(dramatic music) I'm Dr. Onyeka Nubia and I'm a historian, and I'm walking through Britain to reveal a fascinating period in our history.

The Victorians shaped modern Britain.

I'm searching for the innovation, the technology, and the industry that the Victorians gave us.

(woman) It's the oldest working engine in the world, so it's really a jewel in our collection.

(Dr. Nubia) For good and for bad... (man) If you get your finger caught in the belt, you get the fingers off.

(Dr. Nubia) ...I'm going to explore this era that is as complicated as it is fascinating.

♪ This time, I'm in Edinburgh.

Whilst other places turned to trade and manufacturing, this great city took a different path.

♪ (woman) People are coming to Edinburgh from London, from overseas to study here.

(Dr. Nubia) Scotland's capital led the way in science and medicine... ♪ ..from self-experimentation to the grisly world of the body snatchers.

(man) They would come to cemeteries late at night and dig up the freshly buried.

♪ (Dr. Nubia) Edinburgh is a city that gives a unique window into Victorian Britain.

♪ A hundred years before the Victorian age began, Scotland and its capital were facing an uncertain future.

Political union with England had seen power gravitate south to London.

Over time, Edinburgh's close neighbor, Glasgow, would become Scotland's industrial powerhouse.

So where did Edinburgh's future lie?

It differed from Glasgow that was famous for its industry.

It was here that scientists, inventors, doctors, and medical people came.

On this walk, I'll be discovering the impact these Victorians had not just on Scotland but the whole of Britain and beyond.

From the heart of Edinburgh's Old Town, I'll head north to discover some of the medical breakthroughs of the Victorian age and explore the famous New Town that was the backdrop for their work.

I'll meet the extraordinary man who taught taxidermy to Charles Darwin, drop in on Victorian Edinburgh's most exclusive gentlemen's club, and discover the determined women who fought for equality in the practice of modern medicine.

♪ But my walk begins in Edinburgh's Old Town, where in 1726, the University of Edinburgh had set up its medical school, the very first in Britain.

In the 19th century, Edinburgh's reputation grew as a center of learning.

Central to that was the expansion in the medical schools.

People came from all over the world to study medicine in Edinburgh.

But this growth had a problem.

Doctors in the Victorian age wanted to know more about human anatomy.

This meant they needed access to human bodies for dissection.

(eerie music) Some people in the city had a macabre solution to this problem.

They were known as resurrection men, but we know them now as body snatchers.

(Judith) The resurrection men went into churchyards at night and they dug up dead bodies, which they then sold to anatomy schools to use for teaching.

Resurrection was not a crime.

The dead are not property.

They don't belong to anybody.

So if you stole a body from a grave, what they did was they would strip the clothes off them, because clothes are property, so they couldn't be convicted of stealing bodies.

It wasn't theft.

(Dr. Nubia) In the heart of the Old Town, one target of the resurrection men was Greyfriars cemetery, where I'm meeting tour guide Robin Mitchell.

-Hello, Robin, how are you?

-Good, thanks.

So who were the actual grave robbers?

Well, we had the resurrection men, and they would come to cemeteries late at night and dig up the freshly buried and take them off to sell them for medical science.

Some of them were students.

Edinburgh had one of the leading medical schools in Europe, and the students who, at the time, they enjoyed watching public dissection, but they wanted to do it themselves.

Why did the university want the bodies?

(Robin) The anatomy classes required bodies for the dissection tables.

Initially, the bodies would come from executed murderers, people that maybe had died in a workhouse, suicide victims.

(Dr. Nubia) But the trend of grave robbing became so common, measures had to be taken to curb it.

(Robin) Families thought, "We must protect the graves," so in the early days, you might hire a stone slab that would go over the grave for a period of time.

But the adventurous body snatchers just came in from the side and would drag the body out.

So, therefore, they came up with-- well, this is a good example here, they came up with this thing, which is a mortsafe.

-A what?

A mortsafe.

-A mortsafe, yes.

Well, it's like a cage.

