16 - Institutionalising: Edinburgh Medical Students andSurgeons’ Societies in the Nineteenth-CenturyWorld

Summary

The foregoing chapters in this part have focused ondifferent practices of compilation in EnlightenmentEdinburgh, from the methods of summarising involvedin producing and teaching with a school geographytextbook, to the process of supplementing existingencyclopaedias with new ‘discoveries’, to theaccessions to an elite family's domestic collectionof geographical publications. In each case,different aspects of Enlightenment universalism havecome to the fore: how a scholar-compiler summarisedkey details about every part of the world to producean exhaustive, universal compilation in Chapter 13;how the form of the encyclopaedia incorporated ‘new’geographical facts into arguments about a universalhumanity and other, wider discourses in Chapter 14;and, in Chapter 15, how family collecting was amanifestation of a kind of acquisitive universalismbased on the auxiliary desires for power andknowledge. In these chapters, universalism hasfeatured primarily as an intellectual and literaryimpulse: a set of scholarly or publishing practicesfocused on amassing information and completing thecollection. This final chapter on Edinburgh'sEnlightenment compiling highlights, by contrast, amore concrete form of universalism. The focus is noton universal ‘truths’ or ‘principles’, nor onliterary productions or personal collections, but onthe material construction and maintenance ofcarefully configured and serviced networks thatstretched between Edinburgh and Britain's colonies.Here, Edinburgh-based geographi-cal compiling isexamined in relation to the universalism of Britishimperialism in the first decades of the nineteenthcentury, with a focus on the sets of professionals –and their practices and institutions – required tomaintain global trade, slavery and colonialism.

This chapter follows on from the last by looking againat institutional compilation, albeit with anemphasis on a different kind of collectingcollective with a distinct set of concerns:Edinburgh's medical students and professionals.Jacqueline Jenkinson points out that medicalsocieties based in Edinburgh ‘epitomized the desirefor the advancement of knowledge during, and beyond,the Scottish Enlightenment’, and Pratik Chakrabartihas emphasised the inseparability of medicine andempire. Those studying and practising medicine inthe city could draw on global collections ofknowledge through the various institutions andsocieties, both formal and informal, associated withtheir education and chosen vocation.