One year of cataloguing a “special collection” of medical literature (and what I learnt while doing it)
By Nadina Yedid
Not so long ago, while chatting casually with a researcher in the Reading Room, I was asked how long I had been working at the Heritage Centre. I answered, “not long really, roughly a year”. But then I noticed the date on the calendar, and I realised it wasn’t ROUGHLY a year, it was EXACTLY a year, as 17 January 2023 marked my anniversary in the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. Since then, things have changed, and I know now that I will soon be leaving this beloved place. I figured this would be a good time to reflect on my year in the RCPI Heritage Centre, and its fascinating collections.
Looking back on my first days in the College, I remember having mixed feelings. On the one hand, I was afraid to face a new field, the MEDICAL field, having spent almost my entire career working as a law librarian back in my home country, Argentina. Moreover, in English, so distant from my Spanish mother tongue. But on the other hand, I remember feeling from the first time I walked through the door some sort of connection, a funny feeling of remembrance of a place I had never been to, but that felt so familiar to me. I guess libraries have that power, although it’s also possible that there were some architectural influences involved, as you can see in the pictures below.
Since then, each day in the library has been an adventure. Discovering the history of medicine, the history of Ireland too, fascinating books with fascinating stories but also with unbelievably beautiful works of art inside, on its pages, its edges and its binding. This post is not really about cataloguing, but rather about the most interesting things I’ve come across while doing this task.
Learning about the history of medicine
Very recently I was in the Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk. I was amazed by it. Together with many objects from that time, the streets of cities have been recreated in physical rooms. You can window shop in a street of Berlin in the lates 1930s, and you can stand in between the rumble on that same street 6 years later. The overall experience is that you feel transported to another time, because it is not the same to stand in a modern room full of objects as being surrounded by the ambient of the time. And the same happened to me every day working in the Heritage Centre, with the materials people wrote at the time the events were happening. Because, again, it is not the same to read a modern book on history of medicine, as reading what the doctors making the discoveries wrote about it. You don’t feel like you are looking at history, you feel like you are taking part in it, you are involved.
Throughout my year working in the College I learnt a lot of fascinating stories, but perhaps the ones that struck me the most were the ones related to the role of women in medicine, as doctors and also as patients. I learnt about the first women graduating from the College in the 1870s. And about a special female doctor who, although not a graduate from the College, left us with the most invaluable legacy: her diaries where she recorded her professional and political life for almost forty years. I am speaking, of course, of Dr Kathleen Lynn. A witness and part of the events that changed the political history of Ireland, her role during the Easter Rising in 1916 was without doubt one of the most outstanding outcomes of her revolutionary beliefs. But this was only the start of a long career of proposing change, of caring for others, and of serving the Irish community through her role as a doctor, but also as a feminist and as a revolutionary. Nowadays, her diaries constitute one of the most requested items in our archive by researchers and members of the public. And I can fully understand why. Her life was fascinating from the early stages until the very end. Who could overlook it once they become aware of it.
I was also amazed to learn about antique practices related to obstetrics, from many years before Dr Lynn or any other female doctor. To learn about the role of midwives, “wise women” who would attend women giving birth throughout the centuries in rural Ireland. This practice went through some hard times, when man-midwives threatened to force them out of the profession during the professionalisation of the field in the second half of the seventeenth century.
I also read what doctors wrote many years after that, about a fever that affected women in “childbed”, and how they mutated to give it a proper name: puerperal fever. I also learnt about Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor who ended up in poverty and was sent to a mental institution because he dared to suggest that this sepsis was being spread by doctors attending to different women without washing their hands in between two patients. And I read, later on, the writings of Robert Collins, who assumed the position of Master of the Rotunda Hospital in 1824 and was praised for reducing mortality rates due to postpartum infections by applying these concepts centred on the importance of hygiene practices in wards and by doctors.
History can be fascinating, but even more when you are reading it from its leading characters.
Having fun with the authors
And speaking of leading characters, I couldn’t help but be amused by the amount of scientific literature written by anonymous authors. Can you imagine a doctor nowadays, making a breakthrough discovery, and publishing it in “Nature” or “The Lancet” without their name on it? Well, that seems to be the case many years ago. In a time when publishing books was very expensive, a luxury only given to a few, there were a lot of doctors publishing their thoughts and discoveries anonymously. Many would use a pseudonym in the form of another common name, or perhaps a striking “artistic” name such as “Hortator”. Others would be just shy, stating the authorship simply as “By a physician” or “By a philanthropist” (such as the case below); and many would be just forgetful and wouldn’t even mention anything related to authorship. A few, though, could be very creative and state the authorship of a work to supernatural creatures such as “Sir John Floyer's ghost”, to name an example.
At the other end of the spectrum, some authors were not only interested in receiving recognition for their work but were very keen on confronting other doctors’ thoughts and distinguishing themselves from those who thought differently. Some sort of antique “Twitter”, where doctors could reply to each other publicly in much more than 140 characters…
Discovering hidden beauty
Who said medical books can’t be beautiful? Of course, many of the images contained in these books could very easily be classified as “sensitive content”, but I found that many of these “special collection” books could also be approached from an artistic point of view.Who knew there could be any beauty to a scene representing an amputation inside an operating theatre, and yet it is impossible to deny the magnificence of this piece of art.
Teophile Bonet, a doctor from the 17th century, didn’t need to wait until the invention of photography to have a beautiful - and a bit intimidating - portrait of himself on the first page of the book he wrote.
The scenes represented in medical books can vary significantly from one to another, and they could have very easily become part of any museum if they were paintings instead of a print on the title page of a book.
And sometimes, it is not even necessary to open a book to see its beauty. An outside cleanse can reveal what was concealed underneath a layer of dust, and just like magic, beauty is unveiled.
This is another lesson I learnt during my time in Dun’s Library: you don’t need to know about art to be able to enjoy it, and beauty can be found everywhere, even in the most unusual places.
And so, working my way through history, doctors, and beauty, my entire year at RCPI has passed. As I write these lines, I’m spending my last days as Assistant Librarian in the fascinating Dun’s Library, and writing this blogpost is one of my last tasks. It is my surprise project, dedicated to a no less fascinating woman, who makes the magic happen every day at the Heritage Centre, the Keeper of Collections, my dear Harriet.