Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Edinburgh Royal Infirmary

  • Lawson Tait, father of aseptic surgery and gynecology

    Robert Lawson Tait was fifth in a dynasty of pioneers who helped transform surgery from a primitive craft to a sophisticated life-saving art. They all worked for a time at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary—James Syme (the “Napoleon of Surgery”), Robert Liston (“time me, gentlemen”), James Simpson (“made childbirth painless”), and Robert Lister (“antiseptic surgery”)—and with…

  • The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and the legacy of Long John Silver

    George VentersScotland Faced with the danger of having his right foot amputated in 1873, the real “Long John Silver,” the English poet William E. Henley, turned for help to Joseph Lister and became a patient in the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. While there he was introduced to the Scots writer Robert Louis Stevenson. Born within a…

  • James Syme, the Napoleon of surgery (1799–1870)

    James Syme was born in Edinburgh in the year when Napoleon became First Consul, and in later years came to be called the Napoleon or Wellington of surgery.1-6 As a young man he had an interest in chemistry and at age eighteen developed a method of making textiles impermeable to water by impregnating them with…

  • Robert Liston—the fastest knife in town

    Samuel Johnson, a man of strongly held prejudices, had a low opinion of most foreigners, and this included the Scots. James Boswell, his biographer and a Scotsman himself, records how Johnson patronizingly would declare that the best roads lead from Scotland and that much could be made of a Scotsman “if he be caught young.”…