Recipe Resources

Today I put out a call on Twitter asking for open access recipe resources of all sorts. I completed my MA dissertation on early modern recipe books so was familiar with some resources already out there, but I’ve been surprised by how many wonderful resources (and people!) I hadn’t come across. I thought I would list these resources here. I’ll definitely be adding to this as I explore my topic further and I will potentially make a separate section that focuses more on the medicinal side of my research too. If you’re working on a recipe resource and it’s not on this list, please let me know via Twitter, @booksandguts.

I hope this can be of use!

Pario Gallico is a YouTube channel dedicated to ancient cooking methods.

Historical Italian Cooking is a cooking blog which has recipes spanning ancient to modern.

Medieval Cookery draws recipes from a range of online sources.

Grene Boke has many medieval recipes. Scroll down to the bottom of each recipe to see sources.

Foods of England has online recipe books from the 14th to 20th centuries.

Wellcome Library has a vast collection of digitised manuscript recipe books (16th-19th century), which can be found here. The British Library has just (end of Sept 2020) released some wonderful guides to their culinary manuscripts: 17th century, 18th century, 19th-20th century.   

The National Library of Scotland has digitised recipe books, here.

Folgerpedia has a ‘Recipe books at the Folger Shakespeare Library’  resource and many of the digitised recipe books also have transcriptions by the wonderful EMROC

RMIT university has open access material from The Emily McPherson College of Domestic Economy which opened in 1927 was for many years the only institution in Victoria offering courses in domestic economy, cookery and dress making. The University of St Andrews has an online recipe book collection. The National Archives have resources relating to  UK war rationing.

Culinary Historians of Canada have a great resource, Canadian Cookbooks Online, which posts the cookbooks that tell us about the foods Canadians cooked, ate and shared in the past.

Amgueddfa Cymru/National Museum Wales has a digital version of Welsh Fare originally published in 1976.

18th century notebooks has a webpage dedicated to English, Scottish and American printed recipe books and household management guides.

Clare Gordon Bettencourt is a PhD candidate at UC Irvine studying America’s food identity standards, and a pedagogical fellow at UCI’s Division of Teaching Excellence. She has put together a handy list of American online primary resources.

 

This year (2021) the Museum of London is working on Arts Council England funded project called London Eats. It is described as follows: 

Over the course of the year, the project aims to understand and reflect upon Londoners’ relationship with food and drink through new collecting.We’ve started to consult community groups and school children to find out what food means to them. We’ve also looked at audience research commissioned over the past ten years, to understand people’s feelings towards food and drink. These insights and discussions will help inform the objects and stories we collect over the coming months.We’re also researching in more detail food items in our collection. Which objects do we have, which stories they tell, and what is their relevance to Londoners today? Here we share some of these objects, and how they relate to the contemporary food issues we’re discussing with others.

The Folger also has some great projects that look at historical recipes. You’ll definitely want to check out the amazing Before Farm to Table website. It is described as ‘a buffet of delightful memories for the collaborative research team that worked on the project for four years’.  There you will  ‘exciting prompts for cooking experiments together with insights into the sometimes familiar, possibly difficult, and often overlooked histories of foodstuffs, trade routes, enforced labor practices, and the influence of taste-makers.’  

Colleen Kennedy compiles a great list of her favourites here. This list includes the fabulous Cooking in the Archives, which is one of my personal favourites too.  You can also find Cooking in the Archives on Twitter @Rare_Cooking

Cooking in the Archives sets out to find, cook, and discuss recipes from cookbooks produced between 1600 and 1800. This project is situated at the intersection between the practice of modern cooking and the history of early modern manuscript and printed recipe books. I believe these recipes belong in the modern kitchen as well as the historical archive. After all, what are recipes if not instructions for cooking?

 

Continuing on with the early modern, there is also EMROC.

Organized in 2012, the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective (EMROC) is an international group of scholars and enthusiasts who are committed to improving free online access to historical archives and quality contextual information. We see the importance of linking hundreds of texts in repositories that may be thousands of miles apart, as well as creating a space for dialogue about the ideas and research generated around these texts.

