RCSI Heritage Collections

Tonight is the Littlewoods Ireland Blog Awards  and excitement levels are reaching fever pitch in the Heritage Collections!  Woo hooo! Let's get this party started! The awards ceremony will be at Duffy's Circus in Dun Laoghaire so to get in the mood, we decided we would have a look at some glass lantern slides taken of animals in Dublin Zoo in the 1890s and early 1900s. These slides are part of the J Alfred Scott Collection and give a great insight into one of Dublin's favourite visitor attractions, Dublin Zoo . Up until recently exotic animals were part and parcel of the circus. Thankfully the times they are a changing and animals are no longer being made perform in circuses. Instead they are getting to live the rest of their lives out in a happy carefree environment. Not having anything related to circuses in the collections but having established a now tenuous link between circuses and animals the (il)logical conclusion is to look at animals from Dublin Zoo wh...

With a number of Irish Olympic medals in the bag from Rio 2016 and (fingers crossed) more medals to be brought home by those competing in the Paralympics , we thought it was time to look at some medals housed in the RCSI Heritage Collections . Sir William Thomson (1843-1909) Recently the College acquired a set of four medals belonging to Sir William Thomson PRCSI 1896. Thomson was born in Downpatrick, Co. Down on 29th June 1843. He undertook his medical education in Queen's College, Galway and Queen's University, Belfast receiving his M.D. and M.Ch in 1872. By 1873 he was Visiting Surgeon to the Richmond Hospital and Lecturer in Anatomy in the Carmichael School of Medicine. Thomson became a Fellow of RCSI in 1874 being unanimously elected as President two years later. Further distinctions rapidly followed; Surgeon to the Lord Lieutenant, Surgeon-in-Ordinary to Queen Victoria and Honorary Surgeon to King Edward VII. Thomson was Chief Surgeon to the Irish Hospital in...