It’s often very peaceful up in the gallery of the main Reading Room. There isn’t any space for desks, just a narrow walkway allowing you to browse the shelves. That means you can pass by a lot of shelving on your way to find a volume, giving ample…
It’s often very peaceful up in the gallery of the main Reading Room. There isn’t any space for desks, just a narrow walkway allowing you to browse the shelves. That means you can pass by a lot of shelving on your way to find a volume, giving ample…
Dry January is a campaign run by Alcohol Change UK during which participants abstain from drinking alcohol for January. Alcohol Change UK is a British charity that works towards reducing harms caused by alcohol consumption. Since it started in 2012, Dry January has grown fast. It has been widely covered…
The Library’s Pamphlet Collection, housed in the gallery of the main Reading Room, comprises government reports, research papers, leaflets and circulars, and instructional manuals, to name but a few. A more surprising element of the collection is the twentieth-century pamphlets containing recipes. The shelf marks relating to Nutrition…
December 3rd 2022 will be International Day of Persons with Disabilities. The day was first celebrated back in 1992 and set up by the United Nations to celebrate and recognize the achievements of people living with disabilities, but also to raise awareness of the various issues such as inequality and…
While working on the book display about London the other month, I came across a fairly curious-looking bound volume in the Pamphlet Collection. So, today’s trip into the pamphlet collection will investigate it a bit! Fumifugium, written by John Evelyn and first published in 1661, is now considered…
As we continue to welcome new and returning students to LSHTM, we have put together a selection of books from our collection about the city of London. From bubonic plague to air pollution, the works collected cover many of the challenges of living in this city over the centuries. Whether…
28 September 2022 marks World Rabies Day. This year’s theme is “One health ; zero death” : see: https://www.who.int/news-room/events/detail/2022/09/28/default-calendar/world-rabies-day-2022The World Health Organization has a target for the elimination of deaths due to dog-mediated infection…
Like most books in the Library’s Special Collection our copy of A Treatise on the Plague by A.B. Faulkner, published in 1820, was acquired secondhand. This was probably purchased from an antiquarian bookseller by our first librarian, Cyril Barnard, who was actively adding books of importance to the…
Figure 1: Colourful organisms in a sample of the water supplied by the Southwark & Vauxhall Company to St. Thomas’s Hospital in 1854 as seen under the microscope (Hassall 1855a : page 248, Plate 19).
This illustration of a microcosm of the natural world in London’s water in…
This is the latest in the LSHTM Rare Books Blog, featuring Rhazes (full-name: Muhammad ibn Zakariyā al-Rāzī). Rhazes made notable contributions to many areas of medicine. His manuscripts, carefully preserved down the centuries, were among the first medical books printed in Europe in the 15th century. After translation into Latin Rhazes’s writings became widely disseminated and were to influence the future direction of western medicine.