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  • 'A Famous and Flourishing Society': the History of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh 1505-2005
  • Roger L. Emerson
'A Famous and Flourishing Society': the History of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh 1505-2005. By Helen M. Dingwall. Pp.xxiii, 336. ISBN 0 7486 1567 9. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2005. £25.

This well-illustrated, silver-edged, book printed on double weight paper is a handsome contribution to the historical literature on Scottish medicine. The project was initiated by the Royal College which also copyrighted the book. It is thus something of a 'company history' and was presumably published with some aid from its over 400 subscribers – a lot until one realizes that the roll of Members and Fellows of the College now tops 17,000. It is meant to be a celebratory volume and as such gives a rather glossy view of the corporation from the forewords by the Patron, HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and the President, to its conclusion, which looks to its continued flourishing despite an uncertain future in which its roles are in doubt and its needed continuance is even more unclear. This volume is particularly welcome since the RCSE has not had as much attention as has been given to the teachers and students at the University of Edinburgh or to the practitioners across town belonging to the Royal College of Physicians where there are more useful archival sources and a more welcoming environment for researchers. It will not completely replace the earlier and incomplete work by Mr C. H. Creswell, The Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh (1926) but it generally contains on any topic most of what he wrote and more. If it is compared with William Craig's History of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (1976) it is less full of information but far more readable. The bitsy-piecy character of Craig's book is not in evidence here. Craig did not print a general bibliography but was satisfied with the references in the endnotes to sections. Dr Dingwall has given us thirteen pages of bibliographical entries many of them not on surgeons but general history, mostly British. Her entries are a very mixed bag. On British identities, Linda Colley is there but not Colin Kidd who challenged some of Colley's claims. Dingwall's own descriptions of the conflicts between the Scots and English colleges seems to give the lie to Colley's claim that a sense of Britishness had emerged in the period 1707-1837. The medical corporations were very much looking after their own interests but they also saw themselves as Scottish, Irish or English and opposed national regulation in a way that suggests they were not yet and may not yet be good Britons. Dr Dingwall's list of sources on the Scottish Enlightenment seems eccentric and misses the Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (2003) edited by Alexander Broadie, probably the best guide to that period now in print. She has also missed some of the essays published by surgeons before the mid-eighteenth century. On many topics, Craig will need to be consulted.

This is largely a narrative history which manages to include much in a rather graceful way. There is no over-riding analytical viewpoint. From time to time Michel Foucault and Ludmilla Jordanova are invoked but it is never clear quite what the author hopes the readers will make of them. The author seems worried that her book might seem to be 'Whig history' but the worrisome thing is really the inconsequential discussions of historical theory which seem to add nothing and go nowhere. Sometimes one might think that the account is structured by the ideals expressed in the Incorporation's Seal of Cause of 1505 which often is seen as guiding the acts of men long after it was issued. There was often an economic dimension to what they did but too little attention is paid to the economic developments of the country. Dr Dingwall attends to the politics of the College but one wishes that she would be more hard-headed about them. The creation of the medical faculty in the University and...

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