'To be insert in the Mercury': medical practitioners and the press in eighteenth-century Edinburgh.

Abstract

The eighteenth century was a period of development and change in Scottish society, its structures, and institutions. In Edinburgh the Royal College of Physicians, the Incorporation of Surgeons (Royal College from 1778), and the University attempted to improve medical and surgical training, and in the second half of the century the Scottish Enlightenment found its intellectual home in the capital. At the same time, the newspaper press was consolidating and Scots had access to a number of newspapers which appeared regularly, such as the Caledomian Mercury and Edinburgh Advistiser. The press became a major vehicle for the dissemination of information and opinion of all sorts, and examination of surviving newspapers had yielded a substantial amount of evidence on the use of the press by medical practitioners and their organizations. The medical contents of the newspapers demonstrate the progress of the institutions, the activities of individual practitioners, the changing nature of lay practice, and some of the tensions which existed in Edinburgh medicine and society in the hotbed of the Enlightenment period.