I mean, it would cover where the coffin was and it would stop the body snatchers getting in.

(Dr. Nubia) Some of the exhumed bodies were delivered to the dissecting rooms of leading Edinburgh anatomist and lecturer Dr. Robert Knox.

♪ But where was Knox obtaining his dead bodies?

So could you tell me anything about Burke and Hare?

Well, William Burke and William Hare were murderers.

They were Irish laborers in Edinburgh.

It all started when a lodger had died in their lodging house without paying the rent, so they took the body up to Dr. Robert Knox and sold it for 7 pounds and 10 shillings, which was an absolute fortune in those days.

(Dr. Nubia) So, these two individuals, opportunists, saw a space in the market, as it were, and decided to resolve this by giving the university -what it wanted.

-Yes, fresh bodies.

'Cause as you can imagine, if bodies were in graves for a period of time, then perhaps they're no use to the doctors of anatomy.

So they were providing the freshest bodies in town.

(Dr. Nubia) Months later, another of Hare's tenants fell sick and died.

This time, however, he did not die of natural causes.

He had been suffocated.

But their reprehensible scheme came to an end when a body was found on their premises.

When the police arrived, Burke and Hare were arrested for murder.

At the trial, Hare accepted immunity in exchange for testifying against Burke, and he was set free.

But as Burke awaited his hanging, more grisly details emerged.

(Robin) Now, between the conviction and the public hanging, they interviewed him again and they discovered that up to 16 people may have been murdered, so we're talking about serial killers in Edinburgh in the 1820s.

(dark music) (Dr. Nubia) On the 28th of January, 1829, 25,000 people gathered to watch Burke being put to death.

But Dr. Robert Knox, who had benefitted from their crimes, was never prosecuted.

Nothing legally happened against Dr. Robert Knox, but the Edinburgh mob were not particularly happy with what had happened, and they ransacked his home up at Newington, burning an effigy of him outside, although he remained in Edinburgh for many years after that.

(Dr. Nubia) Even though he was the one instrumental -in the whole thing.

-Well, clearly, he knew that the bodies weren't coming from the cemetery.

The bodies were fresh... (clears his throat) ...and, um, you know, hadn't been prepared for burial.

So, yes, they were turning a blind eye to that.

Did the government do anything about people like Burke and Hare?

Well, we had the Anatomy Act of 1832, which came into play partly because people were appalled with what had happened with Burke and Hare, and with the act, doctors and surgeons were licensed, and they were allowed to access dead bodies from hospitals, workhouses, and prisons, so the supply of bodies increased at that point.

(Dr. Nubia) With the new Anatomy Act in place, the problem of body snatching was consigned to the past.

But a fascination in death and the macabre lasted much longer.

Just around the corner from the cemetery, there's a final bizarre twist to this story.

(eerie music) There's some irony here that William Burke, who had assigned so many people to be dissected and examined, would himself, after his execution, be dissected and examined, and parts of his body turned into a case for carrying cards.

This is part of William Burke.

(dramatic music) I'm walking the streets of Edinburgh, uncovering its great contribution to the Victorian age.

(Dr. Woolf) I would describe Edinburgh as the city of medical excellence.

It was a renowned intellectual hub, and in the Victorian period, it had this reputation as a real innovator in medicine and transformations in medicine as well.

(Dr. Nubia) Alongside the Edinburgh Medical School, the city boasted other renowned institutions, including the next destination on my walk, one mile to the north of Greyfriars cemetery, the Royal College of Physicians.

The college was founded as early as 1681, when medical understanding was still quite rudimentary.

Even here, many of the doctors and scientists believed that disease was caused by bad air.

They called it miasmas.

It wasn't until the 19th century that some pioneering individuals began to dispel this idea.

Some of the key breakthroughs of the era were made by members of the Royal College of Physicians.

I've come to the college's stunning New Library, which was opened more than 160 years ago.

-Hello, Daisy.

-Hello.

(Dr. Nubia) It's where I'm meeting heritage manager Daisy Cunynghame.

