Medicine In The Making
The Department of English at the University of Exeter offers its final year students the opportunity to undertake a Dissertation by Collaborative Project with an external cultural or heritage organisation. The aim of the module is to enable students to communicate their knowledge and skills to a wider audience and to work closely with partner organisations to highlight collections and interpret materials in new ways or in new contexts.
Exeter Cathedral is excited to be partnering with Emily Chircop, a final year English and Communications student at the University of Exeter. ‘Medicine in the Making’ is Emily’s dissertation. Through a close investigation of texts in the Cathedral Library’s medical collection, Emily has designed a public guided tour (which the Cathedral will continue to run as an annual event) and a series of collection blogs to draw attention to key works in the history of medicine.
Read Emily Chircop’s blogs below:
Collecting Medicine: Thomas Glass and The Cathedral Library
By Emily Chircop How did Exeter Cathedral become home to so many medical texts? The history of the Cathedral Library collection is connected to the Devon and Exeter Hospital (now the RD&E) and an 18th century physician, Thomas Glass. Glass was born in Tiverton in 1709 and studied medicine at
Learning To Fight Smallpox: Edward Jenner’s Inquiry
By Emily Chircop For most of human history, smallpox was a truly devastating disease, spreading rapidly through communities and especially affecting vulnerable children. Up to 30% of people who caught the virus would die from it, and survivors could be left with severe scarring or even become blind. There is
Understanding Human Anatomy: The Works of Vesalius and Harvey
By Emily Chircop How did physicians in the past learn about human anatomy? For over a thousand years, they primarily studied the work of the ancient Roman physician Galen. But Galen almost exclusively dissected animals because human dissection was forbidden under Roman law. His teachings contained major inaccuracies, and physicians
Ibn Sina’s Canon: Medicine From The Medieval Islamic World
By Emily Chircop Until the 16th century, almost all Western medicine relied on key concepts from ancient Greece and Rome, such as the teachings of Hippocrates and Galen. Less often recognised are the physicians and philosophers from the Islamic world who publicised and expanded on these classical texts. Islamic scholars