Gunning Lectures

Born to a large family in 1818 in Dumfriesshire, Robert Gunning studied medicine in Edinburgh and was licensed by the Royal College of Surgeons. He pursued a career in academic medicine, teaching anatomy at Aberdeen and then Edinburgh to great renown. He was part of a small group that pioneered the use of chloroform on patients, and was associated in Edinburgh with a number of prominent ‘divines’, including Thomas Chalmers who laid the foundation stone to New College in 1846. In 1849, he and his wife emigrated to Brazil because of the warmer climate, where they remained for 33 years, and among other things managed a gold mine, oversaw the construction of a railway in Rio de Janeiro, and financed various schemes to alleviate poverty.

On his return to Edinburgh, Gunning set up several prizes and lectureships around the city, not only to New College but also to the Royal Society, the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Royal Society of Antiquaries. Displaying a particularly progressive attitude for his day, he set up bursaries for women to study medicine and financed a plaque in St Giles cathedral to commemorate Jenny Geddes who threw her stool at the Dean in protest at a new liturgy.

The lectures were set up to promote the study of Natural Science among the students of New College, specifically to bring to their attention the findings of Science, Philosophy, Language, Antiquity and Sociology. More recent Gunning Lecturers have covered topics including Religious Art, the World Wide Web, Economics, and Gender in Hinduism and Islam.

Past lectures