 

The Recipes Project is also invaluable, international resource which is interested in the history of recipes, ranging from magical charms to veterinary remedies. Recipe Project is on Twitter @historecipes

The Recipes Project blog is a collaborative international research community that brings together and showcases interdisciplinary research on recipes across broad temporal and geographic spans. The project features case studies from across time and place: from the ancient world to China and Japan to Renaissance Italy, nineteenth-century America, and more. We cover a range of thematic areas from medicine to alchemy to art technique to food. We also provide resources, thematic series, and we highlight the wonderful ways in which community members use recipes in their teaching. 

The Recipes Project also has an amazing Zotero page, which is a shared bibliography of historical recipe collections and recipe-related secondary readings.

Early Modern Maritime recipes examines recipes circulating before 1800 in print and manuscript in the area now defined as Canada’s Maritime provinces.

Early Modern Maritime Recipes examines recipes circulating before 1800 in print and manuscript in the area now defined as Canada’s Maritime provinces. Early modern recipe writing focused on food and medicine, but recorded a range of other practices associated with alchemy, cosmetics, veterinary, medicine, and laundry, amongst other things. These recipes are texts about knowledge exchange and social networks. They reflect the commercial, social, and familial relationships involved in the acquisition of knowledge, record the use of goods in making products, and connect domestic practices and institutionalized learning. Early Modern Maritime Recipes compiles a record of extant recipes by digitizing and transcribing recipes from archival collections throughout the Maritime provinces.

Nursing Clio is just a fantastic resource all round. A quick search using the term food or recipe brings up a wealth of interesting articles, including Margret Boyle’s article on early modern Spanish recipes.

For information on where to find historical Mexican recipes, see this Smithsonian article.

Historic Food is a working early modern kitchen at Wreay Farm, a seventeenth century house in Cumbria. Their website has recipes and information on historical kitchenware.

Townsends is  a YouTube channel dedicated to 18th century American Life.

See also a video on pottage by Historic Echoes

The Cookbook of Unknown Ladies showcases ‘curious recipes and hidden histories from Westminster City Archives’

The Regency Cook is great on Twitter but also has posts on A Day in the Live of a Regency House. For groups using historical recipes to teach or teach historical cooking see: The Time Travelling Cook and Historic Food

If you like podcasts, then Lady Science has a very funny and digestible intro to recipes (especially women’s recipe knowledge) called ‘What recipes tell us about women’s knowledge and lives‘. A really great starting point if you want to start looking into recipes, from early modern to 20th century, but aren’t sure where to start!

 Egham Museum’s podcast, Egham Oddities, has an episode on Tips for Tea, a 1907 manual for hosting a great tea by Mabel I Rivers. It’s a really great episode that looks at women’s authorship and authority over their recipe knowledge and why you shouldn’t look over unassuming looking museum objects! This podcast features Dr Katie Carpenter.

Here is a blog on the history of fish fingers featured on the Tavistock Institute’s blog.

Reddit has a r/old_recipes which is a great resource for old cookbooks. It’s also really lovely for seeing how old recipes, especially family ones, can help people connect with each other.

A Love Letter to the Hospital Museum

 

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As our favourite commericalised-holiday-that-profits-off-the-commodification-of-our-desire-to-be-loved-in-this-lonely-lonely-world rolls around yet again, I thought I’d write another love letter to a museum. Read last year’s Love Letter To A Little Museum, here.

This year my boo is a hospital museum, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Museum and Archives to be exact. I had applied to volunteer at the museum before I had even moved to London. How did I initially apply you ask? I just slid into their DMs on Twitter asking if I could volunteer, of course 😉 How very Valentine’s. (I will point out, though, that I still had to fill out an application form and receive some NHS volunteer training before I could start!) The fact I starting volunteering at this museum as soon as I moved to London definitely contributes to my love of the place – the archivists and volunteers are some of the first friendly faces I met and the museum is probably one of the first places I felt at home in this vast city. Barts has also allowed me to continue gaining museum experience whilst I complete my MA and gain some archival experience too. Repackaging archival material has been a fantastic and interesting project – despite making my hands drier than a desiccated mummy and spurring a new hatred for staplers and pins. Who the heck pins together documents?!

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The museum’s trusty staple remover. I call it Gnasher.

