A Deep History of Health & Healing in Edinburgh

A Deep History of Health & Healing in Edinburgh: Learning from our History Public Lecture Series

Edinburgh Medical School 300, College of Medicine and Veterinary Medicine

Thursday 5 February 2026, 6:30pm

ECCI Conference Room, High School Yards, Edinburgh, EH1 1LZ

This public talk will explore the evolution of places of healing in and around the City of Edinburgh from the Middle Ages, and will be co-presented by Malcolm Fraser, an architect who has been extensively involved with the renovation and repurposing of the buildings of Infirmary Street in Edinburgh (Dovecot Studios Gallery, ECCI), and who will outline the background of such key locations within the City, including evolving proposals for the Trinity Apse, as a places long associated with healing.

Harriet Richardson Blakeman is an architectural historian with a particular interest in the 19th and 20th centuries, and will bring the story up to the modern day, showing how changes in ideas about health and healing evolved from the 18th century in Infirmary Street, through to the 19th century Victorian buildings on Lauriston Place with their Nightingale Wards, and ultimately to the 21st century New Royal Infirmary under the NHS. Harriet will explore the ways in which hospital design reflects ideas about patient care, welfare and a therapeutic environment, along with medical knowledge of the time and the inevitable financial limitations.

Biographical Notes

Harriet Blakeman has developed a particular interest in the architectural history of hospital buildings having worked on two national studies, one in Scotland and one in England. She edited English Hospitals 1660-1948, published in 1998, and was the principal author of Building up our Health: the architecture of Scotland’s historic hospitals, published by Historic Scotland in 2010. In 2023 her article on Vale of Leven Hospital was published in Architectural History: the journal of the SAHGB. In 2024 Harriet successfully defended her PhD entitled ‘Medicine and Modernity: Fifty Years of NHS Hospital Building in Scotland 1948-1998’. She is currently working on a book that will develop the arguments in her thesis focusing on the development of hospital design for the welfare state in the United Kingdom.

Malcolm Fraser is an Edinburgh architect whose work spans from award-winning homes, placemaking and cultural renewal, and the care and renewal of historic buildings and towns, to advising Government and advising and empowering communities. His work in Edinburgh and elsewhere, promoting regeneration through bottom-up cultural renewal, led to an invitation to lead the Scottish Government’s Town Centre Review which, reporting in 2013, sought to bring life and investment to Scotland’s urban centres. He’s also Convenor of the Common Weal “thinktank”, which promotes National policy for social and environmental renewal.

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This event is free and open to all.

Please indicate any dietary or access requirements when you register to attend.

Lectures are in-person only and will not be live-streamed. Recordings of the lectures will be available after the event.

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