The Court of Session shared its Edinburgh home with some of the leading medical institutions in the British Atlantic world. The University of Edinburgh's medical school and the Royal College of Physicians educated new doctors, including many Americans, in the latest advancements in medical science and patient care.

Great Britain was in a near constant state of war for most of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Between 1707 and 1815, British subjects fought in a number of major conflicts, including the Jacobite Uprisings, the Wars of Spanish and Austrian Succession, the global Seven Years' War, the American War for Independence, the French Revolutionary Wars, and the Napoleonic Wars. Peace quickly gave way to renewed combat as the inhabitants of the British Atlantic world vied for land, power, and mastery on sometimes global scales.