Physicians' Gallery
Episodes
Ep.3 - Past & Present - Rheumatology
22 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Casenotes Past & Present is a Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh podcast. In this fortnight’s episode we explore the past and present of rheu...
Ep.2 - Past & Present - Palliative Care
08 Jul 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Casenotes Past & Present is a Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh podcast. In this episode we delve into the history of palliative care, startin...
Ep.1 - Past & Present - Diabetes
24 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Casenotes Past & Present is a Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh podcast. In this episode we uncover the history of diabetes and its treatment,...
Ep.85 - Grief And The Pandemic
10 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this talk Prof Michael Cholbi explores the medical and emotional understanding of grief in times of global pandemic. Many experts have started to ...
Ep.84 - The Starving Artist
27 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Casenotes Glasgow-based artist Ally Zlatar explores her works which contain examinations of the un-well body, including her own exp...
Ep.83 - Early Modern Scottish Recipe Books
13 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of Casenotes Charlotte Holmes uncovers the history of medical recipes and the historical relationship between food and medicine. This ...
Ep.82 - Physicians, Plants And Poisons
29 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This lecture explores botany and medicine in Edinburgh since 16th century, uncovering stories of doctors growing medicinal plants in dangerous times, ...
Ep.81 - Invention Of The Emotions
15 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The Edinburgh physician and Professor of Moral Philosophy, Dr Thomas Brown (1778-1820), is little known today, and his grave lies in disrepair. In his...
Ep.80 - London's Science Museum - Collecting COVID For The Future
01 Apr 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Curators of the history of medicine are now facing one of the greatest challenges of their careers – how to collect and preserve objects that convey...
Ep.79 - Patient art at the Royal Edinburgh Hospital
18 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this lecture Dr Maureen Park uses the archive of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital to examine the reasons why, and the extent to which, drawing was prom...
Ep.78 - The History Of Clinical Trials And James Lind
04 Mar 2022
Contributed by Lukas
What exactly is the placebo effect? How does it work? How do doctors decide whether a treatment is actually effective? What is ‘good’ medicine and...
Ep.77 - Cultural Biography Of Prostate
18 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
We are all suffering an acute case of prostrate angst. Men worry about their own prostates and those of others close to them; women worry about the pr...
Ep.76 - Counterfeiting the Loss of Virginity
04 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In this talk, Dr Stephanie Allen examines an element of female sexual fraud; counterfeit maidenheads. She discusses the methods authors imagined women...
Ep.75 - Intensive Care and the Pandemic
21 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In conversation with Dr Jivitesh Vashisht (IASH, Edinburgh), Gavin Francis discusses his experiences in Edinburgh and the islands of Orkney. When the ...
Ep.74 - Caring For The Poor In The Highlands
07 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
In 1845 the new Scottish Poor Law established a funded medical service for the registered poor. By 1852 the Physicians’ Enquiry concluded that medic...
Ep.73 - Medical Recipes And Overindulgence
24 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Charlotte Holmes (University of Edinburgh) examines the history of early recipe books and their use to treat a wide range of complaints, including fes...
Ep.72 - Watercolour, woodcut and wax Medical illustration around 1900
10 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Anatomy and surgery have strong extra-textual elements. The development and transmission of these crafts rely heavily on visual communication in a ran...
Ep.71 - Alienation and Beauty in Medical Photography
26 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When the first medical photographs were taken in 1840, the camera was presented as a revolution to medical education, psychiatry and pathology. Gradua...
Ep.70 - Ambrose Parry - The Art Of Dying And The History Of Chloroform
12 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Join authors Ambrose Parry (Dr Marisa Haetzman & Chris Brookmyre) to discuss their new historical novel of medicine & murder, The Art of Dying. Set in...
Ep.69 - Current Approaches To Tuberculosis Treatment
29 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Tuberculosis: a contagious, infectious disease that has been a challenge over much of human history. In this talk, Dr Derek Sloan, who has worked in b...
Ep.68 - The Rise and Fall of the Liverpool Care Pathway
15 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This paper is a historical study and analysis of the events surrounding the emergence of the Liverpool Care Pathway (LCP), an integrated care pathway ...
Ep.67 - Saving the Nearly-Drowned and Humane Societies
01 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Humane societies, charities whose focus was the recovery of nearly-drowned persons, sprang up throughout the transatlantic world in the late-eighteent...