So I'm trying to understand how and why, in the Victorian times, Edinburgh became this seat of learning -around medicine.

-In the 1700s, there were only six universities in Britain.

Four of them were in Scotland and two in England, so, really, at that point, Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland was at the center of medical learning.

Medicine in quite a lot of universities was entirely based on book learning, often in Latin, often studying kind of Ancient Greek or Ancient Roman texts.

In Edinburgh, it was really focused on practical learning.

The university and the infirmary were very connected, so students would study on the wards and learn from real patients and real-life scenarios.

Why did these changes happen here?

(Daisy) Within Britain, I think Edinburgh was a very exciting place to be as a young medic, as a young scientist.

There was an encouragement of new ideas.

There were all sorts of medical societies set up where people would discuss and debate, and I think it wasn't seen, perhaps, as the old guard preventing new ideas from coming through in the same way as it might have been elsewhere.

These ideas were encouraged, really.

(Dr. Nubia) One individual who arrived at the university in 1853 and was drawn to the city's unique approach to learning was Joseph Lister.

He's often described as the father of modern surgery.

(Daisy) There was this idea that gentlemen became physicians.

It was the university-educated, learned thing to do, whereas surgeons worked with their hands, and so, somehow, that was more like a trade.

It was much more focused on the exterior of the body.

It was focused on sort of rashes and tumors and lesions and also amputations, because, really, surgeons were afraid to go inside the body.

It was very risky.

There was a risk of infection, there was a risk of blood loss, and they didn't fundamentally really understand what they were doing, necessarily.

(Dr. Nubia) It was in Edinburgh that Lister began to focus on an area of medicine for which he would become famous.

(Daisy) His interest was in germs, the idea of the spread of germs, these kind of tiny organisms that cause disease.

Lister really demonstrated to everyone the importance of antisepsis, so the importance of cleaning wounds, both postoperative and just any kind of wounds in general.

And what he did was he proved to the world that you could prevent wounds getting infected.

You didn't have to have what there was before, which was almost a 50 percent mortality rate.

(Dr. Nubia) So Lister is about creating a clean environment.

And that's revolutionary in Victorian medicine?

(Daisy) Absolutely.

I think in surgery, first of all, the term "operating theater" exists really because they were actually theaters.

You see operating theaters from the time, they seat hundreds of people, often, and not just medical people but general members of the public would come along.

You know, there's people coughing and sneezing and wearing their sort of street clothes.

But also, the actual surgeons themselves would be often wearing their ordinary street clothes.

Sometimes, surgical aprons or coats would be handed down from one surgeon to another, never washed in between, because it demonstrated, "This is how much experience I have."

So they were incredibly unclean environments.

More unclean than in the average person's home.

(Dr. Nubia) But Lister set out to change this by preventing germs from entering wounds with a chemical barrier.

This became known as antiseptic, and it worked.

Thanks to changes such as this, infection rates during surgery dropped from 50 percent to 15 percent in just four years.

The Victorian era also saw James Young Simpson make a huge breakthrough in the world of pain relief.

He was a professor of midwifery at the University of Edinburgh.

After completing his medical studies in Edinburgh, Simpson went on to set up his own practice here, which by 1839 was treating the wealthy residents of the New Town.

Daisy Cunynghame has offered to show me some of the items from his doctor's bag.

(Daisy) So this here is James Young Simpson's surgical shoe covers, which still have a little bit of blood remaining on them here.

Basically, these were worn over his shoes while he was operating so his smart dress shoes didn't get covered in blood or pus or so on.

So here we have a pillbox of James Young Simpson, so you can see where it says, "Please return to 52 Queen Street," which is his home on the same street that we are on right now.

And it still has the pills in it.

Morphia, for example, is morphine, and there are still morphine pills in there.

(Dr. Nubia) And you haven't tried any, have you?

(Daisy) I have not tried any, no.

There is also two different types of opium, two different quantities of opium.

So this is what he would be using on his patients -to dull the pain.

