Katie Birkwood is the rare books and special collections librarian at the Royal College of Physicians, London, and curator of the exhibition, Scholar, Courtier, Magician: the Lost Library of John Dee, which runs until 29 July.
You were a music scholar. How did you end up in a library rather than a concert hall?
For my course I transcribed a lot of medieval music from original manuscripts. I found I was more interested in that than I was in analysing and performing it, so I pursued a career in special collections.
With your knowledge of the medical collections, could you carry out emergency minor surgery on a curator?
I’m probably more of an expert in 16th-century medicine than in current practice. The prevailing theory at the time was that if you wanted to prevent or cure disease, you had to ensure the four humours – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile – were in balance. The most notable example was blood-letting, with people prescribed leeches or told to cut into a vein to get rid of excess blood. King Charles II had a stroke while out riding and should have easily survived, but his physicians prescribed emetics, purgatives and blood-letting. He died a couple of days later.
And what of grisly operations?
Samuel Pepys had a bladder stone the size of a golf ball fished out with a scoop via a sensitive area of his anatomy. It’s quite possible that he survived only because he was first under the knife that day so the tools were clean. We lent some 17th-century equipment – forceps, scoop and a gorget –to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich for its Pepys show, the tools that would have cut into that tender place.
Do you get a frisson when handling John Dee’s objects?
It’s a thrill to have such a direct connection with an almost mythical character. There are so many stories about him that it’s exciting to leaf through his books and read his annotations. He used a lot of symbols. For example, where we might use a highlighter pen today, he drew a pointing hand symbol called a manicule. They are really nice because you can see not just the hand but also the wrist and the cuff of the shirt, so there’s a little bit of fashion history there as well. He also used little trefoil flowers, brackets in the shape of faces with a nose pointing out and a little eye. There’s also a remarkable Tudor galleon surging through the waves with an extract from a poem – they’re like his own revision notes. Talking of finding things, there was a squashed fly in the pages of his copy of Guido Bonatti’s De Astronomia, published in Basel in 1550. Not very nice.
You were a music scholar. How did you end up in a library rather than a concert hall?
For my course I transcribed a lot of medieval music from original manuscripts. I found I was more interested in that than I was in analysing and performing it, so I pursued a career in special collections.
With your knowledge of the medical collections, could you carry out emergency minor surgery on a curator?
I’m probably more of an expert in 16th-century medicine than in current practice. The prevailing theory at the time was that if you wanted to prevent or cure disease, you had to ensure the four humours – blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile – were in balance. The most notable example was blood-letting, with people prescribed leeches or told to cut into a vein to get rid of excess blood. King Charles II had a stroke while out riding and should have easily survived, but his physicians prescribed emetics, purgatives and blood-letting. He died a couple of days later.
And what of grisly operations?
Samuel Pepys had a bladder stone the size of a golf ball fished out with a scoop via a sensitive area of his anatomy. It’s quite possible that he survived only because he was first under the knife that day so the tools were clean. We lent some 17th-century equipment – forceps, scoop and a gorget –to the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich for its Pepys show, the tools that would have cut into that tender place.
Do you get a frisson when handling John Dee’s objects?
It’s a thrill to have such a direct connection with an almost mythical character. There are so many stories about him that it’s exciting to leaf through his books and read his annotations. He used a lot of symbols. For example, where we might use a highlighter pen today, he drew a pointing hand symbol called a manicule. They are really nice because you can see not just the hand but also the wrist and the cuff of the shirt, so there’s a little bit of fashion history there as well. He also used little trefoil flowers, brackets in the shape of faces with a nose pointing out and a little eye. There’s also a remarkable Tudor galleon surging through the waves with an extract from a poem – they’re like his own revision notes. Talking of finding things, there was a squashed fly in the pages of his copy of Guido Bonatti’s De Astronomia, published in Basel in 1550. Not very nice.
