Documents reveal how times have changed for smokers at the ERI

YOU may think Scotland's smoking rules have never been tougher - but spare a thought for any hospital patient lighting up in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary in the 1920s.

Recently uncovered documents show that being caught sneaking into the hospital's turrets to have a crafty fag "renders the patient liable to instant dismissal". Puffing away on the wards was, however, entirely acceptable.

The smoking rules were found by the Lothian Health Services Archive as part of its work to restore old posters, books and records from Edinburgh hospitals.

Another document reveals instances of police paying junior doctors a visit after laboratory guinea pigs were set free.

Assistant archivist Laura Gould said: "It is our job to go through these files and when you look at records like this you don't expect to find too many light-hearted things.

"But this helps us understand more about that time as well.

"We tend to look back at that time and think a certain way about it - but in fact they were just like us.

"It really is a nice aspect about working through these files."

In one letter sent to staff, depute superintendent William Caw complained about two recent incidents, one which involved the releasing of the guinea pigs and another when young doctors playfully attacked their nursing contemporaries with confetti.

He wrote sternly: "I shall be glad to have explanation from you regarding the following matters.

"The scattering of confetti over night nurses when returning to the wards from the home early on Sunday morning.

"And the putting of guinea pigs through the windows of the nurses' dining room early on Sunday morning."

The smoking notices uncovered by the LHSA - an organisation run by NHS Lothian and Edinburgh University dedicated to the preservation of old local papers and artefacts - highlight the change in attitude to lighting up. While hospitals across the Lothians now prepare to go completely "smoke-free", people in 1927 at the ERI were only prohibited from doing so in the "turrets", and indeed encouraged to puff in the wards.

Aside from rules set down by hospital bosses, the young nurses themselves had a joke list of their own rules. Included in them was "don't dither in the doctor's room, it's draughty", "don't try to be a perfect nurse, there is no such thing", and "don't skip meals - there is many a bone in the throat that didn't come out of the dining hall".