When St Mark’s Hospital Moved to Northwick Park…

...it was the Summer of 1995 and the successful outcome following several years of uncertainty. Since at least the late 1960s there had been a question mark of the future of St Mark's Hospital. The Todd Report 1968 (Royal Commission on Medical Education) with its focus on rationalising London's medical schools created uncertainty for the post-graduate …

Cleaning and housing the St Mark’s Hospital glass lantern slides collection

The St Mark's Hospital archive includes a collection of over 600 glass lantern slides, chiefly of histology specimens, plus related diagrams, charts and microscopic pathology images. It is thought that they were maintained by the Pathology Department or Research Department and were used for research and teaching purposes as well as forming clinical records of some St …

Attending St Mark’s Hospital in the 1930s: Examining and preserving the case notes

The St Mark's Hospital Archive contains an extensive record of the patients who passed through the hospital's doors from 1900 onwards. An array of patient registers, such as admission and discharge, ward, private patient, out-patient, radium, anaesthetics, daily beds and operating theatre, covering 1900-1994, are complemented by Clinical Staff Meeting records where individual cases were …

Sir Charles Gordon Gordon-Watson: Impressions of a St Mark’s surgeon Part 3

In this final article on Gordon-Watson I will explore the surgeon's life outside the operating theatre and demonstrate how medical archives contain so much more than just 'dry' medical history. Gordon-Watson was a general surgeon at heart. In the years before 1920 he also held posts at the Metropolitan Hospital and St Andrews Hospitals, Dollis …

Sir Charles Gordon Gordon-Watson: Impressions of a St Mark’s surgeon Part 2

In this second in a series of three articles I will examine Gordon-Watson's career at St Mark's and St Bartholomew's Hospitals where he held surgical posts up until the early 1930s. After returning from medical service in the Boer War, Gordon-Watson was anxious to establish himself, taking on posts in a number of London hospitals. …

Sir Charles Gordon Gordon-Watson: Impressions of a St Mark’s Surgeon Part 1

In this next series of blog posts I aim to show how archival research on a single subject or person often opens up an Aladdin's cave of equally fascinating historical avenues and tangents. The wealth of contextual documents contribute to forming a more holistic picture of a person and they times the lived in. In …

The Archivist’s first month PART 2: Insights and Impressions from the St Mark’s Photographic Collection

Shortly after St Mark’s Hospital moved to Northwick Park a collection of photographs and slides were transferred by the Medical Photography Department to St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archive. Filling two shelves in the archive store room, the collection comprised over four thousand print images (some with the accompanying negatives), nearly five hundred 35mm slides and about …

The Archivist’s first month PART 1: Getting acquainted

It is now six weeks* since I started work as the Project Archivist and it is high time for introductions and a project update. I began working at St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives and Museum in January 2017 when I was engaged to catalogue the archive of the Medical College (a project funded by the The …

Conservation challenges of 20th century collections

In my last blog post I spoke about stationery bindings, how there is little variation in their aesthetics throughout the 20th century but a decrease in the quality of materials and structures being used. Indeed, collections dating from the 20th century are often found in poorer conditions than those from earlier centuries. As medical record-keeping …

Frederick Salmon Day – 3 January 2018

Work continues on the conservation aspect of our project to preserve and make available the archive records of St Mark's Hospital, and we'll be updating on the project activities again soon. But we couldn't let today go past without a nod to the man who started it all, Frederick Salmon, founder of St Mark's, as …