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 …
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 …
MRI Collections Project: the papers of Raymond Andrew
August 5, 2019
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
June 13, 2019
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
February 23, 2019
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
November 30, 2018
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
October 17, 2018
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, …
Mad Dogs & Englishmen
September 28, 2018
World Rabies Day takes place each year on September 28, the anniversary of the death of Louis Pasteur. Better known for developing the pasteurisation process, he was also involved with developing the first efficacious rabies vaccine. It’s not a disease that many people in the UK have reason to give much thought to, but roughly …
Happy Birthday, NHS!
July 5, 2018
On 5th July 1948 the Secretary for Health Aneurin Bevan officially launched an ambitious new service: the National Health Service. At its core were three principles: That it meet the needs of everyone That it be free at the point of delivery That it be based on clinical need, not ability to pay At the …
Smallpox
October 26, 2017
It has wiped out armies, killed Kings and Pharaohs, and devastated civilisations for at least 3000 (and possibly up to 10,000) years, yet the first written records mentioning smallpox only date back to 4th century China. Trade links and the expansion of empires probably brought the disease to Europe in the 7th century, and Europeans …
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