At our recent Summer Reception, guest speaker Kirsten Rausing announced £387,275 in funding from The ALBORADA Trust for a five year project to catalogue, properly store and digitise priority pieces from our historic collections and make them available for free online. Amongst the documents we plan to digitise is a manuscript ledger recording the work […]
In our collection of watercolours by Edward Mayhew there is only one featuring dogs. The top image is captioned ‘Dog with retracted eye – near the termination(?) of distemper’ and the bottom ‘The lasting effect left by nitrate of silver when applied to an ulcer on the eye of the dog.’ The fact that there […]
In the Historical Collection there are numerous bound volumes that simply say ‘Pamphlets various’ on the spine. They don’t look that interesting but I always have a sense of anticipation when opening one for the first time as they usually contain an eclectic mix of material – prospectuses for vet schools, unpublished correspondence, reprints on […]
This month marks the 75th anniversary of ‘Operation Compass’ which took place in the North African desert, in western Egypt during World War 2. It was here, on 11 December 1940, that a member of the veterinary profession was recognised for gallantry of the highest order. Dr Thomas Somerville was born in March 1887 in […]
I have previously blogged about the almost 400 illustrations by Edward Mayhew that we have in our archives. We also have a number of other smaller collections of illustrations, one of which is the illustrated notebooks belonging to John Roalfe Cox. John Roalfe Cox MRCS FRCVS (?-1903) graduated from London Veterinary School in 1849 after which […]
1 July 1916, the first day of the Battle of the Somme, is a day remembered as one of the worst in British military history. The attack commenced at 7.30am; by the end of the day, 19,240 British soldiers had been killed and three times that number injured. The battle lasted 140 days, and amongst […]
I am delighted to say that thanks to the generosity of members of the Central Veterinary Society we have been able to have some conservation work carried out on Bracy Clark’s pasteboard model hoof. At the same time the surface dirt was removed which means that you can now read the labels much more clearly as you can see […]
This month marks the 75th anniversary of an important military operation which paved the way for true ‘combined operations’ involving the Royal Navy, RAF and Army; an operation in which two members of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons took part. In 1941 Vaagso, a coastal town in Southern Norway, lying between Trondheim and Bergen, […]
