Happy Birthday to The Ministry!

Here at The Ministry of Curiosity we are spending the next week in self-indulgent bliss celebrating our first birthday and to honour ourselves (and of course you readers) we will be posting our favourite articles. The past year has gone has gone by in a museum-loving blur we've met some brilliant people, sparked outrage on twitter, seen amazing exhibitions and tried to get people thinking about museums in a new way.

Almost a year to the day Kristin and I met to visit the fantastic ‘Doctors, Dissectionand Resurrection Men’ exhibition at the Museum of London and out of our shared love of the morbid came the birth of The Ministry of Curiosity. Orginally aiming to provide an event resource to museum workers like ourselves and create a Salon of ideas for Museum Lovers -  but without the patriarchy and opium.

We never expected our pet project to hit off in the way it has done, we never anticipated collaborating with the big guys at Museums Showoff and SickCity Project or get as much attention as an interview on the Guardian website. We’d only aimed for a thousand twitter followers and an invite to an opening or two! 

Thank you to you, our contributors and readers, and especially our twitter followers. Without your 140 characters, retweets and favourites we wouldn't know if anyone cared what we thought or was even listening! Your support and constant enthusiasm is why we do what we do.

And thankyou to Kristin for putting up with my often incoherent regional dialect and early morning panics. God bless that American.

So please join us in celebrations, shake your bum and sing to Stevie Wonder, read our favourite articles and stay curious. 

Love from Terri x

A Support Group for the Museum-Stereotyped 

Collector in Focus: The Little Mermaid

Guest blogger Becky - Smashing Shows

My History Valentine Series: Frederick John Horniman , John Hunter, Mrs Beeton and Henry Wellcome to Katy Perry.

#Museumfear Series Dummies and Packing Foam.

Guerilla Heritage Activist Takes on the Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum

Making Museum Geeks Mad #museumhates

Exclusive Interview with the Glass Jar of Moles

Why your registrar should be your best friend

Museum Muscles

Prancing to Playlists: Museums on Spotify.

The Ministry Explains It All: Getting into museums

P.S We will be celebrating with cocktail this evening  in London email/tweet us to find out where! 

The History Social - 5th September

The Ministry of Curiosity and the Sick City Project invite you to the next History Social – a regular chance to meet, make new friends and contacts, and talk about the past, present and future of our city.

We’ll be meeting on Thursday 5th September, from 6pm, in the excellent Old Red Cow on Long Lane near Smithfield Market. The nearest tube stations are Farringdon, Barbican and St Paul’s.

At 7pm I’ll be talking about the lurid, gruesome and violent history of Smithfield, from Roman butchers and Counter-Reformation martyrs to Hogarthian anti-heroes and London’s most ancient hospital. Join us! – but take care; the ancient cobblestones of Smithfield have too often been slippery with blood.

Exploring the Sick City of London

At the Ministry we love meeting, promoting and participating in all of the exciting multi-disciplinary projects that London has to offer. From Museums Showoff to UCL Researchers in Museums there are so many interesting people doing great things at the moment. So it was only a matter of time before we heard about the Sick City Project supported by the Wellcome Trust. Organized by Wellcome Engagement Fellow Dr. Richard Barnett, the Sick City Project takes the history of medicine in London to the streets. 

Starting out our snowy tour at the Royal College
of Surgeons in Lincolns Inn Field

Building on the cultural and historical geography of our great city, the Sick City projects aims to engage the imagination my immersing participants in the history of medicine by bringing them directly to the places where it happened. Why read about medicine in London when you could walk the streets walked by the historic persons themselves? Get out of the library and get into history!

Heading up the strand towards the heart
of the City 

Sick City offers a variety of tours from exploring tropical diseases in Greenwich to the sex trade of Soho, but I opted to attend Richard Barnett’s ‘Sensational Bodies’ walk organized through the Museum of London. Accompanying the ‘Doctors, Dissection and Resurrection Men’ exhibition, Barnett took us on a tour of anatomical teaching in the heart of London, covering the rise of the surgery from the four humours to the foundation of the Royal College of Surgeons in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Even living in London, it’s sometimes hard to really appreciate the physical closeness of medical London. But walking from Holborn along the Strand to St Paul’s and St Bartholomew’s Hospital, its easy to see how the trade in bodies and anatomical knowledge was linked. Surgeons and student, physicians and booksellers, body snatchers and the poor, all milled together within a claustrophobic two miles at the centre of the city.

You can see why people weren't too keen on dissection
in the early eighteenth century. 

I was also thrilled by the amount of emphasis Barnett placed on the importance of the two brothers who revolutionized surgery and anatomy teaching in the 18^th century: William and John Hunter. I know I am incredibly biased, but it made me happy. I also learned that the Hunters’ pioneering anatomy school in Covent Garden was located right where the Apple store is today. The history of London is all around us, if only we knew where to look. Throw in a ghost story or two, and I was one happy girl (despite the terrible weather- a danger of any outdoor adventure in London).

Without sounding like too much of an advertisement (note that the Ministry is not affiliated with Sick City!), you’d be crazy not to try and get yourself on one of these walks! You can find out more about the project at sickcityproject.wordpress.com plus download their app, podcasts and see future Sick City events. You can also follow them on twitter @SickCityProject.