Ep.66 - Syphilis and Suspect Medical Practitioners in Nuremberg, 1495–1560
17 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1495 a new pandemic swept through Europe. Those infected suffered from a range of terrible symptoms, from eruptions of boils and pustules to extrem...
Ep.65 - The Mütter Research Institute
03 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Can old specimens contain new information? Mütter Museum Curator, Anna Dhody will talk about the ways scientists are looking to the past to improve ...
Ep.64 - Remedies for poison in the 1500s
20 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In renaissance Europe the great feared poisoning - as they had since antiquity - and relied on universal remedies against all poisons. A discussion of...
Ep.63 - Men's Sexual Health In Early Modern England
06 Aug 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How did men cope with sexual health issues in early modern England? How did they feel when their bodies failed them? This talk investigates how sexua...
Ep.62 - History of the Casualty Department
23 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This talk explores how and why the casualty department was transformed over the course of the 20th century, going from a chaotic, under-staffed and un...
Ep.61 - Edinburgh's Forgotten Contribution To Antivenoms
09 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The 1890s were a critical decade in the novel science of immunology. Emerging developments in bacteriology and tropical medicine revealed numerous mic...
Ep.60 - Historical Approaches to Diabetes Treatment
25 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
During the last 100 years, the treatment of diabetes mellitus in Britain underwent radical transformation. One of the most striking features of twenti...
Ep.59 - Vesalius And The Canon Of The Human Body
11 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Andreas Vesalius’ De humani corporis fabrica (1543) is a landmark publication in the history of medicine, well known for its illustrations. Yet, the...
Ep.58 - Fear and Risk in Britain’s Post-War Fluoride Debate
28 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
After WWII, British doctors and politicians thought that they could import the perfect solution for dental illness: drinking water fluoridation. But t...
Ep.57 - Understanding And Managing Syphilis
14 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1600s Peter Sartorius, a citizen and surgeon of Strasbourg, compared syphilis to ‘an angry dog’, which viciously threatened communities. Th...
Ep.56 - Alexander Morison and The Physiognomy of Mental Diseases
30 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this talk Dr Allan Beveridge discusses the nineteenth centry Scottish pioneer of psychiatric medicine Sir Alexander Morison and the collection of i...
Ep.55 - Public health in Britain, 1948-2010
16 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The place of the public within public health is a critical issue for contemporary public health in Britain. Whether it involves appealing to individua...
Ep.54 - William Orpen: looking at bodies in medicine and art
02 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
William Orpen (1878-1931) produced numerous pictures of doctors and artists. Orpen suggests that in medical diagnostics, as in the production and eval...
Ep.53 - Military Public Health from the Crimea to World War One
19 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The military success of a fighting force depends in large part on the availability of fit, healthy troops, but the austere conditions of war often con...
Ep.52 - Forensic Psychiatry From Plato to the Modern ‘Insanity’ Defence
05 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Scotland’s enlightenment a bride stabs her husband on their wedding night; a nobleman kills his brother; a veteran kills his devoted wife – who...
Ep.51 - Current Approaches to Diabetes Treatment
19 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
During the last 100 years, the treatment of diabetes mellitus in Britain underwent radical transformation. One of the most striking features of twenti...
Ep.50 - The Theatre of Anatomy
05 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Between the French Revolution and WWI, Europe and America witnessed a golden age of medical image-making. The first generation of mass-market anatomic...
Ep.49 - Women In White, Eccentric Heirs, Inconvenient People
22 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The 1800s saw a series of scandals concerning individuals being locked away in lunatic asylums – the victims of unscrupulous persons who wanted to b...
Ep.48 - The Emergence Of The Forensic Team
08 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Burney uses the notorious case of the serial murderer John Christie (1953) to explore the contours of English homicide investigation at mid-century...
Ep.47 - Gendering Artificial Anatomies: Practices and Materials
25 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Since the early modern period, artists and anatomists have worked towards perfection; the perfection of anatomical models in three dimensions. But how...
Ep.46 - The Changing Management of Abdominal Wounds During the Great War
11 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In 1914, abdominal wounds were managed expectantly, without surgical intervention, and the majority of patients died. By 1915, early operative treatme...
Ep.45 - Syphilitic Noses In 1700s British Literature And Art
27 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
“For by the word Nose, throughout all this long chapter of noses, and in every other part of my work, where the word Nose occurs,- - I declare, by t...
