Charles Darwin in Edinburgh: How the City He Hated Shaped His Genius

Before Charles Darwin rewrote science with On the Origin of Species, he was a miserable 16-year-old trying — and failing — to become a doctor in Edinburgh.

Statue of Charles Darwin at the Natural History Museum, London — the man who hated Edinburgh’s weather but changed the world with his theory of evolution.

In 1825, Darwin arrived 11 Lothian Street in Edinburgh to study medicine at the prestigious University of Edinburgh. But rather than falling in love with the city’s ancient streets and academic buzz, he immediately started writing letters home... complaining about the weather.

Edinburgh, he moaned, was cold, grey, and damp. The skies were a permanent shade of “no thank you.” He wasn’t a fan of the food either. And don’t get him started on the surgery.

Back then, operations were a spectator sport. No anaesthetic. Just saws, screams, and surgeons racing against time. Darwin once watched a child being operated on without pain relief and promptly decided: medicine was not for him. He walked out — literally — and never came back.

Instead, he spent his days beachcombing, collecting bugs, and joining a secretive student science club called the Plinian Society. They performed eyebrow-raising experiments (like watching flatworms regrow heads) and debated whether barnacles had souls.

Darwin dropped out of Edinburgh after two years of avoiding surgery, skipping lectures, and collecting sea creatures instead of qualifications. His father — a successful doctor himself — was less than thrilled. Seeing no future in medicine for his squeamish son, he suggested a “respectable” alternative: the Church. After all, what could be more stable than a country parson with a hobby for beetles?

So off Darwin went to Cambridge to study theology, where — predictably — he spent more time riding horses, shooting birds, and obsessing over fossils than preparing sermons. But this detour into divinity had a surprising side effect: it put him in touch with the scientific elite.

One of his mentors recommended him for a gentleman’s position on a ship about to sail around the world: the HMS Beagle. It was supposed to be a two-year voyage. It lasted five. And it changed everything.

So in a strange twist of fate, Darwin’s failed career in medicine, his weather-related misery, and a half-hearted attempt at priesthood all led to that one fateful journey — and the spark that would ignite the theory of evolution.

The house where Darwin once lodged no longer stands. But in its place now rises the National Museum of Scotland — home to fossils, dinosaur skeletons and the wonders of life that once thrilled him. A small plaque on the museum’s rear wall quietly marks where it all began.

Just twenty years after Darwin fled Edinburgh’s brutal surgical theatres, James Young Simpson discovered anaesthesia at Simpson House — a breakthrough that transformed medicine and silenced the screams Darwin couldn’t bear.

Darwin left Edinburgh haunted by pain — but not long after, another Edinburgh doctor discovered how to take that pain away.

Want more quirky stories from Edinburgh’s past?

From screaming surgeries to secret societies, Edinburgh’s streets are bursting with tales that shaped the world. If you’ve enjoyed this glimpse into Darwin’s gloomy student years, why not take your curiosity further?

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