Meet district nurse Elizabeth McPhee with her rather splendid BSA motorcycle in 1926. She is the headline image in a stunning online collection at the US National Library of Medicine. The exhibition, curated by Julia Hallam, of Liverpool University, who talks… Read More ›
What did you do in the Great Centenary, Daddy/Mummy? It is already the UK’s most expensive commemoration in history thanks to £50 million of Government funding. War was actually declared in August but the centenary started much earlier: broadcast and publishing… Read More ›
Recent controversies over the centenary of World War One sometimes overlook a key factor – how the survivors wanted it to be remembered by future generations. In the case of Dr Elsie Inglis, this was quite simple – build maternity… Read More ›
What did history do to merit the dustbin tag? You don’t hear about things being consigned to the cesspit of chemistry, morass of mathematics or sewer of sociology. But “dustbin of history” is now in common usage. Mark Liberman has… Read More ›
One of the great pleasures of wasting an idle hour looking at archive film is the electric jolt of surprise that causes you to fall off your chair. In my case it was this clip of around 100 female… Read More ›
This wee gem shows Archie Cochrane, the father of evidence-based medicine, in his prime. He is the narrator so you see him from the start in a 1970s-style pullover. Then it cuts to scenes from the 1950s – some of… Read More ›
Stand by for a treat – if you haven’t already seen it, Kay Mander’s Highland Doctor from the Scottish Screen Archive is an absolute delight. Click on the image to watch…. It tells in around 20 minutes the story of the… Read More ›
British Pathe has pulled together a set of 51 short newsreel films about female football teams as part of the English FA’s 150th anniversary. They are intriguing for a number of reasons – not least because of the FA’s ban on… Read More ›
British propaganda said the First World War would be over by Christmas 1914. It wasn’t. But peace of a different kind broke out on the Western Front when soldiers on both sides found their common humanity instead of the senseless… Read More ›
By 1930 the Frontier Nursing Service had shown that childbirth was safer in a remote area of Kentucky than in most of North America – and even much of Europe. But for its charismatic founder Mary Breckinridge, it was the start… Read More ›
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