Dear blog,

Well, the second event has happened now. It was all a bit of a daze but I shall try to put some of it down in this blog. We went to four museum exhibitions over the past three days (the Wellcome ‘Medicine Man’ gallery, the Grant Museum in UCL, the Foundling Museum, and the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons). The three days hung together quite well; there was a real emphasis on objects and their place in LitSciMed study, and a general theme of links between Literature and Medicine.

The first day was spent at the Wellcome Trust, on a day when a vey famous person was also there <http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/News/2010/News/WTX059024.htm> announcing that a large amount of money would be spent on medical research. We began with a great talk by Ross MacFarlane which introduced us to Henry Wellcome and his collections and started folk thinking about collections and artefacts and the role of museums. The centrality of the Wellcome History of Medicine collection to many of the twenty-two PhD students involved in this event was clear and the rest of our day alerted students to even more books, ephemera, archives, films and online resources that would be useful to their research. I’ll try to add some links to such resources, and I’m going to create a discussion around the films that were entered in the ‘History of Medicine in Motion’ competition. Carole Reeves in her session opened a competition for all LitSciMeders (whether present at the event itself or not) to enter a film competition specifically for them. The deadline is 1st June and students (either individually or in groups) should enter films of 3-4 minutes in length. There are two (apparently very good!) prizes available for the winning entries.

The morning of day two was spent at King’s College London, with a session from Neil Vickers on retrospective diagnosis and then a session given by Brian Hurwitz on the genre of case studies. Both sessions elicited some strong responses from students and made for good discussions in the bar of the Royal College of Surgeons that evening. I’m hoping to get powerpoint slides and handouts from all speakers who used them for the resources page that we will now create for event 2.

The final day was probably my favourite though. We had a really great tour of the John Hunter collection at the Royal College of Surgeons from Simon Chaplin, where I learned lots that was new despite having done quite a bit of research on the man in the past. I also enjoyed the seminar time and finally I enjoyed hearing the students’ presentations. They had been asked to present for a maximum of three minutes on an object that had caught their attention over the past few days and which seemed relevant to their research. The results were hugely different in both the kinds of objects used and the way they were discussed. In this event again, the mix of disciplines (this time we also had a bio-archaeologist too!) made for such interesting questions, debates and perspectives.

I’ve had a thoroughly interesting few days, have had my eyes opened on various topics, some of which were new and some I thought I knew lots about. Keep watching this social space for more information about the sessions and what we learned as well as students’ descriptions of the object that attracted their interest and their responses to the event itself.

All best, 

Sharon