As much as I personally love the museum, neither the world nor the museum’s worth revolve around me. The role Bart’s hospital museum occupies within the hospital’s campus is both an important and undercelebrated one. Naturally, a large number of people who come to the museum or use the archives are academically interested in the history of Barts and the NHS. I have chatted to PhD students researching various aspects of our society’s relationship with medicine and regularly groups of art students come with their teachers to see our famous Hogarth staircase. GCSE history students have found the museum invaluable to their course. We also get the odd Sherlock Holmes enthusiast.

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However, the museum is also a liminal space. It is both within Barts grounds and outside the wards and waiting rooms; a place to spend time, waste time or eat away some at waiting time. A place to feel like you’re not in a hospital whilst knowing medical aid is available quickly. Quite a lot of our visitors are patients, family of patients or people killing time before appointments. It’s a place to stretch your legs and stimulate your mind. It is also a place where sat at a desk as you enter is a person ready to greet you. An obvious detail, you may think, but it is not as inconsequential as you would think. Maybe I am just being romantic but it is Valentine’s Day, so I am going to unashamedly wax lyrical. As museum volunteer at Barts, I have found myself occupying a role that I haven’t in my previous museum work…That of listener. I don’t know whether it is the aforementioned spatial liminality of the museum or a freedom from the often sanitised and formal nature of medical interactions that brings people to my desk. Maybe it is the fact that I am not in a uniform and the very nature of being front of house means that talking to me about the museum (or life in general) will not distract me from any tasks or work that I have to do. Being available for a natter is my work.

People talk to me about a whole range of things and I listen and ask questions. I never advise and if the guest has a concern, I always suggest that they seek advice from their healthcare professional. I am painfully aware that I am only qualified as a listener but as of yet, that has been more than enough. Often people thank me profusely for talking with them and I always reply sincerely that it is, in fact, my pleasure. I acknowledge that this post would be so much more interesting if I went in to details of the amazing stories that I have been told, the poignant tales, the celebratory moments and the sad ones. But I won’t. It would seem uncouth and a transgression of trust. I am not just a listener but a keeper too and (providing there are no safeguarding issues) what’s said to me, stays with me. It is a moving and privileged position and one that I did not expect when I signed up as a volunteer.

Now, it wouldn’t be a BooksandGuts post if I didn’t get on my soap box and preach the importance of interdisciplinary approaches to medicine and the medical humanities, so I will continue to be #onbrand. If these experiences at Barts Hospital Museum and Archive have taught me anything, it is that there is a need for these liminal spaces within healthcare. They don’t have to be museums*, I am talking about access to green places, libraries, cinemas or film nights, theatres, and so on. I have found in my experience that children’s hospitals are already nailing this – when I look back on my time in Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, my minor op was such a small part of my stay. I painted some pottery and read for a bit, popped in the theatre for an op, recovered and went home. Just because we age and understand the nature of hospital treatment doesn’t mean that a hospital stay is any less traumatic or draining on our mental resources. Should patients identify soley as a passive ‘patient’ or as a person, with interests, preferences and needs, who just so happens to be receiving treatment? There are valid practical reasons to disregard this argument; money is the obvious one as the NHS chronically has too little as well as the fact that hospitals are full of people who are sick and have limited mobility. However, I know through my NHS training that there are volunteers on the ward who can play board games, read to and have a chat to patients. They are a great way resource to ensure patients feel like they are being engaged with on a social level without mounting further pressure onto healthcare professionals.

 

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To conclude:

KATE +BHM&A 4 LYF.

*No, I can’t believe I said that either!

Curating: Thoughts from The Learning Curve.

Recently, I had the opportunity to act in a curating role for an exhibition. The exhibit was lottery funded and commissioned by a local theatre. The exhibition, While I Breathe, I hope, focuses on the St Andrews community during the First World War.

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Due to having a very small team of two volunteers, I was able to have hands-on experience at every step of the process, from conception to the installation. At first, I was nervous about the weight of the task – to honour the sacrifice and courage of St Andreans, both on the home front and in foreign fields, is no mean feat. The experience was definitely a learning curve but I feel like I learnt so much more through this hands-on learn-on-the-job experience than I would have from a book or lecture.

