ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Mapping the Royal Infirmary Surgical Instruments Collection at the National Museum of Scotland

• In Event: Measurement and Instrumentation

English Abstract

The Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh has served as a crucial part of Scottish medicine since the early eighteenth century. In the 1980s, the Old Royal Infirmary donated a large collection of surgical instruments to the National Museum of Scotland. This paper draws on my ongoing SGSAH-funded internship at the Science & Technology Department at the NMS, where I have been identifying and cataloguing these hitherto unresearched objects. As scholars have previously noted, “presentations of the history of surgery hardly make any sense without a strong focus on the material instruments at hand” (Arnold and Söderqvist, 2011). The retrospective documentation of these objects offers us new and vital information about the surgical history of Edinburgh; the collection has particularly strong representation of tools used in gynaecology, urology, and osteotomy and aligns with the NMS’ strategic goal to ensure ‘more people will connect with [their] collections and their stories’ but raises complex questions about the ways we represent – and relate to - these material objects (NMS, 2022). The obvious signs of use on these tools evidence their use on the vulnerable bodies of patients, but with very limited documentation available, how can we negotiate the gaps in knowledge and hold space for the lived experiences of the patients who came into contact with these instruments? Furthermore, how should we represent problematic objects with violent histories, such as the tool that is known as the Sims Speculum? This paper seeks to open a conversation about these questions and to ask us to contemplate the unknown histories of surgical instruments.

Author

• Eeva Savolainen, University of Stirling; University of Glasgow