From the Sun King (Louis XIV) in 17th century France, who chose the sun as his personal emblem, to strains of The Temptations’ 1964 song ‘My Girl’ — “I’ve got sunshine on a cloudy day” — the sun has long been recognised for giving life to all things and its positive…
‘She sells seashells on the sea shore’
This nineteenth century tongue twister was inspired by the popularity of seaside holidays, as shown in these engravings:
Seaside scene
Seaside activities
Sea bathing had long been extolled for its health-giving benefits, but it was really only accessible to the upper classes…
The London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine in Keppel Street, Bloomsbury was opened in 1929. The balconies on the first floor of the building, outside the Library, are decorated with a frieze of sculptures of ten animals – seven insects, a tick, a snake and a rat – responsible…
South Asian Heritage Month takes place every year ending on the anniversary of Partition of the Indian Sub-Continent on 17 August 1947 by which the Indian subcontinent was divided into India, West Pakistan (now Pakistan) and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
In the LSHTM Library there are numerous books about…
From the seventeenth century, women have played a small but significant role in exploring the world of insects by listing, drawing, and collecting them. Some women have also observed and recorded the extraordinary life histories of insects. Eleanor Anne Ormerod (1828-1901) did all this before becoming the first woman…
In those parts of the world with a written language, the first organisms in the natural world to be studied, documented and figured were plants in recognition of their economic value in agriculture, nutrition, health and well-being. In Europe these herbals, as they are called, were hand-written in…
In the 18th and 19th centuries and until the 20th Century the death of women in childbirth or shortly afterwards was a common occurrence. One early treatise on puerperal fever was written by John Leake, a physician and male midwife: Practical observations on the child-bed fever, first published in…
The Austrian physician Johann Gottfried Bremser (1767-1827) was born in Wertheim am Main in present-day Germany. He studied medicine in Jena and Vienna where he obtained a licence to practice medicine in 1797. Bremser made a special study of parasitic worm infections in humans and travelled to Paris…
As we’ve already seen in this blog series, the Historical Collection furnishes a huge variety of pre-twentieth-century material that is of value to anyone interested in the history of science or social studies or LSHTM as an institution. The work done to improve catalogue records for this…
The Royal Commission on the Poor Law and the Unemployed was set up in 1905 to review the system of poor relief provision and consider alternative ways to tackle unemployment. Twenty people were appointed to the Commission including Octavia Hill (1838-1912) and Beatrice Webb (1858-1943). However, after four…
