Over the last few weeks and months we’ve been adding a lot of digitised material from our historical collections to the Edinburgh Research Archive. One of the collections that has been scanned is a series of M.D theses written in Latin and published in the period from late 1700s to early 1800s. We now can claim to have the oldest thesis record in the British Library’s e-thesis online service (EThOS) – a dissertation written by Thomas Charles Hope and published in 1787. The challenge is on for other institutions to beat this.

Thomas Charles Hope was one of the University of Edinburgh’s more interesting alumnus who discovered the chemical element Strontium, and also taught a young Charles Darwin who viewed his chemistry lectures as highlights in his otherwise largely dull education at Edinburgh University (we’ve come along way since!).

Thomas Charles Hope’s M.D thesis can be accessed online for free in the Edinburgh Research Archive.