Celebrating 500 years of Pregnancy and Birth

Since April this year the library and archives of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists has been involved in a Knowledge Exchange Partnership with The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and the De Partu History of Childbirth Group. The partnership mines the college’s rich collection of over 2000 books and extensive archive material…

Fantastic Finds for Friday: William Smellie, the ‘Father of Midwifery’

I was recently asked by the College’s President about our holdings on the ‘Father of Midwifery’ William Smellie, and I must admit that the resulting list was quite impressive! So as our Fantastic Find for Friday, I thought I would bring an overview of some of the fantastic sources we hold in the College Archive…

Fantastic Finds for Friday: Eighteenth and nineteenth Scottish contributions to O&G

Our fantastic find for Friday brings us a pertinent reminder that the work of the College ‘transcends political frontiers’ and is a lecture delivered to the College by Foundation Fellow, Professor Robert W Johnstone of Edinburgh in 1949. The William Meredith Fletcher Shaw Memorial Lecture was established in 1946 by former College President, Sir William…

RCOG Heritage 2: Volunteering with William Smellie and Robert Barnes….

The Heritage team have been fortunate to have had the assistance of a couple of volunteers since the beginning of September, which has meant progress in a number of preservation and cataloguing tasks. Katie Truax is a history of medicine student from Edinburgh University, with a strong interest in women’s health, and has written about…