-But none of these medicines were capable of truly numbing the pain of surgery.

So in the summer of 1846, Simpson began to experiment.

So he was really trying to discover an anesthetic which was safer than ether, which was quite risky and quite flammable, and something which he could use regularly on his patients.

So he published on his findings, and really, chloroform was hugely accepted and made operations much easier and safer, and also, it meant that you could carry out much more intricate and longer operations as a result of anesthetics.

So, did he experiment on himself?

So, James Young Simpson, like a number of doctors in Edinburgh at the time, had a home laboratory where he would carry out experiments sort of in his own free time, and he would try various different potential anesthetics on himself and on his two assistants.

So they would come over of an evening, they would all kind of sniff or swallow whatever they were trying that night and just see what happened.

So they tried chloroform one evening.

They all sort of collapsed on the floor, unconscious, woke up a bit later and realized, "I think we've discovered an anesthetic."

(Dr. Nubia) So when was chloroform first used in an operation?

(Daisy) Well, James Young Simpson first used chloroform in his work at the Royal Maternity Hospital.

We have the register here from that time in 1847, where he's clearly marked the specific entry where he first used chloroform on a patient.

(Dr. Nubia) Just five years later, Simpson's new anesthetic gained approval from a very high-profile patient.

(Daisy) Simpson was physician to Queen Victoria when Queen Victoria was going through childbirth with Prince Leopold.

She decided she wanted to use chloroform.

So it was the moment when the Queen herself used chloroform during childbirth that it received really kind of unanimous approval, whereas before then, even though people understood that it worked, there was some sort of idea that pain in childbirth was natural.

So unless it was an incredibly difficult pregnancy, an unusual pregnancy, it was normal to be in horrendous pain, -so you shouldn't have any-- -Obviously coming from men.

(laughter) (Daisy) Very much so, very much so.

(Dr. Nubia) Who were not gonna have that experience.

But the Queen's use of chloroform increased its popularity.

Today, the role of anesthetics is fundamental in modern surgery.

(lively music) There's a story to be told about these grand streets that surround the Royal College.

They too are part of Edinburgh's Victorian story.

Nineteenth-century Edinburgh isn't one city, it's two: an Old Town and a New Town.

An Old Town that's older than Edinburgh itself, and a New Town fashioned in the 18th century but became famous in the 19th century.

Lying to the north of the Old Town, Edinburgh's New Town was once an ambitious urban project.

And a short way west to the Royal College, I'm heading to Moray Place, one of its uptown residences.

The New Town had its origins in the Georgian period and it was developed in the Victorian age.

To discover why and how this area came to be, I'm meeting Dr. Alison Duncan.

Alison, we're here in New Town.

Why is it called New Town?

Because for Edinburgh, it is.

It was built in the 18th century, but by Edinburgh terms, that's "the new town," in comparison to the Old Town, which was a medieval layout.

(Dr. Nubia) By 1707, with a population of 35,000, the Old Town was not fit for purpose.

Its population was crammed into tenement dwellings that were often 12 stories high.

So people lived quite closely together, rich and poor.

So you might have the poorer people living on the bottom, next to the smell and noise of the street, then slightly wealthier people second and third floors, and then poorer again as you get higher, because-- -Oh, the poor live at the top!

-Yeah.

Well, think about it, you've got all those stairs.

Everything has got to be carried up those stairs that needs to come into your house.

(Dr. Nubia) Overcrowding in the Old Town led to squalid conditions and disease.

Beauty spots of today, such as Princes Street Gardens, were once places blighted by the sewage of the Old Town.

The city was at breaking point.

(Dr. Duncan) By mid-eighteenth century, Edinburgh was getting very crowded.

Too many people, and not just living people but actually dead as well.

There was not much room left for burials.

It was recognized that the city really did need to expand, and in 1766, they held a competition for the layout of a proposed new town.

And that was won by a young architect called James Craig, still in his late 20s, not well known at all, but his plan won.

-I'll show you that here.

