Edinburgh Medical Students Peculiarly Described as ‘Occasional Auditors’

Abstract

The phrase ‘occasional auditor’ appears to have been coined by a Royal Commission of 1826–32 to describe students who attended classes but did not intend to graduate. ‘Occasional’ meant ‘infrequent’, ‘auditor’ meant ‘listener’, and the Commission paid scant attention to these students. At the Edinburgh Medical School, however, such non-graduating students significantly outnumbered the graduates, and this can be shown to have been the case from as early as 1726 and to have continued until 1858, particular attention being paid here to the last two decades (i.e. 1839–58). There is no existing Edinburgh University list of ‘occasional auditors’, but a methodology of cross-referencing is described which makes it possible to identify the ‘occasional auditors' by name. ‘Occasional auditors' in the Faculty of Medicine can now be redefined as serious students who had assembled their own course of study in order to further their personal careers, and it is possible to show that very many of these careers were in medicine, largely in the emerging field of general practice.

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18 Once they had matriculated they were free to attend University classes if they paid the appropriate class fee, but there was no University examination open to them, even as a lesser class examination, unless they had given notice of their intention to sit the degree examination.

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19 Difficulties included the annual repetition in print of the same new member's name until the year when he was promoted to a fellowship, and also the clumsiness of visual matching of names from a list of ‘auditors’ with individually projected shadows from microfilm records.

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27 It has not been the habit even in learned circles to stress the point that it was normal for an Edinburgh medical student not to proceed to an MD and that he did not have to have been inferior.

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