RCSI Heritage Collections

The first RCSI student newsletter, Mistura, was published in 1953. Successive class cohorts have continued the tradition, with student newsletters and magazines coming and going under many names and in various forms ever since. As part of the most recent traunch of newly-digitised material from the College Archive to hit our Digital Collections site, you can now explore select RCSI student newsletters from the 1960s  here .  Peering Into the Past Student newsletters provide a unique insight into the evolution of the student experience at RCSI. Through the written word – serious, creative, and comic – they chart the academic and extra-curricular activities of the student body over the past 70 years. Sporting and social life feature prominently, club and society outings providing the same distraction and release for students past as they continue to do for those present. From the stress of exams to the challenges of finding suitable accommodation, some of the academic and social issues d

The town of Saint-Lô in Normandy was a German stronghold in Northern France in the lead up to the D-Day landings of 6 June 1944. Like many others towns in the region, it was all but destroyed by Allied bombings during the effort to liberate Northern France from German occupation in the weeks and months that followed. Central to rehabilitation efforts in Saint-Lô was a small group of humanitarian missionaries from Ireland who set up a Red Cross hospital in the town’s remains, L'hôpital irlandais de Saint-Lô. Among these was nurse Mary Frances Crowley, who served as Matron of the hospital at Saint-Lô between 1945 and 1947. A pioneer of nurse education in Ireland, she later became the Foundation Dean of the RCSI Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery in 1974. Mary Frances Crowley,  painted by William Nathans for  RCSI Women on Walls (2019) To commemorate the anniversary of Crowley’s birth on 1 August 1906, Project Archivist Erin McRae tells the story of Mary Crowley’s role in the establishm