-Okay.

Oh, these are the actual plans, are they?

(Dr. Duncan) This is a copy of the actual plans.

-Oh, that's fantastic.

-You can see it's a very simple grid layout, and it has a grand square at one end, St. Andrew Square.

That's where the building began.

You can see that there are three main parallel streets terminating in another square at the other end.

That became Charlotte Square.

(Dr. Nubia) Built in several stages from the 1760s to the 1830s, this "new town" was a marvel of city development.

It offered a better lifestyle for the city's wealthy population.

Is the New Town a model town?

(Dr. Dunbar) Yes, very much, by that period, people have got the idea that this is the modern Athens and that this is an elegant European city, almost.

It wasn't meant to replicate the business district of the Old Town, so people expected to live in the New Town and still go back and forth to the old.

The New Town was a statement of loyalty and political stability but also of modernity.

Edinburgh wanted to be part of modern Britain at this time.

(Dr. Nubia) The New Town may have been constructed much later than the Old Town, but I'm surprised by a number of things.

So, this is my first time in this part of Edinburgh, and I was struck by the fact that these houses for the very wealthy and the very rich are not detached, and I found that slightly unusual.

(Dr. Duncan) You don't so much notice individual houses.

And it's important to remember that here, it was a mixture of single houses and flats, apartments, just as it had been in the Old Town.

People still liked living that way.

(Dr. Nubia) But whilst there are similarities, there were also an abundance of differences in the New Town, which gives an insight into the type of people who occupied these properties.

(Dr. Duncan) When you look at the design, it's almost what we call a palace frontage.

It's made to look like one very grand building.

If you compare it with what you've seen in the Old Town and think of the comparison, just the size and width of the streets, the amount of light, the amount of greenery, it is a huge contrast and it was seen as very exclusive.

The New Town was very much a town for professional people, professional men.

Lawyers, medical people, doctors, and they were closely connected with improving all the institutions of the city.

♪ (Dr. Nubia) I'm on a walk through Victorian Edinburgh, a center for learning in the 19th century.

♪ I'm heading south again, across the Old Town to the University of Edinburgh, to see how one young student stepped into this vibrant city and went on to influence the modern world.

Scotland's adopted son, Charles Darwin, was staying here at this address, number 11 Lothian Street.

This is testament to Edinburgh as a center of learning, that perhaps one of the most influential thinkers of the time stayed here and studied here in Edinburgh.

Darwin and his brother Erasmus followed their father's footsteps and studied medicine in Edinburgh.

♪ On these streets where they would have walked every day, I'm meeting author Lisa Williams.

Charles Darwin wasn't a doctor of medicine, was he?

He wasn't a doctor of medicine, he hated medicine.

-Okay!

-So he was much more interested in the natural world, even from that age, actually.

So what he did when he was here, he used to write a lot of letters to his dad, complaining and saying, "I hate Edinburgh, I hate studying medicine.

Get me out of here."

And the father was like, "Look, I think you're being a bit rash, you're being a bit lazy."

What was it he didn't like?

Well, what he didn't like was, hated cutting up dead bodies, he hated being in operations, and he was complaining that his lecturers were boring and stupid, and he was much more interested in getting involved in the learning societies that Edinburgh was full of at that point, and learning about natural history instead.

(Dr. Nubia) Importantly, it was while he was studying natural history here that Darwin encountered one of his important teachers, a taxidermist named John Edmonstone.

But the remarkable thing about Edmonstone was that he was of African-Caribbean descent.

He had grown up under the shadow of enslavement on a plantation in Guyana in South America, but in Edinburgh, he became a professional taxidermist, and his shop was on the same street -where Charles Darwin lived.

-John Edmonstone was born in Demerara at a place called Mibiri Creek, which is now part of Guyana.

It was a Dutch colony at the time, but the Scots were very much involved even when it was a Dutch colony.

And the plantation that he was born on and he grew up on belonged to a man called Charles Edmonstone.

-Oh, hence his name.

-Absolutely.

