Edinburgh's anatomy school got bodies through a secret tunnel Burke and Hare used
Voltaire called Edinburgh a hotbed of genius, and its university was a hub of the Scottish Enlightenment. It also had darker corners: corpses for dissection arrived through a hidden tunnel into the anatomy theatre, the same route the murderers Burke and Hare used to deliver their victims in the 1820s.
The university grew out of a 1557 bequest of 8,000 merks from Bishop Robert Reid, whose plan unusually included rhetoric and poetry. The Reformation delayed it for a quarter century until King James VI granted a royal charter on 14 April 1582. Founded by the town council rather than by papal bull, it was a first for Presbyterian Scotland. The Tounis College opened on 14 October 1583 with 80 to 90 students, and its first regent, Robert Rollock, taught the whole first intake every subject for four years; 47 graduated in 1587.
The town council held ultimate control, and relations soured to the point that it seized the college records in 1704. Four years later Principal William Carstares replaced single regents with a Dutch-style system of specialist professors. That structure, a secular origin, a single unified institution and a lack of land income that kept faculty competitive helped make Edinburgh fertile ground for the Enlightenment. Between 1750 and 1800 it drew figures such as David Hume, Adam Smith, Joseph Black and Adam Ferguson. Hugh Blair became the first Regius Professor of Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres in 1762, founding what is regarded as Britain's oldest centre of literary study.
Its medical school ranked among the best in the English-speaking world. In 1869 the Edinburgh Seven, led by Sophia Jex-Blake, became the first women matriculated as undergraduates at any British university. They endured harassment culminating in the Surgeons' Hall riot of November 1870 and were blocked from graduating, but their campaign, backed by Charles Darwin, fed into the Medical Act 1876; they received posthumous degrees in 2019. Lighter chaos came in 1838, when a student snowball fight escalated into a two-day battle with townspeople that needed troops from the castle.
Only the Universities (Scotland) Act 1858 ended 275 years of council control. Today Edinburgh is Scotland's largest university, with over 68,000 undergraduate applications a year, the UK's third-largest endowment and alumni including Charles Darwin, James Clerk Maxwell, Alexander Graham Bell and Arthur Conan Doyle.
Source: University of Edinburgh