Here are three lessons that I learnt along the way…

1. Don’t think you have to squeeze every single nugget of information into your exhibit.

Trust me. You’re going to find out so many amazing stories and facts relating to your topic and you will want to include every single one of them – but you can’t. If you did your exhibition would be too large and lack focus. We started with the idea to include information and stories not just from the war, but also examples of the make-do-and-mend attitude from which inspired the theatres opening in the interwar years. As well as that, we were also going to focus on showcasing the community spirit which has continued to grow around the theatre – people have met their spouses there, the theatre has always worked to include local schools and children in their productions. As you can see – this was just way too much content to produce in the few weeks we had to put the exhibition together. Once we had streamlined our brief, we were able to concentrate on a few stories that really spoke to the town’s motto “While I Breathe, I Hope.”

2. Be warned, you are going to get very attached to the people you research.

It was an absolute privilege to learn about and honour the memory of St Andreans involved in the war effort – both on the fields and the home front. There were tales of hope, love and plenty of examples of the cheeky and ballsy Scottish spirit that I have come to love over the past few years I have lived here. Jock Ripley, a veteran, pretended to be younger than he was so that he could go to the front and fight. When asked about his actions, he argued that his “pen must have slipped.” He survived being shot in the head – being awarded the VC for continuing to support his fellow soldiers despite his injury and the odds of their survival. His courage and cheek made me laugh, Ripley was a real rogue one, a man with principals who knew he could help and had no qualms about bending the rules to recruit himself back into active duty.

But there were also tales of tragedy. I remember losing my temper when transcribing a letter from the front informing of a local teen’s death. The language of the letter was beautiful – if there is any comfort at all to be had at this moment, it will come from the knowledge that your brother lies amongst some of the bravest men who have ever fought for King and country – but the soldier’s name was spelt wrong multiple times. I had read so much about this young man and his brother (one came home, one didn’t), poured over pictures of him, seen his “dead man’s penny” and the local newspapers report of his death. The carelessness of the letter felt like a gross indignity. I was raging. Then I realised how many letters like this must have been written, how much of a toll it would have taken on those who spent hours writing “I regret to inform you…” over and over again. Each letter signifying another life lost in a bitter and brutal war. By learning and relating to one man from a small coastal town – I was able to grasp (or rather realise that I could never grasp) the enormous scale of lost lives, lost hopes, lost loves. It was humbling, profound and harrowing all at the same time and I am so grateful for the experience. This is why museums are so important- they encourage powerful moments of connection between the present and past, they transcend personal experiences and tap into the shared human condition. They are a thousand times more effective than a textbook.

3. Plan all you want, the installation is going to throw a few spanners in the works.

First of all, Publisher is a cruel, cruel mistress. I am sure there are better programmes to use to produce posterboards, but it was all we had to hand. Don’t get me wrong – it worked and the posterboards look clean and neat, but my god did formatting them (and reformatting them…and reformatting them) lead to sleepless nights. Before finalising the content of the exhibition, we visited the space again and drew 2D plans on where we wanted everything. It was a logistical task and we still needed to arrange printing and transport for a glass case but we thought we’d sorted everything…
Except that we’d assumed the theatre would be coming up with means of actually hanging our posterboards but that wasn’t the case. They told us that they have a wire to hang from the ceiling and that all we needed was to attach hooks to the boards. Our boards were foam though and flat, there was no way we could drill picture hooks into them. Our curator came up with the ingenious idea of attaching velcro to the walls and the posterboards and so that hiccup was solved. However well you plan your layout, the practicalities of the installation process will cause you to tweak things like where things are placed, sometimes very last minute. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, there is just a difference between seeing a layout in theory and seeing the reality of that space when it is occupied.

A bonus lesson…

I learned most of all that I love heritage and museums, that whatever I end up doing, I want to in some way be a preserver and communicator of history. This exhibition was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life!

Event Review: New Weapons, New Wounds

New Weapons, New Wounds: Medicine in War and Rebellion is the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh’s contribution to Edinburgh’s International Science Festival. The event is running 3-5 April at the Royal College. The event focused on medicine’s relationship with war and featured talks on shell shock, the dual duty of field medics, the evolution of the field kit and venereal disease within troops. What made this event stand out from other RCPE events I’ve attended was the dynamic way the talks were presented; attendees were split into four groups and at the ringing of a bell, shuttled to different areas of the building for each talk. This allowed each presenting academic to fill their station with displays of relevant books and artefacts and gave guests the opportunity to explore the college and its stunning decor.