So, Charles Edmonstone and his wife come back to Scotland in 1817.

She's actually have Scottish and half Amerindian, which was interesting.

And they're living back in Scotland with their three daughters, and they bring John with them.

So, John moves out of the home.

As far as we know, he goes to Glasgow, gets a job in the museum, and he's selling specimens to the museum in Glasgow, and he's probably starting to make a career for himself, because taxidermy is beginning to become popular.

(Dr. Nubia) After six years in Glasgow, in 1823, it's believed that Edmonstone relocated to Lothian Street here in Edinburgh.

So, Edmonstone living here and Darwin just living just one minute's walk away.

They must have seen each other every day.

(Lisa) Absolutely.

It's a small place.

They would have seen each other.

And Darwin also heard about John Edmonstone.

He was getting quite a name for himself at that point.

'Cause he's teaching students at the university, he's got his taxidermy shop, and, um, he's becoming well respected in Edinburgh at that point.

(Dr. Nubia) Disillusioned with medicine, the young Darwin sought out the expertise of this man from Guyana.

(Lisa) Every day, he spends an hour with him.

He pays him a guinea an hour for those two months, and they become quite close, they become quite friendly, and he talks about-- he describes him as a very pleasant, a very intelligent man that he really enjoys spending time with.

(Dr. Nubia) Darwin left Edinburgh in 1827.

In the decade that followed, he traveled the world, ultimately developing his theories of natural selection and evolution.

(Lisa) The first place they go to is Brazil, then they head down to Argentina.

And at that point, because of the skills that he's learned from Edmonstone, and also the knowledge of the flora and fauna of South America as well, he's in a very, very good position then to go into the forest and then to come out with-- let's say, for example, in Argentina, he goes into the forest and he comes out with 80 different specimens of birds that he's preserved and brings back to the ship.

So by the time he's finished on that voyage, he's coming back with a huge variety of birds and animals from all over the world, and then he comes back and he becomes a certified naturalist at that point.

So he has a huge debt to pay to John Edmonstone.

Why don't we know more about the story of John Edmonstone?

We tend to forget about the contributions that came from African people, from Indigenous people, from Asian people, from all around the world whose contributions were negated, whose contributions were ignored, they weren't recorded.

And often, very often, other people would be taking the credit for them.

There was a plaque put up to him to recognize how important he was in 2009, and it was approved by the Council.

It showed up in the newspaper, it's in newspaper articles, but there's a mystery because the plaque seems to have disappeared and no one seems to know where it is.

-So there was a plaque.

-As far as we know, yes.

(Dr. Nubia) But it's no longer there anymore.

(Lisa) It's no longer there.

(Dr. Nubia) Can we not make another one?

(Lisa) I think we absolutely should make another one.

(soft music) (Dr. Nubia) It's clear this forgotten teacher played a part in developing Darwin's ideas.

Taxidermists such as Edmonstone were part of a Victorian fashion in collecting and preserving dead animals.

In her studio just outside Edinburgh, I've arranged to meet taxidermist Fiona Dean to learn about how the art appealed to the everyday Victorian.

-Hello.

-Oh, hi.

-Fiona.

-Hi!

-Can I come in?

-Of course.

Yeah, I--I need to find out about taxidermy, and I don't know anything about it.

(Fiona) Taxidermists really have to be observers of nature, so, the natural world.

(Dr. Nubia) And what are you observing?

You're observing the expressions, the anatomy.

Taxidermists are, especially from Charles Darwin's era, are trying to recreate things that not everyone in Britain, for example, would have been able to see.

(Dr. Nubia) These taxidermists are gonna also have to be well-traveled, then.

'Cause unless they've seen these creatures in their natural habitat, they're not going to be able to do it.

(Fiona) Not going to be able to do it, you know, correctly.

(Dr. Nubia) So they're going to need to be-- (Fiona) And I think at the beginning, there was some quite bad taxidermy done.

(Dr. Nubia) Equally important is the taxidermist's ability to understand and replicate the movement of the animal.