Ep.44 - Doctors’ Fight Against the Plague in Early Modern Europe
13 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The plague was one of early modern Europe’s most deadly and feared diseases. At the forefront of developing public health campaigns in the face of e...
Ep.43 - Syphilis In The 21st Century
30 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Tracey Jolliffe discusses the science of syphilis in the 21st century. She explores the use of antibiotics to treat this disease and the health proble...
Ep.42 - An Urge to Correct: Andreas Vesalius Revised
16 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The De humani corporis fabrica of Andreas Vesalius (1514-1564) is the most famous of all books on anatomy. Its artistic brilliance and its insistence ...
Ep.41 - Fragments from an Eighteenth-Century Family Scandal
02 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Lisa Smith researches gender, health and the household in early modern England and France. In this talk, she discusses the tumultuous relationships of...
Ep.40 - Burke, Now and Then
18 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Think you’ve heard all there is to know about Burke and Hare, Edinburgh’s infamous body-snatchers? Janet Philp knows more. Join her as she explore...
Ep.39 - Prosthetics: From Maker to User
04 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Edinburgh has a strong history in prosthetics research and development. Over the past 40 years, National Museums Scotland has established a world clas...
Ep.38 - Coping With Plague - Public Health And Epidemics
21 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Italy, though best known for the birth of the Renaissance, is also renowned for the precocious development of its public health policies in the 16th c...
Ep.37 - Substance Abuse: Past and Present
07 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This talk considers the changing public perception of drugs such as cannabis and the factors which have influenced its longevity, including immigratio...
Ep.36 - Louis Wain - Animals and Madness
24 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Louis Wain was a relatively well known British illustrator working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly known for his depictions of...
Ep.35 - Looking To The Past To Improve Our Future
10 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Can old specimens contain new information? Mütter Museum Curator, Anna Dhody will talk about the ways scientists are looking to the past to improve ...
Ep.34 - William Harvey and the Discovery of Circulation
26 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Born into a middle-class family in 1578, William Harvey rose to fame as one of Britain’s foremost anatomists, Harvey’s discovery of the circulatio...
Ep.33 - The Uses of Plants in Medicine in Ancient Greece and Rome
14 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Plants have always played a prominent role in the field of medicine since the first recorded examples. From Dioscorides, a Greek physician and botanis...
Ep.32 - Medical Tourism in Victorian Edinburgh
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This talk focuses on an under-represented area of medical history: the depiction of places of medicine in 19th-century travel guides. Across a huge ra...
Ep.31 - John Dee: Magic, Medicine And The Tudor World
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
John Dee (1527–1609) was one of the most intriguing figures in Tudor Britain. The model of a Renaissance man, he harboured interests in astrology, a...
Ep.30 - Knowing and Selling Exotic Drugs in Paris c.1700
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Many exotic plant materials would become household words for the well-to-do during the decades around 1700. A language of curiosity, innovation and in...
Ep.29 - Food allergy Before “allergy”
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How were bizarre reactions to food described before the coining of the term ‘allergy’ in 1906? Symptoms reminiscent of food allergy have been obse...
Ep.28 - The great influenza of 1918-20
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This talk explores popular reactions to the ‘great influenza’ of 1918-20, primarily in relation to other epidemics of the 19th and early 20th cent...
Ep.27 - The Medical Campaign Against Female Musical Education
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Although playing the piano was often seen as a thoroughly respectable pastime for young ladies, for much of the nineteenth century there was serious m...
Ep.26 - Medical Innovation in the British Empire: The Edinburgh Connection
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Speaker: Professor Mark Harrison (University of Oxford) Twitter: twitter.com/RCPEHeritage Instagram: instagram.com/physiciansgallery/ Facebook: face...
Ep.25 - 1700s Dissection and the Stoic Ideal
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Speaker: Simon Chaplin (Royal College of Surgeons of England) Twitter: twitter.com/RCPEHeritage Instagram: instagram.com/physiciansgallery/ Facebook...
Ep.24 - What Killed Burns And What Did Not?
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The poet and songwriter Robert Burns died in 1796, aged 37. There was no post-mortem and hence no tissue diagnosis. Detractors, commencing with unsign...
Ep.23 - Animals And Their Pathologists In London, 1846 - 1900
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This talk uses the records of the Pathological Society of London, a key institution for the advancement of pathology, to reveal the place and purpose ...
