Simon Buck and Ian Stewart reflect on co-organising the two-day conference Race, Empire, and the Edinburgh Medical School held at the University of Edinburgh (UoE) in April 2024.
This conference emerged amidst a wider reckoning in recent years of the colonial pasts of universities (including those in Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester and Edinburgh) and other institutions. This now includes medical organisations such as NHS Lothian, NHS Grampian, Guy’s and St Thomas’ Foundation, the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, The Lancet and the medical schools of the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, and the University of California. In response to their historical legacies, some institutions have gone further by beginning to grapple with the question of reparations. This event thus aimed to draw the Edinburgh Medical School under the analytic lens of racial, imperial, global and reparatory history, and into conversation with the wider field of decolonial studies that has done much to critique the racist and anti-Black epistemologies, practices, and climates of European and ‘Western’ medicine.
As co-organisers, we were particularly cognizant of the institutional context within which this event took place as the Edinburgh Medical School begins its preparations to celebrate its tercentenary in 2026. Though undoubtedly significant, we decided that any forthcoming celebration of the three-hundred years of medical education and research in Edinburgh would benefit from a more critical, honest and inclusive re-telling of the Medical School’s links to race and empire from historians of medicine, medical humanities scholars, and heritage sector workers.
‘Mastering’ Disease
The first day’s morning papers looked at the entanglements of the UoE’s medical alumni and faculty in the transatlantic trafficking and enslavement of people of African descent. Michelle Faubert (University of Manitoba) explored a series of antislavery texts published by UoE-trained slaving ship’s surgeons, noting how each ‘turned their hands’ from the medical treatment of captive patients to pen and paper. Katherine Paugh (University of Oxford), taking a disease- rather than vocation-focused approach, retraced eighteenth-century debates surrounding African-associated yaws, the Scottish-linked sibbens and the great pox (or syphilis), showing how knowledge about these diseases and their racial identifications circulated across Edinburgh and the Atlantic world. Observations of African cures for yaws in the Caribbean, for example, came to the desk of the esteemed UoE professor Joseph Black.
Emphasising both the value of using legal records to historians of medicine, and the key place of medicine within colonial administrations, Linsey McMillan (University of Edinburgh) used the reports of Crown officials in nineteenth-century Trinidad and British Guiana – called the ‘Protectors of Slaves’ – to glean information on the everyday healthcare experiences of enslaved individuals. Reading against the archival grain, McMillan showed how enslaved people’s complaints to officials during the period of slavery’s ‘amelioration’ in the British Empire prior to its abolition can provide insight into experiences of ill health, disability, pregnancy, and ‘self- and community-based care practices’. Margaret White (NHS Lothian) provided a detailed exploration of how another, closely related Edinburgh-based medical institution, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh near the end of the eighteenth century held examinations and issued certificates stating that the bearer was ‘qualified to act as surgeon on board any ship in the African Trade’. As well as providing a rich historical study, White, who unlike other speakers works for the UK’s National Health Service, spoke insightfully in the Q&A on how her research might relate to issues of racism and other forms of prejudice within healthcare systems today.
Bodies of Knowledge
Several contributors spoke on a theme that has also been central to the activities of UoE’s Research and Engagement Working Group (REWG) tasked with investigating the University’s historical links to slavery, colonialism and racial thought: the UoE’s anatomical collections. Linda Burnett Anderson (University of Uppsala) and Bruce Buchan (Griffith University), sharing ideas from their forthcoming book on medicine, colonial travel, and the Scottish Enlightenment, highlighted case studies such as the colonial collections of Rev. John Walker, UoE’s Professor of Natural History, and demonstrated how student dissertations might help in tracing the pedagogic journeys of racial ideology. Rebecca Martin (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UCL and Royal Museums Greenwich) took on a towering figure in UoE histories: Professor of Anatomy, and later Principal, Sir William Turner. Drawing together previous research at the UoE, and her current work with the National Maritime Museum on the HMS Challenger expedition, Martin delicately situated Turner’s reports on the ship’s collection of human crania as part of a wider global network of race scientists, while retaining a specific sense of Turner’s contributions and standing in the field. Touching on the vast network-building involved in the collection of the human remains of non-European peoples, both papers set the scene for Mobeen Hussain (Trinity College Dublin and University of Oxford), who shared her research on Trinity College Dublin’s own anthropometric collection, established under the UoE-trained Daniel John Cunningham and enlarged through Edinburgh associates and global networks.
All three papers and the subsequent Q&A stressed the importance of institutions as framing devices when researching and teaching histories of medicine, race and empire, and highlighted the ethical stakes of such work: the restitution of human remains, and the unintentional harm which scholars or heritage workers can cause by reproducing anatomical images of racialised, enslaved, and colonised subjects.
Changing perspectives, Matthew Daniel Eddy (Durham University) discussed William Fergusson, a UoE-trained medic of African descent who, while working for the colonial government in nineteenth-century Sierre Leone, conducted research on health and climate data that ran against both the colonial and medical authorities’ prevailing racial ideas. Looking likewise at historic alumni of colour, Daisy Chamberlain (Royal Museums Greenwich) showed how James ‘Africanus’ Beale Horton, Theophilus Scholes, and Cedric Dover resisted race science. Their papers were echoed by papers over the next two days by Lea Mattia (Independent), who went into more depth on Scholes, and his arguments against early-twentieth-century race science; Diran Soumonni (University of Witwatersrand) on the (false) bifurcation of ‘tradition’ knowledge and ‘modern’ science in the careers of some nineteenth-century African graduates at Scottish universities; and Ayodele Ige (University of Glasgow) on UoE-trained Yoruba medics impacts on traditional healing practices in colonial Nigeria.
