By Emma Laws, Cathedral Librarian
It’s no secret that Exeter Cathedral Library holds one of the country’s largest historic medical collections. At its core is the private library of about 350 works of science and medicine bequeathed to the Cathedral Library by the Exeter physician and bibliophile, Thomas Glass, on his death in 1786. The connection between the city’s cathedral and hospital is also no secret: the Dean of Exeter Cathedral, Alured Clarke, founded the Devon and Exeter Hospital (now the RD&E) in 1741 – and Thomas Glass was one of the hospital’s six founding physicians.
Thomas Glass stipulated in his will that his books should be available to ‘any physician being an inhabitant of the city’. His bequest thus extended the purpose of the Cathedral Library as a centre of learning and inspiration for secular readers as well as clerics, and his generosity and foresight created a legacy of aspiration and participation that continues today. We are proud of the fact that Exeter University’s medical students still come to the Cathedral Library to consult Thomas Glass’ books as part of a Fourth Year Medical Humanities module, ‘What Can History Tell Us?’
Collections beget collections. In 1964, the Cathedral Library acquired another important collection of science and medicine on permanent loan from the Exeter Medical Trust. The most recent legacy collection of the bequest of Thomas Glass is the Christopher Gardner-Thorpe Collection. We are delighted to announce that Dr Christopher Gardner-Thorpe MD FRCP FRCPE FACP, retired Consultant Neurologist at the RD&E, has generously donated a collection of historic medical books to sit alongside the Thomas Glass Bequest. (Some of you may have attended Dr Gardner-Thorpe’s Presidential Address to the Devon and Exeter Medical Society, delivered in the Chapter House in October 1999. His resulting publication, ‘Stones unturned: memorials of medical significance in Exeter Cathedral’, was printed the following year.) Dr Gardner-Thorpe has long had a keen interest in the work of James Parkinson (1755-1824) and amassed a collection of Parkinson’s works, including an extremely rare copy of his ground-breaking 1817 essay on the shaking palsy, the neurodegenerative disorder that would become known as Parkinson’s Disease.
Dr Gardner-Thorpe’s generous donation also includes Parkinson’s work in geology and palaeontology, including early editions of his Organic remains of a former world (1804-1811) and Outlines of oryctology (1822). Alongside the publications of Parkinson are those of a number of his associates: Gideon Mantell, an English obstetrician and geologist, who praised Parkinson’s Organic remains of a former world as ‘the first attempt to give a familiar and scientific account of fossils’, and Jean-Martin Charcot, a French neurologist, who coined the term ‘Parkinson’s Disease’ after James Parkinson.
The collection of Dr Gardner-Thorpe is now publicly available at the Cathedral Library. At a time when students receive course material through a virtual learning environment, it seems even more important to have access to the material history of science and medicine – and to appreciate the many shoulders of medical knowledge and experience on which we rest.