The Alumni, Fellows and Members team are delighted to share the details of our next lunchtime talk, which will take place on Thursday, 16 October in the Albert Lecture Theatre, RCSI Dublin.

Dr Rachael Scally, a Research Ireland postdoctoral fellow at Trinity College, Dublin will join us to share her research on the Edinburgh Medical School’s links to slavery and empire, which received funding from the Institute for Advanced Studies, Edinburgh and a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grant.

Jamaica and the Edinburgh Medical School, c.1726-1834: Legacies of Enslavement

Dr Scally’s talk will examine the Edinburgh Medical School’s legacies of enslavement in Jamaica, focusing on the period from its inauguration in 1726 to the implementation of the apprenticeship system and the Slavery Abolition Act of 1834.

Dr Scally will assess the medical school through a colonial lens, placing its links to enslavement at the forefront of the historiography. Her presentation will outline the transference of medical students to and from the island of Jamaica, a country which had by the 1720s surpassed Barbados to become Britain’s wealthiest and most brutal colony.

We will learn how Edinburgh’s medical students profited financially from the ownership and medical treatment of enslaved people. and the receipt of slave compensation, as well as how the medical school, university, and city profited from the practice of enslavement.

Dr Scally will conclude by shedding light on how the medical school’s teaching hospital, the famous Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, was built and maintained from bequests and donations derived from the profits of slavery.

The talk will begin at 12:30pm, with tea and coffee to follow.