On Wednesday last week, I paid a visit to the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The purpose of my visit was to attend the launch event of a new online resource. The People’s dispensary brings together digitised case notes from the earliest years of the Edinburgh public dispensary.

The Edinburgh public dispensary was established by Andrew Duncan in 1776 to provide medical advice and treatments to the poor. Duncan‘s records shed light on a decade of patient care, charting the illnesses and diseases suffered by the impoverished eighteenth century residents of the city of Edinburgh. The accounts offer extraordinary detail because one of Duncan‘s intentions when assembling them was to build a teaching resource. Now in their online format, the case notes are freely accessible to those interested in the history of medicine. Given that these records focus on patients as named individuals, they also have wider historical importance and applications, most notably in genealogical research.

The launch event was expertly chaired by Professor Gayle Davis of the University of Edinburgh. She introduced four speakers, each of whom took a twenty minute slot for a short presentation of relevance to the theme of medical provision to the poor.

1. Dr Daisy Cunynghame of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh introduced the People’s dispensary, outlining the process of transcribing the original records from notes into database entries, and the ways in which these can be interrogated for research [video available]
2. Professor Keir Waddington of Cardiff University argued for the value of researching ‘everyday’ medicine and medical treatments [video available]
3. Professor Samantha Williams of the University of Cambridge spoke about the provision of poor relief and medical care under the Old Poor Law [video available]
4. Professor Bernard Harris of the University of Strathclyde presented on the advent of the welfare state and its impact on the long-established role of charities in caring for the sick poor [video available]

A lively Q&A session followed the presentations. Most of the questions were directed at Daisy Cunynghame in response to her stand-out presentation. They covered a range of issues related to the dispensary – both in its physical and online formats – and the wider context in which it was established. The topics raised by audience members included the role of AI in transcribing archive material, the ethics of ‘practising on the poor’, and closed shops/cliques in professional medical communities. In response to a question about Daisy’s favourite case notes, we learnt more about the domestic medical recipes held in the People’s dispensary, the gossipy nature of some of the more candid case notes, and the lengths that ‘patients’ would go to fake illness in their attempts to avoid military service. Also in the Q&A session Daisy made clear that there are no restrictions on public use of the content of the People’s dispensary as she encouraged all to make the most of this new online resource.

After the end of the formal part of the afternoon, all the delegates were invited to view the exhibition of eighteenth century medicine bottles and archive material related to the Edinburgh public dispensary on display in the building. They also helped themselves to the last of the impressive range of cakes enjoyed with tea and coffee earlier in the afternoon.

The launch event was held in the impressive surroundings of the Physicians’ gallery at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh