Using our special collection to teach a medical school humanities project in Cornwall

Deborah Mogg gave a talk at last year’s CILIP Rare Books and Special Collections Groups conference in Cardiff about how the library has been using its special collection of historical medical items to teach University of Exeter medical students during their SSU. Below is an account of the project published in the Rare Books and Special Collections Group (RBSCG) CILIP special interest group Spring newsletter.

NURSES’ CALL BELL

The call bell was an innovation of Florence Nightingale in the Crimean War of the 1850s.

She had based the idea on wealthy houses where the owners would use bells to summon servants.

She wrote: ‘Without a system of this kind, a nurse is converted to a pair of legs for running up and down the stairs’

This bell came from West Cornwall Hospital

Title	Citation	Shelfmark
Visualizing Disease. The Art and History of Pathological Illustrations	Meli, D. B. 2017	QS11
Anatomy as Spectacle. Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present	Stephens, E. 2011	QS11
Bodies Beyond borders. Moving Anatomies, 1750-1950	Wils, K; De Bont, R; Au, S. 2017	QS11
Public Health in History	Berridge, V; Gorsky, M; Mold, A. 2011	W11
The Human Body in the Age of Catastrophe: Brittleness, Integration, Science, and the Great War	Geroulanos, S; Meyers, T. 2018	WA245
Technological Medicine: the changing world of doctors and patients	Reiser, S. J.	WB35
Confronting Contagion. Our evolving understanding of disease	Santer, M. 2015	WC11
Plague : a very short introduction	Slack, P. 2012	WC11
Epidemics and Society: from the Black Death to the present	Snowden, F.M. 2019	WC11
Fat: a cultural history of the stuff of life	Forth, C. E. 2019	WD17
Inconvenient People. Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad-Doctors in Victorian England	Wise, S. 2012	WM11
Faces from the Front: Harold Gillies, The Queen’s Hospital, Sidcup and the origins of Modern Plastic Surgery	Bamji, A. 2017	WO11
Crucial interventions: an illustrated treatise on the principles & practice of nineteenth-century surgery	Barnett, R., Kneebone, R. & Wellcome Collection 2015	WO11
The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine	Fitzharris, L. 2017	WO11
Physick and Folk Medicine: a history of healthcare in Cornwall	White, R. 2019	WX11
History of medicine	Hall, T. 2013	WZ40
The Oxford handbook of the history of medicine	Jackson, M. 2013	WZ40
The history of medicine: a beginner's guide	Jackson, M. 2014	WZ40
A Global History of Medicine	Jackson, M. 2018	WZ40
The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine	Le Fanu, J. 2011	WZ40
The Medicine Cabinet: the story of health and disease told through extraordinary objects	McEnroe, N; Hurley, S. 2019	WZ40
An illustrated history of medicine	Paul, G. 2016	WZ40
Wounded: the long journey home from the Great War	Mayhew, E. 2014	WZ64
Medicine in First World War Europe. Soldiers, Medics, Pacifists	Reid, F. 2017	WZ64
The prince of medicine : Galen in the Roman Empire	Mattern, S. P. 2013	WZ100
Ayurvedic Man. Encounters with Indian medicine		WZ330
The Healing Presence of Art: a history of Western art in hospitals	Cork, R. 2012	WZ330
Medieval Bodies: Life, death and art in the Middle Ages	Hartnell, J. 2018	WZ330
Patients as Art: forty thousand years of medical history in drawings, paintings and sculpture	Mackowiak, P. A. 2019	WZ330
A Body of Work. An anthology of poetry and medicine	Wagner, C; Brown, A. 2016	WZ330

A NEW ELECTRONIC THEORY OF LIFE

OVERBECK’S REJUVENATOR IN CONTEXT