By the age of sixteen, John Rae felt that the Orkney Islands had taught him all they could. He wanted to see the wider world, but he was not yet ready to go as far as the Canadian wilderness. Medicine interested him, probably partly because with a medical degree, you could travel wherever you wanted and still find work. This would not have been the case if John had followed his father into farming.
At first, John thought of going to London to study, but then he discovered that he would not be allowed to graduate before he was twenty years old. The Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh did not have such a regulation, so John went there.
Edinburgh’s famous castle dominates its skyline.
He spent four winters in Edinburgh, in his own words “plodding through the various courses of study” and engaging in snowball fights with the boys from the town. In later life, that was all he claimed to remember from his time there. Nevertheless, in April 1833, at the age of nineteen, and after a rigorous oral exam, John Rae graduated as a doctor.
In the 1830s, Edinburgh was a bustling city of 160,000 people. Its school of medicine was famous, although it had a reputation for being politically radical.