New Collections Available
Two new collections of archive material have just gone up on the online archive catalogue. They are the archive of the College itself and a large collection of visual material relating to the history of the College and the history of medicine in Ireland more generally. The online catalogue can be accessed here, and PDF files of the collection lists can be downloaded from the archive website. The completion of these two large collections now means that over half the material in the archive is fully catalogued and the descriptions available online.
The College archive is split into five sections, and I have written about the contents of the first three sections
here,
here and
here. In the coming weeks I will also be looking at the contents of the last two sections.
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VM/1/2/M/19
Sir John William Moore |
The visual materials have been collected over time by the College and also by Dr Kirkpatrick, a long serving registrar of the College who donated substantial amounts of material to the archive and library. The collection contains a very large collection of portraits of Irish doctors in various mediums; photographs, engravings, pastel and pencil drawings. There are also engravings and photographs of British and Irish hospitals, as well as of the College itself.
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| VM/1/4/27 - Sir Patrick Dun's Hospital |
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RCPI 54 - Ephraim MacDowel
Cosgrave |
The collection also contains a large number of glass lantern slides, used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as teaching aids; these cover a variety of subjects including tuberculosis, census statistics and anaesthetics. There are also the glass lantern slides and microscope slides used by Ephraim MacDowel Cosgrave (1853-1925) as professor of Biology at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.
All the material in these collections is now available to readers for consultation, with the exception of some closed records which are indicated in the catalogues, and we look forward to sharing the material with our readers over the coming months!