Student Newsletters in the Digital Collections: Discover what life was like for RCSI students in the 1960s

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 documented seem universal to the student experience today. Others, thankfully, are a legacy of times past: RCSI’s reputation as a safe haven of medical education for students from apartheid South Africa (see image below), for example, is reflected more than once in newsletter pages. From the sublime to the ridiculous ('Aspects of the Origin and Future of the Public Convenience' (p.27), anyone?), they offer a glimpse of what mattered in life to the students of RCSI.

'The South Africans' by Moosa Kebab [pseudonym], Two Sides of Surgeons, No. 6, April 1967

Student publications often reflect the cyclical nature of College life and most newsletters were short-lived. New titles tended to appear with new student cohorts as enthusiastic editorial teams sought to put their own stamp on the tradition, often only to disappear again as those same students graduated from RCSI and moved into professional practice. Many – despite the best intentions of editors and editorial teams – were issued sporadically, enthusiasm often proving no match for the academic demands of medical school.

Filling the Gaps

Unfortunately, many of these newsletter series are incomplete. Some have possibly not survived the passage of time. Others may never have found their way to the College Archive, but may perhaps still be found in the attics or garages of College alumni alongside lecture notes and other keepsakes from student days… 

Dear reader, if this is the case for you – please consider helping us to fill some of these gaps in the newsletter collections for future generations and get in touch at archivist@rcsi.com.