This two-day international conference (online and in-person) brings together historians, heritage professionals and other researchers whose research investigates the Edinburgh Medical School’s history from the perspectives of race and empire, or examines histories of race, empire, and medicine through case studies involving historic Edinburgh professors, students, and alumni. The conference aims to draw the Edinburgh Medical School under the analytic lens of racial, imperial, and global 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 ‘Western’ medicine. A full programme is available here (opens as PDF).

In 1976, the Royal Scottish Museum and the Scottish Society of the History of Medicine held a symposium and exhibition to commemorate the Edinburgh Medical School’s 250th anniversary. The published symposium proceedings, if an important contribution to Edinburgh Medical School historiography, were nonetheless celebratory in tone and narrowly focused; contributors, for example, said very little about the Medical School’s historical connections to enslavement, colonialism, or racial science, while its ‘global’ connections were limited to its ‘positive’ influence on North American medical schools.

In 2026, the Edinburgh Medical School will celebrate its tercentenary. Inevitably, the University of Edinburgh will take the opportunity of the anniversary to celebrate an undoubtedly significant three-hundred years of medical education and research. It can be expected that the tercentenary will involve a packed programme highlighting and venerating the careers of historic Edinburgh staff and alumni—its great doctors and medical ‘worthies’—which, in all likelihood, will reproduce the same ‘heroic’ narratives of medicine adopted fifty years earlier.

With only two years left to plan and set the tone for such events, now is an important moment for historians of medicine, medical humanities scholars, and heritage sector workers to begin to take a leading role in shaping how the Edinburgh Medical School’s history is re-told more critically, honestly, and inclusively.

Registration to attend either in-person or online is free and should be done on Eventbrite. Free lunch and refreshments will be available on both days.

The conference is co-organised by Drs Simon Buck and Ian Stewart (IASH) and kindly supported by the Susan Manning Workshop Fund from the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (UoE); the Research and Engagement Working Group (Decolonised Transformations, UoE); the History of Science, Medicine and Technology Research Group (UoE); and the Society for the Social History of Medicine. It is co-hosted by the Edinburgh Centre for Global History and the Edinburgh Health and Medical Humanities Network.