Medicine Most Foul
Historian-turned-writer E. S. Thomson reveals her fascination with the dark, gothic underbelly of the city of Edinburgh
EDINBURGH-BASED author E. S. Thomson knows a thing or two about the history of medicine. Elaine uses her PHD in the subject to explore the dark and gory side of Victorian life in her fiction. So, when I meet her in the capital’s Surgeons’
Hall Museums, the setting and namesake of her latest novel, I’m surprised to learn that she’s actually rather squeamish.
“I’m a massive fainter!” Elaine tells me. “If I see something horrible, I’ll just pass out! Even just visiting this museum, can make me a bit dizzy. Sometimes I have to go and sit quietly in the corner until I recover!”
Surgeons’ Hall is the latest book in the author’s historical crime series. Set in the wake of the Burke and Hare scandal, the novel unfolds on the cobbled streets and narrow lanes of both Victorian Edinburgh and London. The protagonist of the series is Jem Flockhart, a cross-dressing apothecarist-turneddetective who is pursuing her ambitions in the only way that she can – by living as a man.
Elaine tells me that she got the idea for the character from real life. “The character of Jem was inspired by James Miranda Barry who famously left Ireland as a woman. She travelled over to Edinburgh by boat, entered her cabin as a woman and emerged as a man, because it was the only way she’d be allowed to study at university and have a career in surgery. It’s a really interesting story and it raises the question – how many more women were there working like this out there?”
Each book in the series examines a different aspect of Victorian medicine from hospitals in Beloved Poison, institutions in Dark Asylum, tropical medicine in The Blood and now surgery in this latest book, Surgeons’ Hall. With Elaine’s fainting tendencies, I had to ask her why she decided to dedicate her life to the grisly subject.
“I think sometimes we’re kind of drawn to nasty stuff. It’s like when we see roadkill, and we can’t help but stop and look at it. Sometimes I think the more I write about the gruesome elements of medicine the less chance there is of me fainting – but I don’t know whether that’s true or not! I find the history of medicine completely fascinating and really powerful. It’s everything good and bad about human nature, and that makes it a really exciting kind of crucible for any story that you choose to tell.”
Elaine moved to Edinburgh from Lancashire
32 years ago to study for her PHD. Now she spends her days alternating between lecturing at Napier University and writing her gothic novels. Elaine explains that setting a book in the city was something she felt that she had to build up to.
“I just fell in love with Edinburgh. It’s such a great city. It’s filled with the two things that I really love: stories and history, which are arguably the same thing in many ways.
“Although I’ve always featured characters and medical history from Scotland in my books, I’ve always set them in London. I really put off setting my work in
“The history of medicine is fascinating – and humanity” everything good and bad about