The University of Edinburgh: The “Tounis College” That Built the Enlightenment

Regents, Chairs and Old College

For its first century and a quarter Edinburgh taught the way every Scottish university then taught. A single regent took one class of students through the entire arts curriculum, year by year, whatever the subject and whatever his own competence. In 1708 Principal William Carstares abolished it, replacing regenting with specialist professorial chairs on the Dutch model he knew from Leiden and Utrecht. It sounds administrative. It was the single most consequential decision in the University’s intellectual history.

The standard histories connect that reform directly to what followed: the Enlightenment took hold in Edinburgh partly because of the University’s democratic and secular origin, its organisation as one entity rather than a federation of loosely linked colleges, and its adoption of the more flexible Dutch professorship. A chemist could be hired as a chemist. A student could attend the lectures that interested him. Neither was true at Oxford in 1750.

The buildings lagged far behind the ideas. For two centuries the University occupied rented and converted property. Old College on South Bridge was designed by Robert Adam, whose foundation stone was laid on 16 November 1789; Adam died in 1792 with perhaps a quarter of it standing, and the Napoleonic Wars stopped the money altogether. William Henry Playfair won the competition to finish it in 1817 and completed a modified, unified single quadrangle between 1818 and 1834. The dome, with John Hutchison’s gilded Youth on top, arrived only in 1887 to Robert Rowand Anderson’s design. The Playfair Library inside remains one of the finest interiors in the city.

Civic control ended with the Universities (Scotland) Act 1858, which gave Edinburgh self-government and created the offices and bodies it still runs on: a Chancellor, an elected Rector, and the tripartite structure of University Court, General Council and Senatus Academicus, all now framed by the Universities (Scotland) Acts 1858 to 1966.

The Enlightenment Machine

Between roughly 1750 and 1800 Edinburgh earned the label Athens of the North, and the University supplied much of the staff. Joseph Black, who had discovered fixed air and latent heat at Glasgow, took the Edinburgh chemistry chair in 1766 and became a famous lecturer. William Robertson, Principal from 1762, was a serious historian who also grew the institution substantially. Dugald Stewart carried common-sense philosophy to a European audience, William Cullen reshaped medical teaching, and Adam Ferguson wrote what later readers would call sociology before the word existed. Adam Smith belongs to the city’s intellectual life and to Glasgow’s faculty.

Two of the most famous Edinburgh names, though, were not University appointments, and the distinction is worth keeping. James Hutton, the founder of modern geology, was Edinburgh-trained in medicine and thoroughly of the city’s scientific circles, but his Theory of the Earth was presented to the Royal Society of Edinburgh — a separate body, founded 1783 — in two sittings in 1785, the first read by Joseph Black on 7 March because Hutton was ill, the second by Hutton himself on 4 April. He was never a professor. And Hume, discussed below, was never one either.

The Oldest Medical School — and What It Did Not Invent

The Faculty of Medicine was organised in 1726, when four Edinburgh doctors — John Rutherford, Andrew Sinclair, Andrew Plummer and John Innes — petitioned the Town Council. Alexander Monro primus had already held the chair of anatomy since 1720, and three generations of Monros would hold it for around 126 years between them. Most of the founding faculty had trained at Leiden, and they built a Leiden in Scotland: bedside teaching, a linked infirmary, and lectures in English rather than Latin. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was widely regarded as the best medical school in the English-speaking world, and it is the oldest.

The school’s most quoted moment is James Young Simpson and chloroform. Simpson, an Edinburgh MD of 1832 and Professor of Midwifery from 1840, inhaled chloroform with his colleagues George Keith and James Matthews Duncan on the evening of 4 November 1847, used it in obstetrics on 8 November, and announced it to the Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh on 10 November. Queen Victoria’s use of it for the birth of Prince Leopold in 1853 ended the remaining resistance.

The same discipline applies to Joseph Lister. He came to Edinburgh in 1853 as assistant to Professor James Syme and married Syme’s daughter, but the carbolic acid antiseptic method was developed in Glasgow, where he was Regius Professor of Surgery from 1860 and published his results in The Lancet in 1867. He returned to Edinburgh in 1869 as Syme’s successor and refined the technique here. Training and refinement are a fair Edinburgh claim. The breakthrough is Glasgow’s.

