Back to School with Dinah Holt
September 22, 2025
Following on from our previous blog, which explored the arduous process of midwifery training in the mid-20th century through the letters of Dinah Holt, nurse and midwife extraordinaire, as she undertook her examinations in 1948 and 1949, today we’re stepping even further back in time to Dinah’s first term of nursing training in 1944… In …
Results Day Special: Midwifery Exams in the 1940s
August 14, 2025
Dinah Holt trained and then worked as a nurse and midwife between 1944 and 1986, working at various hospitals in the East Midlands and as far afield as Switzerland. A lot has changed about nursing education since she undertook her training – the NHS would not come into existence until part way through her training, …
Art, Antidotes and Anatomy
June 11, 2025
Founded in 1828, The Nottingham Medico-Chirurgical Book Society is believed to be the second oldest medical society in the UK. The well over 1000 books which made up its library, today held at Manuscripts and Special Collections, stretch back even further, into the mid-15th century. As you might imagine, within their pages you can find …
Skeletons and Superstitions
November 29, 2024
I don’t know about you, but the wintry weather has me yearning for warmer climes – and I’m not the only one! Last time we met Dr Edward Wrench in the midst of his European tour in February 1876, he was looking out over the Colosseum, but in today’s instalment he’s heading underground in search of …
Alisander’s Journey and Other Poems
January 15, 2024
This is a guest post by Gail Webb, who volunteered at Manuscripts and Special Collections between April and September 2023, cataloguing medicinal herbs and their uses in remedies from material held in our collections. Alisander’s Journey A species named as Alexanders, known to the ancient Romans, grows green on clifftops, thrusts its way along roads, …
The Ballad of the Cherry Tree
December 11, 2023
This is a guest post by Trish Kerrison, who volunteered at Manuscripts and Special Collections between April and September 2023, cataloguing medicinal herbs and their uses in remedies from material held in our collections. In Mrs Willoughby’s Housekeeping Book of 1737 (MS 87/4), to which Mother Bird is a frequent contributor, there is a receipt …
Plants & Prayers
April 30, 2023
Healing is what makes us human – but concepts of health and methods of healing have changed much over time. Visitors to our latest exhibition Plants and Prayers: health and healing before 1700 will see how healthcare in the past was not just the domain of the physician: priests to apothecaries to housewives all provided …
Florence Nightingale Returns
May 14, 2021
It’s been a long time coming, but we’re sure that Florence Nightingale of all people would understand why we had to delay opening the exhibition in her honour due to an outbreak of a deadly disease. ‘Florence Nightingale Comes Home’ was supposed to open last May to coincide with her 200th birthday, part of a …
Simple Medicine
February 9, 2021
Post by Library Assistant Safiya Williams. There is a great pleasure, and sometimes amusement, in reading through old texts that cover topics of the human body and cures for its many ailments. Books on herbalism and herbal remedies give us an idea of those who came before us – without the support of modern medicine, …
Vaccinations
January 27, 2021
Vaccines. They’ve been headline news for weeks, and earlier this month the Covid 19 Vaccination Centre at KMC opened its doors. Vaccination was explicitly legalised and made free of charge in the UK in 1840. At the time, smallpox, which had killed, disfigured and disabled people since antiquity, was the only disease that could be …
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