Speech delivered on the occasion of the opening of the exhibition ‘A body of knowledge’, 11 September 2025.
This exhibition is the product of 20 years being employed in libraries and a dozen years getting to know the RCP’s Heritage Library: the thousands of books that line the walls of the Dorchester Library, and a fair few more besides kept safely elsewhere in the RCP building at Regent’s Park.
In the exhibition there are some famous works and some lesser-known gems, all chosen because they’ve caught my eye or my imagination for one reason or another. There are various superlatives: I couldn’t resist name-checking the oldest, biggest and smallest books. Some are pretty and some are plain. Some have been owned by the RCP for centuries, and some are very recent acquisitions. In their variety they embody some of the different functions and meanings that this institution’s library has had over the course of five centuries.
The idea of a library is a cultural touchstone, and not an uncomplicated one. Though routinely portrayed as dry, dusty and dull, they’re also regularly glorified as bastions of civilisation: beacons of learning, democratic knowledge centres; guardians of cultural, professional or national identities; safe havens for the nerdy; places of perpetual safe-keeping.
However, they are not necessarily all—or any—of those things.
And the esteem in which they’re held does not guarantee their safety: indeed, it can make them a target:
Dear reader, no library is meant to keep everything. (We’ll come back to that thought later.)
There is another, more theoretical, conception of The Library, which though less glamorous is ultimately no less idealistic. In an ideal world, a library, or rather the maintenance of a library, is an act of hope and defiance in the face of entropy, the fundamental irresistible tendency of the universe to become less ordered over time.
A library is—or ought to be, the theory goes—a deliberately made collection of information resources described and organised for retrievability. It’s the product of human minds twice over: someone to write the books (or compose the music, or draw the maps, or record the movies, and so on), and someone else to choose, document, arrange, and preserve those books (or scores, or atlases or film reels), and to let people use them.
None of these processes happen automatically: the library can’t and won’t care for itself.
The dirty, dreary, complex, endless work of maintenance isn’t what excites most people about libraries (although I, and maybe you, may be exceptions), and it doesn’t always excite those asked to fund them.
It’s salutary to remember that of the disasters that can befall libraries, the prosaic outcomes of neglect can be no less serious than a good headline-grabbing emergency. Fire, flood and bombing are terrible, sure, but so can be attack by pests, the accumulation of dirt, the misplacement of books, creeping theft when no-one’s paying attention, and a lack of access for readers leading to a perceived lack of relevance and ultimate closure.
It’s fair to say that the RCP library has faced most if not all of these challenges over its 500-year history. It burnt in 1666, it was bombed in 1940, and I shan’t list all the times a roof has been known to leak. Periods of neglect have led to accusations of the embezzlement of books, to the unwise sacking of a librarian, to long periods left quite undocumented in the archive, to 18 months’ homelessness resulting in the loss of volumes during a building move, to the shuffling of titles on shelves obscuring their origin and provenance, and the buildup of London grime on spines and pages.
But it’s not all gloom. There have also been periods of intense and productive engagement, from various of the past Harveian Librarians---of whom Anita Simonds is the latest in a long list---and, from the turn of the 20th century onwards, professional staff. The survival of this library and my knowledge of its contents, such as it is, is built on all of their efforts.
As an aside: nothing in life is simple, and sometimes today it’s easy to look back at periods of what turned out to be benign neglect with rose-tinted glasses, and to sneer at instances of what has turned out to be malign attention. An early-20th-century rebinding project was declared by the library committee to have left the books looking very attractive, but it was completed with a leather that today is already crumbling to dust, with quite the opposite visual effect. But, on balance, it is probably best to keep paying attention to the books.
All this work across the centuries has been undertaken in order to make the information herein accessible to readers. Once upon a time, those readers were restricted to members of the college, to persons who ‘will have increased the treasury of the College by at least five pounds’ and to others by special pleading. Today, the Heritage Library is open—free of charge—to all who wish to use it. It’s been a treat over the years to see the collections here used for everything from abstruse articles on maritime legal history; to creative inspiration for fine art; to developing dermatologists’ clinical observation skills; to storytelling for children; to research on vaccination, the use of excrement in medicine of the past, any number of topics about medicinal plants, and much more besides.
This library, any library, is a place where we can all practise the vital skills and abilities that some would have atrophy in this so-called exciting new age of Generative AI: the coming new world in which we’re encouraged to outsource the necessary mental exertion of finding, thinking and synthesising raw material to the biased datasets of an opaque system.
Use your libraries. Use your brains. Make work that reflects the fundamental weirdnesses and wonderfulnesses of what it is to be human.
One way we can do that is by understanding the constitution and history of a library itself, as a window onto the social history of the time that created and nurtured it. The work of libraries—if they’re to do their work of fighting entropy—is necessarily that of selection and standardisation. No library can or should contain everything (read Borges for the nightmare that ensues if it does), and little will be findable if you don’t impose order on how you describe it. What is selected and documented—by active choice or by the whims of fate—at any given point in time will necessarily be a reflection of the mores and prejudices of that time.
Today, we’re trying to unpick the ways in which selections and systems of the past have embedded inequalities and injustices in library collections. It’s an ongoing task and we’re well aware that we’re heaping on our own new biases as we go.
One way we’ve approached that work here was to recruit a researcher—our next speaker—to study the history of women in the library. I hoped when first writing the proposal for a collaborative doctoral award research project that the outcomes would include new perspectives on library and institutional history, imaginatively expressed.
So it’s been a pleasure and an honour to welcome Catherine James into our team, and to support her project on the history of women’s ownership of medical knowledge. And I was beyond delighted, though not a little daunted, when she suggested the installation that has become Making Visible.
That installation is the most visible output of the ongoing work to investigate and contextualise the subtleties of the unique collection that is the RCP library.
Katie Birkwood, rare books and special collections librarian