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The first talk I attended was by Napier lecturer and author, E.S Thomson, and discussed the diagnosis and treatment of ‘shellshock’ during WWI. Despite being a lecturer at Napier University, where the building of the famous Craiglockhart Hospital still stands, Thomson only briefly mentioned its most well-known patients, the war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Thomson argued that there is perhaps too much focus on the war poets link to the hospital which ignores the larger context writing war poetry had within Dr Arthur Brock’s ‘Shell Shock’ treatment. This certainly mirrors my knowledge of Craiglockart, which I acquired by studying Pat Barker’s 1991 novel Regeneration which explores Owen and Sasson’s relationship and treatment by the now renowned psychiatrist W.H.R Rivers. ‘Shell shock’ or what we would now term P.T.SD. Hysteria, a traditionally female illness, did not fit as a diagnosis for these men who were debilitated in the most masculine of pursuits, and so neither did Weir Mitchell’s ‘bed rest cure.’ (Although those who have read Perkins Gilmore’s The Yellow Wallpaper may argue that Weir Mitchell’s treatment was equally as useless for treating women!) Thomson’s talk charted the attempts of healthcare professionals to define, name, and treat the psychological trauma sustained by those who witnessed the horror of the trenches.

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Illustrations showing a single bullet wreaking enormous havoc by perforating the small intestine.

Next up was a talk by PhD candidate Sam Klein of The University of St Andrews. I found this talk particularly interesting as I had never considered its subject matter before. This segment highlighted the complexities of providing medical care during wartime. Usually, on some basic level, the interests of a health provider and their patients are same – they want the condition of their patients to improve and, if that is not possible, provide sufficient palliative care. During wartime, a doctor is not only accountable to his patients but to the War Office and this inevitably has repercussions for the patient. An example Klein gave was the way in which the triage process is reevaluated. Usually, triage is quite egalitarian – those whose are most in need, whose life hangs in the balance are prioritised. However when under the pressure, triage on the field becomes more utilitarian in efforts to fit with military principles. Those who can be treated in the shortest time are prioritised in an effort to ensure a higher number of active soldiers than the enemy. For example in WWI, 5 patients could be treated per patient with an abdominal or chest wound and so these patients were at an extreme disadvantage. Therefore despite needing urgent care, patients with a chest or abdominal wound were pushed further down the list. For me, the most interesting aspect of this talk was the consideration of how the ethos of medicine, which dates back millennia, does not exist in a vacuum and as a result must interact with politics, bureaucracy and circumstance.

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In the beautiful blue coloured Cullen Room, Prof Angela Thomas OBE showed us the medicine chest of Bonnie Prince Charlie. This was an amazing artefact and being allowed to interact with it and see it up so close was such a great experience. The design of the cabinet is deceptively intricate with compartments that pop out when pressed and multiple drawers containing all manner of substances. These would be used to make poultices, liniments and potions for whatever ailment was troubling a patient. As well as looking like something that belongs in a magician’s or alchemist’s study, the chest was a great artefact to springboard discussion concerning the advancement of medicine and the evolution of military medical kit. A large amount of the substances within the cabinet were botanical (although the chest does feature a ground insect or two!) and were made by grinding up or treating plants and roots. Since the 1700’s many of the active ingredients of these plants have been identified and used in modern medicine. Seeing this chest in person also highlighted the how difficult it must have been to use in a war zone. The chest is made of lead and wood and is enormously heavy. It is hard to imagine it being used to treat the wounded during the Jacobite uprising. Field kits which soldiers carry today are only 1lb and there is now an onus on soldiers being trained to carry out immediate first aid on themselves and their peers whilst waiting for medical attention. The 40 hours first aid training which all soldiers now receive has drastically improved survival rates of those wounded in battle.