Ep.22 - After Burke And Hare: Procuring Corpses To Dissect In Scotland
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Grave-robbing and the Burke and Hare murders have become anatomy’s enduring reference points, but during the nineteenth century most bodies were ste...
Ep.21 - The Age of Stress: Myth or Reality?
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Since the late nineteenth century, stress has emerged as a popular means of explaining the onset of both physical and psychological disorders. Yet the...
Ep.20 - The Doctor-Patient Relationship In Art From Ancient Greece To The Present Day
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The doctor-patient relationship has changed considerably over the centuries. There have often been cyclical changes: diagnostic improvements leading t...
Ep.19 - The Evolution Of Controlled Trials
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Contrary to widely believed assertions, the concept of unbiased creation of treatment comparison groups in clinical trials was not ‘a seminal statis...
Ep.18 - Epidemiology and the Science of Detection, 1890-1960
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This talk looks at how forensic and investigative techniques were used to study epidemics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Speaker: Profess...
Ep.17 - Benjamin Rush, the Yellow Fever, and the Rise of Physician Autobiography
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This talk examines the links between Benjamin Rush’s autobiography ‘Travels through Life’ and his protracted feud with the English journalist, p...
Ep.16 - Forensic Science In The Era Of Burke And Hare
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this talk a CSI-style approach is taken to the discussion of the notorious murders carried out by Burke and Hare, who supplied bodies for dissectio...
Ep.15 - Fashionable Stomach Complaints And The Mind In Georgian Britain
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The nerves have been the principal focus of ‘fashionable disease’ studies, but the stomach arguably has an equal claim for consideration. The stom...
Ep.14 - Irish Migration, Institutionalisation and Mental Illness in 1800s England
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This talk explores the migratory patterns of Irish patients into and through the Lancashire asylum system in the later 19th century. Asylum medical su...
Ep.13 - How Ideas about Psychiatric Trauma Evolved in the Two World Wars
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The two World Wars intensified the study of the psychological effects of combat for both soldiers and civilians. This talk explores how health-care pr...
Ep.12 - George III And The Porphyria Myth
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Considerable doubt has been cast on the claim that King George III suffered from acute porphyria. The alternate diagnosis of recurrent acute mania is ...
Ep.11 - Patients’ Letters From The Royal Edinburgh Asylum
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Royal Edinburgh Asylum is fortunate in having a very rich archive of its history, including an extensive collection of patient accounts of their m...
Ep.10 - The Relationship Between Madness, Psychiatry And Gender
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This talk explores the relationship between madness, psychiatry and gender over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, using the Royal Edinburgh Asyl...
Ep.9 - Victorian Skin
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The body brings together a number of vexing questions: it is ‘animal’ yet ‘human’; ‘natural’ yet the ultimate object of cultural inscripti...
Ep.8 - Thomas Mann’s Fictional Characters and Their Quest for the Patient Narrative
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the majority of his novels, short stories, and essays, in his diaries and personal letters, that is throughout his life and work, Thomas Mann (1875...
Ep.7 - Pain and the Politics of Sympathy
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Bodily suffering is central to the experience of being human, yet we still know remarkably little about how people actually experienced pain in the pa...
Ep.6 - The Strange History Of Aristotle's Masterpiece
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Aristotle's Masterpiece is neither a masterpiece nor by Aristotle. It was the best-selling popular book about reproduction from its first publication ...
Ep.5 - The Bloody Fields Of Waterloo
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This talk explores the various stages of the Battle of Waterloo (1815), highlighting particular medical issues of the campaign. The Army Medical Depar...
Ep.4 - Food, Fear And Public Health In Victorian And Edwardian Britain
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This talk combines history of science, food and culture and applies these to Anglo-German relations and perceptions by examining how between 1850 and ...
Ep.3 - Thomas Sprat And The Later History Of The Plague Of Athens
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This talk examines responses to Thucydides’ narrative of the plague of Athens. While in recent years Thucydides has sometimes been praised for his ...
Ep.2 - The Annotated Medical And Physical Observations of John Pringle
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Sir John Pringle was born in 1707. He studied medicine at the universities of Edinburgh and Leiden. During the War of the Austrian Succession, Pringle...
Ep.1 - The History of Forensic Anthropology
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Forensic anthropology has a relatively long history in the USA but is a more recent addition in the UK. However, just a shallow scratch below the surf...
Ep.0 - Introduction
10 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This fortnightly podcast presents stories from the history of medicine. We examines some of the different ways that doctors have thought about healt...