(Fiona) The beauty of a piece like this is the movement within the frame and the lifelikeness of the birds.

Has taxidermy changed from how it was in the Victorian times?

So, really, the rough methods are the same in that you're taking the body out of the animal and putting some form of mannequin back in.

Victorian taxidermy in birds, they probably would have used a similar method in the body structure, but in big animals, like game heads, lions, tigers, the materials that were used were incredibly heavy, so the mounts on a lion was mainly plaster and wood.

So, nowadays, with science and technology, we're able to use things like polyurethane foams, make it much lighter.

In the tanning of the skin or the preservation of the bird, they used a lot of arsenic.

Isn't that a poison?

(Fiona) Mild poison or strong poison, but I think the quantity that they used, I think there's a bit of a myth and sort of murder stories like to use, that a lot of taxidermists used to poison themselves with arsenic, but, um-- but it did preserve the skins very well.

(Dr. Nubia) Taxidermy remained popular throughout the Victorian period.

Those who could afford it built up extraordinary collections of stuffed animals, which they displayed in magnificent cases.

So, when you're doing taxidermy, you need to be aware of science and anatomy and biology and all those things.

(Fiona) You really need to be an artist, um, a painter, a sculptor within the arts, a naturalist, study anatomy, biology, chemistry...

I found this person called John Edmonstone, who was a teacher of Charles Darwin.

He taught Charles Darwin taxidermy.

So John Edmonstone must have had the same or similar skills that you've just been talking about.

(Fiona) Yeah.

He would have had all of the skills of a scientist, an artist, a naturalist, an anatomist.

(Dr. Nubia) Charles Darwin passed away in 1882, aged 73.

He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Unfortunately, little is known of what happened to John Edmonstone.

Back in the city, I'm heading to one of Edinburgh's most famous streets on the very edge of the New Town.

Princes Street was originally a residential area.

It was the Victorians who turned it into a famous shopping district that we now know today.

And this street contains a Victorian legacy but it's not easy to spot.

This modern 1960s building of concrete houses a very important organization called the New Club, founded in the 18th century, and very important in the Victorian period.

I'm paying a visit to Scotland's oldest private members club.

Organizations like this formed an intriguing part of Victorian society, and membership was reserved for gentlemen.

Today, it's where I'm meeting medical professor David Purdie.

Thank you for inviting me to the New Club.

Was the club always here on Princes Street?

No.

We began at the very far end of Princes Street, at the eastern end, near the Theatre Royal, for the first 25 years of our existence, until May 1837, when we opened here.

Who could join the club?

(David) To become a member, you have to be proposed by a member, seconded by a member, then your name goes into a book which lies on the hall of the club here, and 12 members will have to sign their names to say that they would be happy to see you as a member.

(Dr. Nubia) In the mid-1800s, Britain's growing professional class saw private institutions such as this as integral to British society.

London, for example, had over 400 clubs.

Their members were no longer just aristocratic land owners but lawyers, military officers, artists, politicians.

If I was a young man in Edinburgh, a young doctor, what benefit would it be for me to be a member of a club like this?

(David) Whatever your profession, be it medicine, law, science, et cetera, being a member here would be of an advantage, because you might well be invited to give a talk or conduct a seminar on the subject.

If you had an advance and you wanted to promote it, you might bring it here and consult with the legal opinion around the club.

This was the place to meet, to meet your colleagues and your friends to discuss matters of business, although business itself, technical business, had to be conducted in private.

(Dr. Nubia) Acceptance at a gentlemen's club meant being accepted by polite Victorian society.

And of course, once inside, close connections and alliances could be made with fellow members.

Were there any notable members in the Victorian period?

Sure.

There were members who were at the forefront of medical advances, both in the teaching of medicine to students and in the practice of medicine and surgery.

Lister, for example, in surgery, and James Young Simpson in obstetrics and gynecology.

We were quite a military club at that time.

We had several generals of the army who fought with the Duke of Wellington, for example, in the Peninsula and at Waterloo.