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Finally, Mona O’Brien, a doctoral scholar at the University of Glasgow, gave a talk about the history of venereal disease in the military. Specifically, she talked about syphilis, which is one of my favourite diseases of all time from both an etiological and sociological point of view. Syphilis has always been linked to the military with outbreaks being linked to the movements of troops for centuries. One of the most interesting aspects of O’Brien’s talk was the examination of military attitudes to syphilis and how they contributed to the spread of the disease. For centuries blame was attributed to the women soldiers had sex with and this blatantly ignored the fact that armies left outbreaks in their wake. This led to acts such as the Contagious Diseases Act which allowed the forcible internal examination of any woman suspected to be a prostitute or of having VD. If deemed to have a venereal disease, a woman could be essentially locked away and confined. These acts did nothing to stop the spread of syphilis and instead were a method of shaming and punishing the vulnerable. Syphilis was even a major issue during WWII, Winston Churchill himself instructed supplies of penicillin to be diverted from the wounded to soldiers who found themselves inflicted with syphilis. A personal highlight of this talk was talking to O’Brien about William Clowes, a royal physician on whom I wrote extensively in my dissertation.

The talks themselves all approached the relationship between the military and medicine through different angles and provided a time travelling and comprehensive exploration of the subject. The range of artefacts and books on display was also impressive and was definitely one of the best features of the event for me! The dynamic structure of the event allowed attendees to see the beauty of the college building as well as ensuring our brains were awake. By moving around to different locations, I felt like I was able to absorb a lot more information than I would if I had just sat in the main hall for four talks.

To summarise, this event was one of the best heritage events I’ve ever been to and I hope this format is adopted for future talks!

Event Review: The Snowy Secrets of the Blood

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So not to detract from what was an amazing lecture, this blog post is split into two parts; the first half is an event review and the second is the story of how going to the event nearly killed us…

Part I: Secrets of the Blood

The Royal College of Physicians London is celebrating its 500 year anniversary this year and as part of its celebrations, the college has put together an exhibition on Dr William Harvey. London’s Scottish counterpart, Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh, hosted the Curator of RCPL, Dr Kristin Hussey, for a fascinating talk on Harvey and his legacy.

Harvey’s discovery of the circulatory system made him one of the most well known historical doctors – details of his life and work are still taught in GCSE history classes. In light of this, Hussey’s talk didn’t focus too much on the precursory details. Instead, the talk delved into complex issues surrounding scientific discovery; personal conflicts of belief, the political nature of the scientific community, and the fact that a pioneer of science has surprisingly little control in how their work will be used by others.

Hussey painted Early Modern medical culture with great nuance. Before Harvey’s discovery was accepted, the heart wasn’t exactly well regarded. Medical theory was practically unchanged from Galen and the heart was thought of more an accessory to respiration than the ‘pumphouse of the body’ it would later be imagined to be. Harvey’s work directly contradicted Galen, whom he had to recite verbatim to become a licensed physician. Harvey was a conservative and against the idea of a mechanical body, so would he be pleased or horrified at his posthumous ‘revolutionary’ status?

Harvey’s work is championed as a pivotal shift in science – a move from the rhetorical to the demonstratable and objective. However, whilst he may have learned anatomical objectivity in Padua, he couldn’t abandon the calculating and political nature of the English medical culture which produced him. He hid his discovery for ten years in an attempt to quietly gain support from well-respected colleagues. When he did finally publish De Motu Cortis, he cunningly dedicated it to King Charles, both currying favour with the King and legitimising his work. Harvey perfectly illustrates the precarious situation that discovery-makers find themselves in; they straddle both sides of progress and that cannot be an easy place to stand. This gap between theoretical progress and practical application is encapsulated by an anecdote Hussey shared about Harvey himself: despite him discovering that there is a finite amount of blood in the body, he still wanted to be bled after suffering a stroke. In fact, bleeding was still practised for centuries after Harvey’s discovery. This raises the interesting question of how doctors balance meeting a patient’s cultural expectations of a physician with acting in their patient’s best interests.

