The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 270 No 7249 p703
17 May 2003

Society summary

Museum lends objects to commemorate important medical anniversaries

Museum lends objects to commemorate important medical anniversaries
The Royal Pharmaceutical Society’s museum continues to increase access to its collections by lending objects to two museums this month, the Society says. Both the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum and the Royal College of Physicians are celebrating important medical anniversaries. These are, respectively, the 75th anniversary of Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin and the 250th anniversary of the death of Sir Hans Sloane.

As part of the 75th anniversary of Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin, the Society’s museum has lent a culture vessel to the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum for its permanent exhibition. The vessel, donated by Norman Heatley, was used as part of Professor Florey’s team’s ground-breaking work on penicillin at Oxford University between 1940 and 1942. Up to 400 of these vessels were used to produce the quantities of the fungus Penicillium notatum required for the laboratory and clinical trials that brought penicillin into use.

The museum has also lent a selection of items to the Royal College of Physicians, which is marking 250 years since the death of Sir Hans Sloane with a temporary exhibition. The exhibition includes portraits, archival material and objects from the College’s collection illustrating many aspects of Sloane’s life as an adventurer, collector, and president of the college from 1719 to 1735. The materia medica objects lent by the Society’s museum, including a viper, cinchona bark, cocoa and bezoar stone (an antidote to poisons), are all mentioned by Sloane in his writings or formed part of his collections.

Coincidentally, the items come from a materia medica cabinet that was originally donated to the museum by the Royal College of Physicians in the 1920s.

Briony Hudson, the keeper of the Society’s museum collections, said: “Working with other organisations is one of the ways we can reach the public and let them know about the educational and research potential of our collections and historical information. We are very much focused on developing the collections’ potential as a resource for learning, for schoolchildren, university students, community groups, web-users and through loans to other museums.”