Ms Irving's talk was entitled Bloody Knives and Body Snatchers: the Rise of Surgery in Edinburgh.
The speaker at the first meeting of the new season of Dumfries shire and Galloway Natural History and Antiquarian Society was Cat Irving, curator of the Surgeon’s Hall Museum in Edinburgh, and her talk was entitled Bloody Knives and Body Snatchers: the Rise of Surgery in Edinburgh. The meeting was also held on Zoom.
The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh was founded by Royal Charter in 1505, and is the oldest in the world. Much of its work was concerned with dissection of bodies for training physicians, but there were also public dissections, where important people were allowed to see dissections in order to appreciate the beauty of God’s creation. However, dissection was only permitted using the bodies of criminals who had been hanged, and as a result, demand for corpses greatly outstripped supply.
The last part of Cat Irving’s talk turned to 19th century improvements in surgery. Most notable was the development of anaesthetics. Ether was used initially, but it’s inflammability led to it being replaced by chloroform, which was used for the first time by Sir James Young Simpson in Edinburgh.
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