The South African College (known as the University of Cape Town after 1918) launched its Medical School in 1911. The teaching of medicine in South Africa had been under active discussion for a decade before this and, in preparation, the University of the Cape of Good Hope (the regulating body that controlled the quality of high school education around the country) had negotiated with three Scottish universities to recognise the preliminary undergraduate courses in science offered in Cape Town (Louw 1969). When the first course in anatomy began in May 1911, not only was the course recognised as a Scottish equivalent, but the first professor, Robert Black Thomson, was himself a Scotsman trained in Edinburgh, as was Matthew Robertson Drennan, his demonstrator hired in 1913 (Slater 1999, 255).

Janine Correia, Quenton Wessels and Willie Vorster (2013) have looked closely at the relationship between the early South African anatomists and Edinburgh. In academic hindsight, it really does become obvious why the connection should be so strong. South African medical practitioners were largely trained in Edinburgh during the second half of the nineteenth century. Out of the fifty-odd Cape-born doctors licensed to practise medicine in the Cape Colony in 1882, half were Edinburgh-trained (Burrows 1958, 150). Not only was there a bias at the Cape for Edinburgh medical education, but there were also hundreds of Edinburgh-qualified doctors, Scots and non-Scots, available and looking for medical and academic practices around the British Empire. Why was this single medical school so disproportionately important in training doctors (and anatomists) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? To answer this question, we need to look a little closer at the medical school in Edinburgh.

EDINBURGH AT THE CUTTING EDGE OF ANATOMY

Academic studies of anatomy in Edinburgh arose out of the conflict between physicians and surgeon-apothecaries, which had been going on from at least the 1650s. Surgeons were not perceived as real doctors by physicians because their training was more practical whereas traditional medicine at the time depended on an education with the classical overtones of ancient Greece and Rome. Medical doctors were seen as men of cultured education, but surgeons were not. Both qualifications required the study of anatomy as a base.