(lively music) (Dr. Nubia) This club has changed since the Victorian era.

For over 50 years, it has admitted women, and it now claims members from all over the world.

♪ (dramatic music) I've been exploring the city of Edinburgh and its very distinct history during the 19th century.

♪ My walk is ending very close to where it began, with a visit to the Royal College of Surgeons.

♪ I've come in search of an extraordinary stand made by women here in Edinburgh.

Nowadays, we're used to an idea that higher education should be available to all.

But in the 19th century, there were restrictions on class and on gender, and these restrictions meant that only a few could enter education.

Women were hindered.

But seven women here in Edinburgh decided to make a change.

The Royal College of Surgeons was founded in 1505, one of the first surgical colleges in the world.

♪ It's where I'm meeting museum director Christopher Henry to find out more.

♪ When I came into campus today, I noticed that it's quite a diverse group of people that I saw.

Was it diverse in the 19th century?

Medicine was a male preserve, apart from midwifery, and women were involved in lots of other activities, but in terms of formal qualification and recognition, -it was a male preserve.

-Right.

But in 1869, a woman by the name of Sophia Jex-Blake, from Hastings, submitted an application to study medicine at Edinburgh.

Her application, however, was rejected.

And so, she put an advert in The Scotsman newspaper and asked for other women to join her to try again.

Seven of them all together applied and they then became known as the Edinburgh Seven.

And the strange thing is, they were allowed to enroll and matriculate.

So, in 1869, they did some of the early exams.

And particularly interesting at the time is a woman called Edith Pechey, who did very well, I think it was in the chemistry exam, and there was an award for it.

And the chemistry professor at the time wasn't keen on the fact that she looked like she might be the one that won the award.

And so, therein started the controversy about whether they should have been admitted or whether they should even be admitted to Edinburgh University to study.

There were enough people there to go, "We don't really want this," and they started to encourage students to be hostile towards the Edinburgh Seven.

(Dr. Nubia) Accounts on the time recall how the Edinburgh Seven were subjected to a hostile environment where they were threatened and demeaned.

The university, meanwhile, charged the women higher fees than their male counterparts.

(Christopher) They did their anatomy exam here in 1870 and were presented with a massive riot at the time of male students who did not want them to be recognized and graduate in medicine in Edinburgh.

Why wouldn't they let women become surgeons and doctors?

Was it male fragility?

I think it was a fair amount of male fragility, but I also think you have to remember that in order to get into the medical world, you had to study for a fair old bit of time, but there were rewards, there were financial rewards, there were status rewards.

And if that was in a small community of people who had exclusive rights to it, they really didn't want another large group of people coming in and joining in on that.

The thing that really put the cat amongst the pigeons, should I say, was a riot in this very college.

The Edinburgh Seven were due to do an anatomy examination and there were hundreds of people gathered outside the gates, shouting and jeering and throwing things at them, and they had to stand there and endure it for a period of time until some sympathetic soul came to the gates and let them in.

(Dr. Nubia) The final insult came three years later, when the Court of Session ruled that Sophia Jex-Blake and her colleagues should never have been admitted and should not be allowed to graduate.

(Christopher) The Court of Session backed the university and said, "You don't have to let them graduate," which was a real blow.

But they were very determined.

A number of the group qualified, after a lot of trials and tribulations, much later to become medics.

At least one of them was a doctor in India.

Matilda Chaplin created a college of midwives in Tokyo.

Sophia Jex-Blake started off two colleges for women, one in London, one in Edinburgh.

So they all contributed something to the ongoing education of women in medicine.

(contemplative music) (Dr. Nubia) These days, around 60 percent of the university's medical students identify as women.

And 150 years later, in 2019, these seven pioneers were posthumously awarded honorary degrees.

♪ In the 19th century, Victorian Edinburgh reimagined itself not as a place of industry but one of learning, of education.

This made this city remarkable in the sense that it was shaping Victorian Britain in a different way.

(dramatic music) ♪ (bright music)