£6 a skull to view assorted appendages

The appendage mentioned in my bombshell opening sentence is a third leg that grew out of a Highland man’s spine. It would be invidious of you, and expected of me, to make crass reference to the song Jake the Peg (“with his extra leg, diddle-iddle-iddle-um”), but out of decency we shall refrain, if only because the song’s singer – one R. Harris Esq – turned out to be, um, an indecent fellow now diddling his iddles in Stafford Prison.

After diddling about with an 18-month refurbishment, Surgeons’ Hall Museums threw open its doors yesterday to the great unwashed. The Surgeons never used to be like this, but were quite snooty about their peculiar collection, implying you could only come and see if you had a professional interest.

Maybe they thought the average peasant would blanch at all this horror and return with a torch-wielding mob shouting, “Burn the freaks and other medics!” The collection does make the medical profession look a bit weird, which I think we all knew already.

Weirdly, too, the refurbishment cost £4 million so they must have bought up all the paint in B&Q. You know my feelings about all these public projects that cost many millions of pounds. My question: “But how?”

How Monday’s official opening by His Royal Wryness The Duke of Edinburgh will go is anybody’s guess. One expects the press to gather in hope of a gaffe. “You Scotch really suffer from an excess of appendages, don’t you?” Or: “Did you collect these just by asking the average Edinburgh passer-by in a 10-minute period?”

That’s if he can find the place. Thanks to a high wall and a lack of scene-setting space out front, Surgeons’ Hall’s fine neoclassical frontage doesn’t manage to impose itself on the crowded street outside. Across the road, the City fish and chip (and more) restaurant, which also recently underwent a refurbishment thought to have cost less than £4 million, and the glassily modern Festival Theatre are better placed to attract the meandering mob.

Despite being the work of William Henry Playfair, who designed everything in 19th century Scotland, and despite its columns, pediment and Ionic capitals, you could easily walk past Surgeons’ Hall and never notice it was there, partly because that was the way they liked it. Now they’ve got inviting signs up. Maybe they need the money.

It’s £6 a skull (£3.50 concessions) to enter this den of frightfulness which, historically, has been home to the Greig and Menzies Campbell collections. David Middleton Greig, a Dundee surgeon, collected 250 skulls, while Glasgow’s John Menzies Campbell left many specimens and instruments from dentistry. Still, it’s nice to have a hobby.

I ought to confess that, despite the high-minded tone I’m struggling to manage here, I myself have form in this regard. When a young man, I worked as researcher on a project at Edinburgh University’s Department of Anatomy. My qualification for the job? I was unemployable – there being few openings back then for cloud watchers – and it was part of a government scheme to get us off the dole statistics.

The anatomy department had a fine collection of life and death masks, previously associated with the once credible science of phrenology, which judged your character by the shape of your heid. Thus it claimed to be able to spot a criminal in a crowd. The fundamental flaw was that it failed to take account of the fact that, in those days, everyone wore a hat. And so the otherwise rigorously scientific pursuit fell into disuse.

Our death masks collection also included the law-abiding such as Mendelssohn, who looked contented, and Coleridge, who looked down in the mouth. We also had William Burke, of Burke and Hare fame, whose skin was used to bound the Surgeons’ Hall pocket-book mentioned earlier.

We, like the Surgeons, staged an exhibition, which was a big hit with the lieges. I’m sure the Surgeons will have queues round the block too.

So if your mind’s set on a moulage (plaster cast of an abnormality) this weekend, you know the show, you know the town.