A really fascinating aspect of the talk was the examination of Harvey’s legacy. Harvey was a Royalist and a conservative as well as a ground-breaker. He was, like anyone, multifaceted. Various aspects of his life have subsequently been used in the agendas of others. For example, after the civil war, the College of Physicians London used their connection to the Royalist Harvey to appease the monarchy. Thomas H. Huxley emphasised Harvey’s scientific method to support his own Darwinism. Victorian doctors romanticised him as a ‘father.’ It is easy to see how the ‘real’ Harvey (if there still is such as thing) can get distorted and lost within the voices who herald him. In the Q&A section of the talk, I asked, to what extent can we even know who Harvey was, and does it even matter who he ‘really’ was if his legacy is so great? Hussey’s answer was really insightful. She argued that it is the job of the historian to look at the context in which people exist and to be removed from the subject in a way which those close to the subject matter cannot.

It was really great meeting Dr Kristen Hussey and hearing her speak. I was glad she talked a little bit about her career journey. When I was a teenager, I had the most profound experience the Hunterian Museum (Read about that here!), so it was amazing to meet someone who had worked there in a curating capacity. As someone who is about to embark on her first role ‘curating’ an exhibition, it was comforting to hear Hussey talk about how she approached curating an exhibit that was initially outside her comfort zone and speciality. Dr Hussey is both #careergoals and #brightbluehairgoals and it was really motivating to see a young professional woman talk about her passions and career trajectory.

Overall, the talk was an insightful look into the cultural afterlives of well-loved pioneering figures and the possible conflict between the legacy we celebrate and who they really were. I think these are really pertinent sentiments for someone who wants to work in the heritage sector – it is so easy to get lost in the romanticism of a figure and it is a lot harder to look at things, like Harvey did, in the cold light of objectivity.

Part II: Snow place to go – Stranded in Edinburgh!

On the 28th of February, the MET office released a ‘red’ weather alert which warned people not to travel unless absolutely necessary. At this point, my friend Anna and I were on a bus which was crawling at a snail’s pace towards Edinburgh. Were we perturbed? Yes. Could we get off the bus immediately and easily get home? No – we had no idea where we were and standing at a rural bus stop with no way of knowing if buses were running back towards St Andrews seemed pretty precarious. We decided the best thing to do would be to continue to Edinburgh and turn back as soon as possible. Anna rang RCPE asking if the talk was still on and we decided that if we were going to have to wait for the snow to pass, we might as well attend the talk. After all, the RCPE is only a five minute walk from the bus station.

After being told by our friends from home that our local Tesco was in chaos and expected to close, Anna and I thought it would be prudent to stock up on non-perishables on the way to the RCPE. We were both girl guides and so we were smug in the thought that we would arrive home from Edinburgh that afternoon (how naive!) with an abundance of provisions for our friends.

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Anna upon realising that beans may be the ‘Today’s Special’ for the foreseeable future.

It was my third visit to the Royal College of Physicians Edinburgh and the staff were as friendly as ever. Despite arriving unbelievably early for the talk, they welcomed us in. We hung up our coats and made ourselves comfortable in the hall. It was completely empty and we were slightly concerned that we would be the only attendees.

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We checked the bus timetables before we left the hall to ensure the buses were running before venturing out into the cold. Head of Heritage, Iain Milne, kindly made sure we knew the best route home. We ventured out back in the snow thinking that we would be back in time to cook our provisions and have an early night.

However, when we got to the bus station we were informed that all buses had been cancelled until further notice. We were well and truly scuppered. Realising it would be too dangerous to implore our car-owning friends to come and pick us up, we made the decision to book a hostel. With our groceries weighing us down (not so smug now!), we carefully trudged to the local SYHA – cold, hungry and one slip away from a broken appendage.

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‘Anna take a picture of me on the bunk bed but let me hide first because I am tired and inhuman looking’

We were exhausted and stressed. We made sure to ring our families to let them know that we were, at this point in time, still alive and faring well. We hid our valuables, stored away our darn provisions (read: increasingly heavy dead weight), and went to bed ridiculously early. The sooner we slept, the sooner it would be the next day, and the sooner we could get home…We thought.

