While out today simultaneously gaining weight for my pack while shedding pounds, I stopped in the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons, a couple blocks down the hill toward the River Clyde from my hotel. \u00a0As luck would have it, the librarian and archivist, Carol Parry, was at the reception desk when I arrived. \u00a0She kindly agreed to give me a tour.<\/p>\n
Founded in 1599 by a man who had previously been surgeon to the King of France, it is both a licensing body and a professional society. \u00a0Its presidency alternates between surgeons and non-surgeons (which is to say, physicians). \u00a0In England there are separate royal societies for the two professions.<\/p>\n
Scotland has been a distinguished center of medical research education for centuries. \u00a0It is, among other things, the place where many American Jews came when quotas kept them out of American medical schools. \u00a0The Royal College is full of history.<\/p>\n
Joseph Lister (who went to University College London because as a Quaker he was denied entrance to Oxford or Cambridge) did his studies of the antimicrobial properties of carbolic acid at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary. \u00a0This ushered in antiseptic surgery. \u00a0There’s a meeting room named for him that includes a fireplace and heavily scarred table scavenged from his ward before it was torn down. \u00a0The papers of Ronald Ross, who described the connection between mosquitoes and malaria and won a Nobel Prize, are on display at the moment. \u00a0The portraits on the walls include David Livingstone of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume . . . ” fame, and Graham Teasdale, the neurosurgeon who co-designed the Glasgow Coma Scale.<\/p>\n
One of the more interesting things, however, has nothing to do with medicine.<\/p>\n
It is a volume of the “double elephant” folio of Audubon’s “Birds of America.” \u00a0The full set consists of four volumes; the college has two, bought for 40 guineas in 1841. \u00a0These books were rare when they were published from 1827 to 1838. \u00a0Most of the ones that survived have been cut up to for the sale of their prints.<\/p>\n
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