From 1818 - 1839 King's College and Marischal College operated a Joint Medical School in Aberdeen, with a dedicated Lecturer in Anatomy. The School was dissolved in 1839 owing to a disagreement regarding its original terms of agreement, and individual training courses in the subject were pursued by the 2 colleges until their union in 1860. A Department of Anatomy was subsequently established at the newly formed University of Aberdeen in 1860. In 1990 it joined with the departments of Pharmacology and Physiology to create a new School of Biomedical Sciences.
Marischal College had established Aberdeen's first Chair in Anatomy after dissolution of the Joint Medical School in 1839, to which Allen Thomson, well-known histologist and embryologist was appointed, 1839 - 1841. His successor, Professor Jardine Lizars, 1841 - 1860 became first Chair of Anatomy in Aberdeen University, 1860 - 1863. He was succeeded by Sir John Struthers (1823 - 1899), 1863 - 1889, made famous for his enthusiasm in using comparative animal material in his teaching presentations (most notably, the Tay Whale , a huge sperm whale, beached on the Scottish coast at Dundee), and under whom the first Regius Chair of Anatomy was instituted; Robert W. Reid, 1889 - 1925, founder of Aberdeen Anthropological Museum (now Marischal Museum), who achieved prominence through the discovery of 'Reid's Base Line'; Alexander Low, 1925 - 1938, a modest man who made important contributions to understanding the embryological development of the mandible, the skeletal remains of Neolithic and bronze age skeletons and to human anthropometry (his work in this field laying the foundations for the Aberdeen Growth Study of 1956); Robert Lockhart, 1938 - 1964, an outstanding teacher of Anatomy and author (with Gilbert F. Hamilton and Forest William Fyfe) of the much re-published textbook, Anatomy of the Human Body (London: Faber, 1959); David Sinclair, 1964 - 1977, who made important contributions to curricular development of the Anatomical sciences in Aberdeen; and E. John Clegg, 1977 - 1993, last Regius Professor of Anatomy, and an acknowledged authority on the historical demography of isolated populations.
From the guide to the Papers of the Department of Anatomy, University of Aberdeen, 19th c - 20th c, (University of Aberdeen)