The Chair David Hume Never Got

Walk down Edinburgh’s Royal Mile and you pass a statue of David Hume. Read almost any casual account of the University and you will find him described as one of its professors. He was not. Hume was born in Edinburgh, studied at the University as a boy, and later served as Keeper of the Advocates’ Library, which gave him the books for the History of England. He held no academic post anywhere, ever.

In 1744–45 he applied for the Edinburgh chair of ethics and pneumatical philosophy. Ministers petitioned the Town Council — which, being the governing body, decided such things — against him on grounds of “heresy, deism, scepticism, atheism &c &c &c”. He lost. Around 1751–52 he was passed over again for the chair of logic at Glasgow, and in the mid-1750s he narrowly avoided a heresy proceeding in the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.

This matters beyond pedantry, because it says something true about the institution. The civic foundation that made Edinburgh flexible also made it answerable to a council that could be lobbied by the Kirk. The greatest philosopher the city produced was kept out of its university by exactly the machinery that had created it. Two other alumni claims need the same care: Charles Darwin enrolled in medicine in October 1825 and left in 1827 without a degree, and Alexander Graham Bell was born and briefly educated in Edinburgh but never graduated and invented the telephone in North America.

Higgs, Informatics and the Roslin Connection

Peter Higgs first came to Edinburgh in 1954 and returned in 1960 to a lectureship. In 1964 he published the paper predicting the mechanism by which elementary particles acquire mass, and the particle that would carry his name. CERN’s Large Hadron Collider announced observation of a compatible particle in 2012, and in 2013 Higgs shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with François Englert, who with the late Robert Brout had proposed a similar mechanism independently in the same year. Higgs stayed as Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Physics until his death in 2024, and the University’s Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics carries the name forward.

Edinburgh’s other modern claim is less advertised and arguably larger. Donald Michie established an artificial intelligence research group at 4 Hope Park Square in 1963, which the University describes as Europe’s first; Edinburgh was the second university in the world, after Stanford, to teach the subject. The School of Informatics, formed in 1998 by merging artificial intelligence, cognitive science and computer science, is now among the largest in Europe. And the Roslin Institute, part of the University, produced Dolly in 1996.

Veterinary science is a third strength with an institutional history: the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College was reconstituted as part of the University in 1951, reached full faculty status in 1964, and its successor school at Easter Bush ranked second in the UK and sixth in the world in the QS 2026 subject tables.

Rectors, Mergers and Modern Scale

Like St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee, Edinburgh elects a Rector who chairs the University Court, an office recreated by the 1858 Act and codified in 1889. The early roll is a parade of establishment figures — Gladstone, Baldwin, Lloyd George, Kitchener, and Winston Churchill from 1929 to 1932. In 1935 students attempted to elect Leon Trotsky, who declined on the ground that his politics were too definite for a non-political office.

Student activism between 1968 and 1975, over apartheid divestment and student governance, turned the rectorship into something else. Jonathan Wills became the first student rector in 1971, and in 1972 a 21-year-old postgraduate named Gordon Brown was elected and fought to keep the Rector’s right to chair the Court. Later holders returned to public figures, including Magnus Magnusson and Muriel Gray, the first woman rector.

The modern University is also an accumulation of mergers: the Faculty of Divinity with New College in 1935, the Royal (Dick) Veterinary College in 1951, Moray House Institute of Education in 1998, and Edinburgh College of Art in 2011 with £13.8m of Scottish Funding Council support. (Duncan of Jordanstone, often confused with these, belongs to Dundee.) The result is one of the largest of the ancient Scottish universities, with 49,640 students matriculated in session 2024/25.

On the tables: QS 2026 places Edinburgh 34th and Times Higher Education 29th, with US News putting it 39th globally in 2025. The QS position has slipped from 22nd in 2024, but the component scores explain it — 99.6 out of 100 for academic reputation against 54.3 for citations per faculty. That is a metric sensitivity, not a decline in standing, and it is a good reason to distrust any single ranking quoted without its year and its method.

