Thackray Insights invites you to delve deep into eye opening topics and explore the unheard stories of medicine.
For centuries, women were the keepers of herbal remedies, passing down knowledge of the healing and harmful properties of plants through the generations. As medicine became increasingly professionalised, much of this expertise was dismissed or forgotten. Join us as we uncover the talents, guile and sheer bloody-mindedness of a group of women whose hard-fought contributions to medicine have shaped how we heal today.
Using images from the Lindley Library’s amazing collections, The Royal Horticultural Society’s Fiona Davison will explore the forgotten story of the great herbal revival of the 1920s and 30s, and its legacy today. Then The Royal College of Physician’s Katie Birkwood shares the extraordinary life and artistic talent of Elizabeth Blackwell, and her monumental publication A Curious Herbal. How did one woman overcome gender imbalance in science and medicine to produce one of the most important botanical works of all time?
End your visit in our new exhibition Where Magic Grows to discover more long-forgotten tales of plant magic and medicine, and come face-to-face with an original hand-coloured copy of A Curious Herbal, just one of 100 known copies still in existence.
About the Speakers
Fiona Davison has been Head of Libraries and Exhibitions at the RHS since 2012. Prior to that she worked in museums for more than 20 years. She has written two books on garden history: Hidden Horticulturists: the working-class gardeners who shaped Britain’s gardens (Atlantic Books, 2019) and An Almost Impossible Thing: pioneer women gardeners (Little Toller, 2023).
Katie Birkwood has been the rare books and special collections librarian at the Royal College of Physicians since 2012, where she cares for a collection of over 50,000 titles spanning 550 years. She is the lead curator of the recent exhibition A body of knowledge which explored 500 years of book collecting at the RCP.
We offer a select number of free Insights tickets for students studying A-Level or above – email [email protected] to find out more.
