Friday 8 June 2018

70 years in pictures...


This week, Access Officer Louise has been getting to know LHSA's image collections:

5th July is fast approaching, and as the National Health Service prepares to turn 70, here at Lothian Health Services Archive we have been hard at work promoting the big day.

Our exhibition, Dawn of a New Era, has been on display in the Main Library of the University of Edinburgh since April 13 and will continue until August 15 with the addition of two further display cases arriving in late June. The exhibition uses LHSA collections to chart the journey of the NHS from pre-1948 experiments with state healthcare through 70 years of innovation, challenges and breakthroughs. The exhibition showcases a diverse range of objects, and it is definitely the first exhibition I have seen featuring both a pacemaker and a board game.




NHS objects on display inside the exhibition
As well as our preparations, I have been answering enquiries from others who are collecting images to use in their own promotion of the anniversary. Image requests have been helpful in allowing me to gain an ever broadening understanding of the collections held by LHSA and I have already compiled a long list of favourites.

While searching for images that depicted nurses at work I came across this wonderful scene from 1960s which shows nurses at Christmas with geriatric patients on a ward in Bangour Village Hospital.
Patients and nurses at Christmas, Bangour Village Hospital, c. late 1960s (P/PL44/P/088)
Another image I enjoyed was a photograph showing a classroom of nurses being taught in their new teaching department at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh which opened in 1957.
 
Nurses' classroom, Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, 1957 (P/PL1/S)
I also conducted a search through our extensive collection of midwifery and nursing badges from across Scotland. My favourite is from the North Edinburgh School of Midwifery which has a dolphin arching across the centre.

North Edinburgh School of Midwifery badge, late 1970s (O467)
As well as midwifery and nursing, badges held by LHSA cover Edinburgh’s hospitals from the early twentieth century through to HIV awareness campaigns of the late 1980s and ‘90s.
For more images of our historic badges, visit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/49439570@N08/sets/72157625849589925

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