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Aberdeen Royal Infirmary

UK public sector hospital in Foresterhill, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionAug 20, 2026
Entity authorityQ4666975 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Aberdeen Royal Infirmary (ARI) is the largest hospital in the Grampian area, located on the Foresterhill site in Aberdeen, Scotland. The ARI is a teaching hospital offering tertiary care for a population of over 600,000 across the north-east of Scotland. It offers all medical specialities with the exception of heart and liver transplants. It is managed by NHS Grampian.

History

The Aberdeen Royal Infirmary has it origins in a facility established at Woolmanhill in 1739. The move to the current site formed part of the Aberdeen Joint Hospitals Scheme as envisaged by the Scottish doctor Matthew Hay, which involved the development of an integrated medical campus at Foresterhill. The granite buildings on the site were designed by James Brown Nicol. The hospital was officially opened by the Duke and Duchess of York on 23 September 1936—King Edward VIII had been due to open the infirmary but he called off his visit and instead went to Ballater railway station to meet the American socialite Wallis Simpson off her train. The first patients were admitted a month later. The hospital joined the National Health Service in 1948.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Aberdeen Royal Infirmary” is uK public sector hospital in Foresterhill, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Aberdeen, Royal and Infirmary, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1739, 1936, 1948—that can be checked directly. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. For this dossier, Aberdeen, Royal and Infirmary is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “uK public sector hospital in Foresterhill, Aberdeen, Scotland, UK” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 20, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4666975. VIAF identifies the subject as 125768612. The Library of Congress control number is no90014734. Authority coordinates are 57.155, -2.136. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1739, 1936 and 1948.

Critical limits

Overview language is designed for orientation and should not be treated as a substitute for the evidence cited beneath it. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Aberdeen Royal Infirmary”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Aberdeen Royal Infirmary primary sources, Aberdeen Royal Infirmary archive and Aberdeen research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Aberdeen Royal Infirmary” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.