Timeline

1. 1557

   Robert Reid signs his will

   8,000 merks left to found a college in Edinburgh; the seed of the whole institution

2. 1558

   Reid dies

   His executors and descendants resist payment for a generation

3. 1560

   The Scottish Reformation

   Religious and legal upheaval stalls the college scheme entirely

4. 14 Apr 1582

   James VI grants the charter of novodamus

   The Town Council, not a pope, is empowered to found and govern a college

5. Oct 1583

   Teaching begins at Kirk o' Field

   Robert Rollock teaches the entire first cohort single-handed

6. 1587

   First graduations

   Forty-seven students laureated MA

7. 1617

   King James's College

   James VI, revisiting Scotland, decrees the college bear his name

8. 1708

   Regenting abolished

   Principal William Carstares installs specialist chairs on the Dutch model

9. 1720

   Alexander Monro primus takes the anatomy chair

   Three generations of Monros will hold it for some 126 years

10. 1726

    Faculty of Medicine organised

    Four Edinburgh doctors petition the Town Council; Leiden is the template

11. 1766

    Joseph Black arrives from Glasgow

    The discoverer of latent heat takes the Edinburgh chemistry chair

12. 1785

    Hutton's Theory of the Earth read to the RSE

    Presented by Joseph Black on 7 March, by Hutton himself on 4 April

13. 16 Nov 1789

    Old College foundation stone laid

    Robert Adam's scheme; he dies in 1792 with a quarter built

14. 1818–1834

    Playfair completes Old College

    A single unified quadrangle replaces Adam's double-court plan

15. 4 Nov 1847

    Simpson tries chloroform on himself

    Obstetric use follows on 8 November; announced to the Medico-Chirurgical Society on 10 November

16. 1858

    Town Council control ends

    The Universities (Scotland) Act creates self-government, Court, Senate and Rector

17. 1887

    The Old College dome is added

    Rowand Anderson's design, crowned by Hutchison's gilded Youth

18. 1951

    The Royal (Dick) Veterinary College joins

    Full faculty status follows in 1964

19. 1963

    Donald Michie founds an AI research group

    At 4 Hope Park Square — the root of Edinburgh's informatics strength

20. 1964

    Higgs publishes the mass mechanism

    Confirmed at CERN in 2012; Nobel Prize shared with Englert in 2013

21. 1996

    Dolly the Sheep is cloned at the Roslin Institute

    Now part of the University

22. 2011

    Edinburgh College of Art merges in

    Backed by £13.8m from the Scottish Funding Council

23. 2024/25

    49,640 students matriculated

    One of the largest of the ancient Scottish universities

Did You Know?

• The University opened on the site of Kirk o' Field, where Lord Darnley had been killed in 1567 — the most notorious address in Scotland became a lecture hall.
• Arthur Conan Doyle studied medicine at Edinburgh and clerked for the surgeon Joseph Bell, later writing to him: “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.”
• Robert Louis Stevenson entered in 1867 to read engineering, switched to law, and was called to the Scottish Bar on 16 July 1875 — then never practised a day.
• James Clerk Maxwell studied here from 1847 to 1850, and in 1860 applied for the Edinburgh natural philosophy chair and lost it to his friend P. G. Tait.
• In 1935 the students elected Leon Trotsky as Rector; he turned them down by letter.
• Teviot Row House and McEwan Hall become one of the largest venue clusters of the Edinburgh Festival Fringe every August, run by the Gilded Balloon and Underbelly.
• Edinburgh was the second university in the world after Stanford to teach artificial intelligence, starting from Donald Michie's 1963 group.

Honest Caveats

Hume was never a professor. The most common single error about this University concerns its most famous philosopher. He applied in 1744–45, was blocked on religious grounds, and held no academic post in his life.

Simpson’s first is chloroform, not anaesthesia. Ether came first, in Boston in October 1846. Waldie suggested chloroform, Glover had studied it in animals in 1842, and Simpson’s genuine achievement is the human demonstration, the obstetric application and the campaign that made it normal.

Two claims belong elsewhere. Lister’s antiseptic method was developed at Glasgow; Alexander Graham Bell was educated briefly here but graduated nowhere and invented the telephone in North America. Darwin’s Edinburgh years were formative but produced no degree.

The medical school’s founding narrative is contested. The 1726 organisation is documented; the account of who deserves credit for it is a live scholarly argument, and this article does not settle it.

Ranking figures are edition-dependent and volatile. The QS and THE numbers here are 2026 editions and several aggregator sites report different values. Any position quoted without its year and methodology should be treated as decoration.