The next morning we woke up to a raging blizzard. We checked the public transport but neither the buses nor the trains were running. We sat in the foyer of SYHA and resigned ourselves to being stuck in Edinburgh for at least another night. We sat for two hours whilst the sky tempted us with blue before unleashing yet another torrent of snow. We had only been in the hostel overnight but we were getting cabin fever. Checking my phone, I saw that the Surgeon’s Hall was open despite the weather. We jumped at the chance to leave the hostel even if just for a few hours.

close up on scalpal

We bought our tickets to the Surgeon’s Hall before leaving to find a place to get a hot drink. Our restless sleep and difficult walk had taken its toll on the both of us and we needed to take stock of our situation. Should we stay in Edinburgh? Or should we make a break for it whilst it was light out and a little warmer? Inadvertently fitting into our medical theme, we got coffee at Black Medicine Coffee Co. Choosing to stay open during the weather was a lucrative decision and the place was packed. On a day when I was not worried for my safety, I would have loved the decor and atmosphere of the coffee shop. Alas, we were too stressed and squished to appreciate our surroundings.

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Eventually, we found a taxi who would take us home for a pittance. He had been helping people out of Edinburgh since the ‘Beast From The East’ had hit. He said the main roads weren’t so bad and he would ring us when he was back in Edinburgh. We got his call when we were at the Surgeon’s Hall – He could take us back to St Andrews on the condition that we were back at the SYHA in half an hour. The race was on. We had to run through the piles of snow heaped upon the pavements, get to the SYHA, gather our things, check out and be standing outside within 30 minutes. There were a few slips and we had to run the last stretch, but we made it. I breathed a sigh of relief. The roads weren’t bad, I thought, I’ll be home soon.

But the journey was treacherous. We had low visibility and had to deal with other vehicles which had become stuck on the roads. There were a few close calls but I won’t go into them (purely because if my mother knew how bad it was, she would build a tower and lock me in it for the rest of my life). We made it home in one piece. Anna’s boyfriend, Reuben, made us tea whilst we showered and got in to warm PJ’s. It was a perilous adventure but we got home safe- thanks to our girl guide sensibilities and Scottish kindness.

My next trip to RCPE is at the end of March. I hope the weather has thawed by then, but if it hasn’t, we have enough canned food to feed the whole town.

A Love Letter to the Little Museum

 

 

We all know the big guns; the British Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Louvre, the Smithsonian, the Guggenheim and so on. These bustling hubs of historical and artistic scholarship welcome millions of visitors each year and some visitors travel across literal oceans to see the artefacts that have captured their imaginations since childhood. When I travelled to London for a palaeography summer school, I was so excited that Senate House was close enough to the British Museum to allow a trip to see the Rosetta Stone. The story of the stele had enchanted me since I was in primary school – how amazing that a stone once used as building material was the key to deciphering hieroglyphs – and to see it in person was nothing short of magical. However as much as I love the British Museum, this Valentine’s Day I am giving my heart to another. This is a love letter to the small folk museums, heritage museums, maritime museums, agricultural museums and historic houses that bejewel the landscape of the UK.

These museums, which are often run mostly (if not exclusively) by volunteers, welcome guests in the thousands rather than the millions, but this by no means makes them less worthy of praise than their monolith counterparts. In fact, I would argue that they have a massive impact on their communities. Through storytelling, dress up and activity packs, children learn the stories of those who have come before them. Museums allow them to make emotional and empathetic connections to history which could never be gained from a textbook. Events and exhibitions allow families to spend time together and create memories on a budget. For those who have watched their community change over their lifetime, museums and historic buildings provide a chance to reminisce about times gone by and tell their own oral histories. Small museums by their nature are niche, containing a wealth of information on their locale which historians, genealogists, and any interested amateur can get lost in.

Children areas

On a purely selfish note, Saint Andrews Preservation Trust Museum, ‘my’ little museum, has allowed me to gain invaluable work experience, both as a tour guide and behind the scenes. I have learned how to use Adlib software and helped at Museums at Night events. But more importantly, I have been able to have a lot more access to the inner workings of the museum than I would be afforded at a larger institution. I have met trustees and board members and had unfiltered access to the curator’s extensive knowledge of the industry. I have met the people who have lovingly put exhibits together to pay homage to the town that they have loved and lived in their entire lives. Over the next two months, I will be helping create an exhibition on St Andreans during WWI. This immeasurable fulfillment has come directly from this little museum and those who pour their heart and soul in to its upkeep, and I am so thankful for it.

This Valentine’s Day, send some love to your local historic building or museum for whilst they are little, they are so, so important.