinctly monumental presence.

The museum is Scotland’s major medical museum and a collection of national significance. Its story reaches back to 1699, when the surgeons began gathering natural and artificial curiosities. The collection later grew through major holdings assembled by John Barclay and Charles Bell.

Bell’s collection had an extraordinary journey: after building a major anatomical and pathological museum in London, he sold it to the Edinburgh college in 1825 for £3000. It arrived in Edinburgh under Robert Knox’s supervision and became the core of the museum housed here when Playfair’s building opened in 1832. The museum reopened in September 2015 after an eighteen-month redevelopment, with space to display twice as many items. What you see is therefore both an active surgical institution and the home of a medical collection shaped over centuries.