"A host of experienced microscopists": the establishment of histology in nineteenth-century Edinburgh.

Abstract

Edinburgh was the foremost center in Britain for the introduction of microscopic anatomy into medical training. It therefore offers an instructive case study of the way in which what was initially an obscure and exotic technology eventually became a regular part of medical education. The paper explores the process by which skills that were originally the preserve of a small number of pioneers in histology came to be transmitted to a wider population. It focuses, in particular, on the transition from an authoritarian style of pedagogy, best exemplified by the histological teaching of John Hughes Bennett, to the more collegial styles of interaction between microscopists that came to be embodied in the Edinburgh Physiological Society.