Missions and Medicine / Segregation and Study
Presentations from Tarquin Holmes (Independent) on leprosy, race and Scottish-trained medics in late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century Cape Colony and Britain, Dana Nabulsi (Harvard) on the Edinburgh Medical Missionary Society in the Levant, Ola Uduku (University of Liverpool) on West African medical students at the UoE in the 1950s, and Meng Zhang (University of Manchester) on the colonial imposition inherent in Scottish medical practitioners’ translation of medical terms in a Chinese context, collectively stressed the crucial intersections between Scottish medicine and religious missions.
Looking at colonial Zimbabwe near the turn of the twentieth century, Clement Masakure (University of the Free State) turned to Andrew Milroy Fleming (Edinburgh, M.D.) as a lens through which to view the bureaucracy of particular colony’s biomedical service. Zachary Kingdon (National Museums Scotland) complexified understandings of West African medical practice as practitioners negotiated colonial-medical power. Returning us to Edinburgh, Roger Jeffery (University of Edinburgh) charted the paths to and from India taken by female medical students in Edinburgh’s Extra-Mural School, while Henry Dee (University of Glasgow) mapped the lives of Indian students in the city up until the 1950s. Both papers documented the complex and sometimes contradictory race, class, and gender tensions surrounding the education of certain student populations.
Reparative Histories of Medicine
Two days of papers on subjects ranging from eighteenth-century slaving vessels to the twentieth-century Edinburgh’s ‘colour bar’, and to UoE alumni activity in Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, the Levant, Oceania, and the maritime spaces between them, makes it abundantly clear the Edinburgh Medical School’s much-lauded history requires a critical rethink.
The conference showcased the advantages of an institution-based framework (i.e. a single medical school) in tracing patterns of racial thinking and imperial networks over time and place. Yet, as speakers reminded us throughout the two days, the School’s history is entwined with other disciplines at Edinburgh (Natural History, Natural Philosophy, Law, Divinity), other Scottish medical institutions (Glasgow and Aberdeen’s medical schools; Edinburgh’s two Royal Colleges of Surgeons and Physicians), and those in London, Ireland, Europe and across the European powers’ empires. As a prominent place of learning over the last three hundred years, and one with its own distinctive features, the Edinburgh Medical School acted neither alone nor entirely uniquely.
The conference shone when participants committed to African, Asian and Indigenous experiences, voices and health-related practices not as tokenistic gestures but as clear examples of non-European peoples’ complex negotiation of, and contributions and resistance to, ‘Western’ medical authority and power.
Beside some notable exceptions, most papers focused on alumni rather than faculty. Proceedings thus omitted more than cursory mentions of some more well-known figures historic professors (the Monros, William Cullen etc.). Perhaps indicative of recent trends to re-assess the peripheries of empire as key sites in the development of European science, this imbalance may also reflect a popular understanding of the School’s international influence with former students establishing medical schools in North America and Australia. In any case, there is clearly more research to be done on race, empire and UoE’s educators rather than those they educated.
A roundtable entitled ‘Reparative Histories of Medicine and the Edinburgh Medical School’s Tercentenary, 2026’, held on the conference’s second day, featured Anne-Marie Coriat (Registrar, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine), Gwenetta Curry (Usher Institute, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine), Tommy Curry (REWG), and Ebo Anyebe (UoE medical student and co-founder of the African Caribbean Medical Society), and was chaired by Edwin Jesudason (NHS Lothian). Gwenetta Curry, who teaches medical students, discussed how institutions misconstrue the language of ‘repair’ as a simplistic ‘fix’ that ends up reinforcing a sense of denial about present-day racism in healthcare, and the existence of racial health inequalities across countless health metrics. Tommy Curry spoke of the corruptive historic role of medicine in the process of dehumanisation that sits at the heart of racial ideology. Anyebe expressed her sense of disappointment and frustration at the lack of teaching on her medical degree regarding racial and colonial legacies. It was not that the ‘wrong thing’ was being taught, Anyebe explained, but rather that ‘nothing is being done’. Responding to Anyebe’s feeling of ‘alienation’ towards the curriculum and representing the Medical School’s executive, Coriat conceded, with a twist on the Hippocratic oath, that ‘by doing nothing we are doing harm’. An ongoing university-wide curriculum review and a series of reflective workshops organised for the ‘Edinburgh Medical School 300’ (tercentenary) programme were among the potentially transformative measures Coriat hoped would improve the experiences of African and Caribbean students like Anyebe. Turning attention to the role of executive leadership by way of a sports metaphor, Jesudason asked whether the only way to improve the School’s antiracist agenda would be, ‘study the fouler, not only the fouled’.
We’re pleased that the College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine has welcomed such critical conversations, and we hope that this conference has opened up a space for a cooperative approach to the tercentenary. Rather than appeal to the Medical School’s history solely to extol the same old myths (albeit repackaged in the marketing speak of the twenty-first-century university), events like this open up a more just, accurate, diverse, reparative, and perhaps even healing discussion of the past, present and future of medicine in Edinburgh.
This conference was supported by the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (UoE), the Society for the Social History of Medicine, the History of Science, Medicine, and Technology Research Group (UoE), the Research and Engagement Working Group (UoE), the Edinburgh Centre for Global History, Edinburgh Health and Medical Humanities Network, and the Centre for Research Collections (UoE).
About the Authors
Simon Buck is an historian and medical humanities scholar with interests in the US South, histories of medicine and music, and the impacts of slavery-derived wealth on British institutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His current research focusses on the University of Edinburgh’s historical links to slavery.
Ian Stewart is an historian of Britain and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, primarily working on ideas of nation, race and language in the decades around the French Revolution. His current research focuses on the University of Edinburgh and the East India Company (c.1765-c.1833).
