700 Years of Medical History: An Interview with Pamela Forde of the Royal College of Physicians
January 29, 2025
From piecing together the Dead Sea Scrolls with sellotape to digitizing a 19th-century scroll from a Japanese acupuncture school, the world of conservation is full of fascinating stories. We sat down with Pamela Forde from the Royal College of Physicians (RCP) to get the inside scoop on an archive dating back to the 1200s and to learn more about the art and science of preserving history.
Pamela Forde managed modern records before returning to historical ones, where the RCP’s long-stretching history caught her eye. She has been an Archive Manager with the professional membership body for over 21 years and counting.
Q1: What would surprise people to know about the conservation process?
Forde: One common misconception is the idea that conservation consists of preserving an original item intact. Conservation may remove original material that's been worn or damaged too much and replace it with a modern copy, which means that the item can be handled safely. So, although you can keep the pieces that have been removed, that item is no longer as originally produced. Modern best practice keeps removal to a minimum and does its best to make changes which can be reversed because one of the things that we don't always know is the long-term effects of time on a particular material or chemical.
A very famous example is the Dead Sea Scrolls. At the time they were discovered, sellotape was a brand-new material, and seemed perfect as a backing material for piecing the fragments together again. Now modern conservatives are spending decades removing these very fragile fragments from the glue and the sellotape. We don’t necessarily know how material is going to change over time, so modern conservators try to make changes that can be easily reversed.
In our collection we have 13th-century handwritten books, and when we had to have those rebound, because the original bindings were disintegrating, we picked a conservator who used the same materials and techniques the original binders would have used. The new binding for these 1300s manuscripts is from the 1950’s but uses the same materials and techniques the binders in the 1300s used.
Q2: Talking about unique pieces ties into my next question: what are some unusual pieces you have found in the RCP archive?
Forde: An unusual piece would be a really lovely 19th-century Japanese acupuncture school text. It's a continuous scroll with beautiful images of the male and female body, showing the acupuncture points. This is a very unusual item for a Western collection. In the west books are bound by cutting paper into rectangles. You sew the rectangles together, forming a block and you sew the block to a spine that sits between two boards.
A scroll is literally one continuous piece of material that's wrapped around a central rod. Very different to western book binding. The conservation needs and requirements for a continuous scroll which you unroll to the page that you’re looking for and then roll to close, are very different.
In term of the digitization, it was challenging because with a Japanese text you read from right to left. It had to be imaged in sections and reassembled as a continuous roll, for reading in the opposite direction to European text.
Q3: What about particularly valuable pieces in the RCP archive?
Forde: As far as I’m concerned, all the items are valuable. The information they contain and what they can tell us about our history and the history of medicine are genuinely unique. They're usually the only copy of that item anywhere.
A good example of a unique item which is valuable in so many cultural ways, is an original Charter from Elizabeth I. It was a legal document which allowed the 16th-century college to take the bodies of up to four executed criminals from the scaffold at Tyburn, to make anatomical dissections so they could study and teach on anatomy. In the 16th century, most people wouldn't leave their body to medical science for dissection. So, there was a huge shortage of bodies for dissection.
For executed criminals it was considered part of the punishment of execution that you would be dissected afterwards and your body wouldn't remain intact for burial.
Q4: Do you have a favorite type of medium, be it maps, diaries, letters, etc.?
Forde: I like letters because letters are very personal things. Some are written in a professional capacity, but other letters are written in a personal capacity to friends, family and they really give a sense of personality. For example, we have about 15 or 16 letters from Edward Jenner to a friend. He's a famous figure in the history of vaccination. But his letters to his friend give a really strong sense of his personality.
