Alisander’s Journey and Other Poems

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, …

Bloody Flux and the King’s Evil

This is a guest post by Jayne Muir, 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.  The byways, meadows and cottage gardens of Britain were once a vast larder of ingredients from which oils, ointments, tinctures, pills, …

Marginalia in a Medical Manuscript

This is a guest post by Tabitha Gresty, who volunteered at Manuscripts and Special Collections between April and September 2023, cataloguing medicinal herbs and their uses in remedies from material held here at Manuscripts and Special Collections. Since working on the Early Modern Recipes Research project, I have been constantly amazed by the breadth of …

Plants & Prayers

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 …

Vaccinations

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 …

MRI Collections Project: the papers of Raymond Andrew

Professor E. Raymond Andrew was one of the early founders of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) research at the University of Nottingham, and Manuscripts and Special Collections (MSC) are fortunate to have his papers amongst our collections. As part of the MRI Collections Project which is currently under way, Archivist Zoe Ellis describes how the team …

MRI Collections Project: the papers of Brian Worthington

This is a guest post from Rachael Orchard, Archives Assistant for the MRI Collections Project. Professor Brian Worthington’s papers form part of theWellcome-funded MRI Collections Project currently under way in Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham. He was a radiologist who was heavily involved in the development and use of magnetic resonance …

Spooky Scary Skeletons

Guest post by Anja Rohde, Library Assistant. On Wednesday 27th January 1943 Nottingham students awoke to an unusual sight – a skeleton was suspended from the clock tower of the Trent Building. This was ‘Mrs Criker’, one of the mascots of Goldsmiths College, London, and it had been kidnapped by Nottingham students. At the start …

MRI Collections Project: Shining a light on slide digitisation

Work is now well under way on our exciting Wellcome Trust funded project ‘Development of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) at the University of Nottingham’, as covered in the previous blog post. Project Archivist Zoe Ellis updates us on one of the main strands of the project: the digitisation of around 18,000 35 mm slides. These …

MRI project gets under way

This is a guest post by Zoe Ellis, MRI Project Archivist. Manuscripts and Special Collections recently started work on an exciting 12 month project entitled ‘Development of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) at the University of Nottingham’.  This project is funded by a Wellcome Trust Research Resources award of just under £100,000. The project will catalogue, …