Phenomenal Bodies @ Centre for Research Collections, University of Edinburgh

1 September 2025 – 31 January 2026

Object in focus

The item we’ve chosen to highlight from the Phenomenal Bodies display in Heritage Collections (University of Edinburgh) is a photograph album dating back to the First World War. It’s held in Lothian Health Services Archive (LHSA), the archive of NHS Lothian based here. LHSA collects records from local hospitals and material about the history of healthcare in Edinburgh and the Lothians from the sixteenth century to the present day.

The album was made by staff at Edenhall Hospital, which was a Red Cross facility for “Limbless Soldiers and Sailors” founded near Kelso in the Scottish Borders in 1915. The first such institution in Scotland, Edenhall was a treatment, rehabilitation and convalescence hospital for servicemen who had lost limbs in the First World War. When demand for services outstripped what the Kelso hospital could offer, Edenhall relocated to Musselburgh (to the east of Edinburgh) in 1918 after its management committee acquired buildings and land around Pinkieburn House, once the ancestral home of the Lindsay family. Following the war, the hospital became the main Ministry of Pensions hospital in Scotland. Even after Edenhall was taken into the NHS in 1953 and its remit expanded to general hospital care, it kept its mission to treat ex-service personnel well into the 1960s. The hospital finally closed in 2010.

This photograph album, spanning Edenhall’s work in both Kelso and Musselburgh, is one of the few original artefacts to survive from this period of the hospital’s life. It provides an invaluable insight into the experiences of patients and the technologies that were available to them. As you look through the pages, you get a real sense of day-to-day life in Edenhall during the First World War. There are the more formal shots of ward interiors and staff sitting to attention in groups that you might expect in a hospital album from this time, but the over-riding impression is of informal glimpses of life in what appeared very much to be a community, with images of patients outnumbering those of staff. Patients are shown using a variety of mobility aids, from different types of wheelchair (two and three wheeled) to crutches and walking sticks. The emphasis on aids for lower limb amputees is not surprising: artificial legs were made and repaired in workshops on site, but prosthetic arms were made in England and fitted in central Edinburgh (although an arm-making workshop finally opened in Edenhall towards the end of the war).

The majority of photographs show patients and Red Cross nurses outside, relaxed in solo or group shots. Some people are clearly engaged in rehabilitation activities (which was also work to keep the hospital running: we see one patient helping a nurse to dry laundry in a mangle), but most are out and about, sitting in the fresh air in the country grounds of the hospital sites, running craft sales, on picnics or outings, and playing croquet or tennis. Photographs are of all shapes and sizes, clearly arranged with care across each album sheet.

The pages we have chosen to highlight for the Phenomenal Bodies display reflect the sense of community and commitment to servicemen’s wellbeing across both Kelso and Musselburgh sites. The left hand page features sections of a programme for a concert held in August 1918 when the hospital had relocated to Musselburgh. As well as a demonstration of the togetherness and resourcefulness of the Edenhall community, the mock advertisement for artificial legs on the programme’s back cover shows not only a strong sense of humour, but also of pride in the products made and repaired on site. The adjacent page is a collage of photographs from Edenhall’s former Kelso home. Men are captured relaxing in the grounds, and we see the range of mobility aids patients used (one man is even cradling a cairn terrier as he sits in his wheelchair: pet cats, dogs and rabbits were a familiar site in military hospitals in the First World War). This is also one of the only pages where we can clearly see patients with lower arm amputations.

The mechanised combat in the First World War undoubtedly accelerated the development of disability aids and artificial limbs as large groups of men returning with injuries necessitated both scaling up and innovation in the existing artificial limb industry. Hospitals like Edenhall (which served the east of Scotland) and Erskine in Renfrewshire (for the west) became centres of excellence in rehabilitation and care, a legacy which paved the way for the development of pioneering prosthetics. When the thalidomide tragedy of the late 1950s and early 1960s necessitated the development of artificial limbs for young children into adulthood, Edinburgh once again became a centre of innovation: a story that continues in our Phenomenal Bodies display.

Louise Williams, Archivist, Heritage Collections

For more information on the display visit: Phenomenal Bodies | Library | Library