Key Collections

Object of the Week

During the closure of the Museum from May 2014 to August 2015, we shared a different object on a weekly basis. The objects shared are in this key collection folder.

The Bell Collection

Charles Bell (1774-1842) was born in Edinburgh. He was apprenticed to his surgeon brother John (1763-1820) in 1792, working alongside him at his anatomy school in Edinburgh’s Surgeon Square. In 1799 Bell qualified as a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh and took over the formal teaching at the school. He moved to London in 1804 and in 1812 bought the Great Windmill Street Anatomy School. Some 3,000 specimens from the anatomy collection he amassed there were sold to the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh for £3000 in 1825.

Robert Knox

The most famous of all Surgeons’ Hall Museum conservators, Dr Robert Knox (1791-1862), was involved in almost every aspect of the museum’s development during its great expansion of the 1820s and early 1830s. He was, at the time, the most successful anatomist in Scotland if not Britain, but it was his involvement in one of Britain’s most infamous serial murder cases that led to him becoming the most fictionalised of all Scottish medical men.

The Greig Collection

David Middleton Greig (18641936), Conservator of the Museum from 1920 to 1936, was an international authority on bone disease and abnormalities of the skull. During his professional life as a surgeon, in and around his home city of Dundee, he formed his own pathology collection, documenting every case in detail and adding photographs, x-rays and drawings.

Instruments

Surgeons' Hall Museums house a large collection of surgical and dental instruments. Some, such as the Squires Inhaler shown here, hold a significant place in the history and development of safe surgical procedures.