The medication chest of Bonnie Prince Charlie’s private doctor, used on the Battle of Culloden, will go on show for the primary time.
The historic merchandise, which incorporates medicines constituted of beetles, beaver anal glands and turpentine, might be a part of a brand new exhibition touring the Highlands known as “Distant and Rural Cures.”
Organised by the Royal School of Physicians of Edinburgh (RCPE), the show explores the modifications which have taken place in Highland medication within the final 600 years, and uncovers tales behind Jacobite medicines, native healers and famed Celtic physicians resembling The Beatons.
Dr Daisy Cunynghame, curator of the show, confirmed the medication field belonged to Stuart Threipland.
It was used through the Battle of Culloden, the climax of the Jacobite Rising, which ran from 1745-46.
This medication chest, and the remainder of the exhibition, celebrates the individuality and the interconnectedness of the historical past of medication within the Highlands and IslandsDr Daisy Cunynghame, exhibition curator
Whereas Threipland is thought for his function medically aiding the Younger Pretender, Dr Cunynghame mentioned he was additionally a “stand-out” earlier president of the RCPE.
Additionally on show would be the unique handwritten survey responses from ministers and medical doctors throughout the Highlands and Islands from the 1850s detailing the poverty, illness and deprivation attributable to the potato famine and Highland Clearances.
Highland historians have mentioned the geographical isolation meant that many medical recipes wanted to be tailored to incorporate regionally out there components, together with seaweed and fish oil.
They mentioned the areas was additionally seen as a possible supply of revenue for charlatans and an inflow of travelling quacks – unqualified individuals who claimed medical data – from the Lowlands who streamed throughout the Highlands within the 1700s and 1800s.
Dr Cunynghame mentioned: “Medication within the Highlands and Islands is usually handled one-dimensionally – as merely a narrative about folks treatments and unusual rituals.
“We made certain once we had been growing this exhibition that we appeared past that, and we’re excited to have uncovered tales about some actually necessary individuals, and discoveries, within the historical past of Highland medication.”
She added: “The Highlands and Islands influenced, and in flip was influenced by, developments elsewhere in Europe.
“This medication chest, and the remainder of the exhibition, celebrates the individuality and the interconnectedness of the historical past of medication within the Highlands and Islands.”
The touring exhibition beings on September 16 and can initially run on the Gairloch Museum earlier than transferring to Castletown Heritage Centre in Caithness.
The show is obtainable for mortgage to any museums, galleries, libraries and different public our bodies who're fascinated by borrowing it.
Fought close to Inverness in Scotland on April 16 1746, the Battle of Culloden noticed Prince Charles Edward Stuart, aka Bonnie Prince Charlie, and his forces, whereas making an attempt to reclaim the throne for his household, meet a British military led by the Duke of Cumberland, son of the Hanoverian King George II.
The battle lastly settled a contest for the monarchy that had lasted virtually 60 years.