RCSI Heritage Collections

Nowadays when venturing abroad an essential for most people is a travel guide, be it in the physical form of a guidebook or the electronic version on your phone or tablet. Either way they are a wealth of information about the city, country, continent you are planning on visiting. Travel guides, such as Lonely Planet and Rough Guides , have been around only since the 1970s but here in the RCSI Heritage Collections we have some that are a lot older than that! As you can imagine travel guides and books were essential reads back in the mid to late 1800s. If you were going to travel somewhere you had no idea what it was like and most likely had never met anyone from your destination before. Remember this was a time before internet and Google! So what fabulous travel guides do we have in store for you today? Well, off to our first stop...... Philadelphia ! Travel guide of Philadelphia dated 1824 From a medical point of view, Philadelphia was a city worth visiting because it was ...

RCSI Heritage Collections are delighted to announce that we have been shortlisted in the Littlewoods Ireland Blog Awards 2016 in the Corporate Arts & Culture Blog category . So while we shake the dust off the gúna and get the polish out for the bróga.... Voting has opened but is not open for very long. It runs from today Wednesday 17th to Tuesday 23rd August. So make sure you get your vote in early and often! And for us of course!! Vote for us HERE! Vótáil dúinne ANSEO! VOTE HERE!! And maybe here... And sure why not here.

The word 'pamphlet' comes from a 780 line 12th century Latin comedic play. Bet you didn't know that! The play was called Pamphilus de amore and focuses on Pamphilus who seeks to woo Galatea. This small work was issued without any covers. This meant that the popular poem could be easily and widely copied and circulated in the form of a small slim booklet. Pamphilus was being read in England, France, Italy and Spain and by the early 13th century the word 'pamphlet' was being used in Middle English to describe a small thin book with no cover on or about a particular topic.   Pamphlet dated 1755 ( RCSI/PAMP/8c ) Pamphlet by Charles Marie de la Condamine ( RCSI/Pamp/16a ) With over 6,000 pamphlets in our Heritage Collections, a large scale cataloguing project was undertaken and is still ongoing to make them available online. By clicking here you will be brought to the RCSI Heritage Collection online catalogue hierarchical browser. If...