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25 November 2013
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Relaunch | Burning down the house

We welcome in the darker months with a bright new look. Our new surrounds are the second facelift that the Bookclub has been lucky to receive thanks to our Faculty overlords and the design team at Manta Ray Media. The set-up remains much the same with regular reviews, high-profile author interviews and blogs from the editors (a warm welcome to Sam Byrne, who joins the editorial team), but what is new is that we are pleased to share much of this with a far wider audience who, as non-members, now have access to our reviews and blogs.  If this is your first visit, please explore the archives and see what there is to pick up on medical leadership and management.

We hope that you will join us for more reviews, interviews and blogs (usually on some aspect of our core theme, Leadership in Literature) throughout 2014 and beyond. As usual, you can e-mail us at bookclub [at] fmlm.ac.uk to share ideas, suggest books to include and review, or if you are interested in contributing. We are also happy to receive interest from authors and publishers.

Burning down the house

No, this is not a seasonal incitement to burn down the house with a capital ‘H’. Rather, given the recent commemoration of Guy Fawkes Night, which is slightly more romantically named than it’s original epithet of Gunpowder Treason Day, it felt apt to reflect on other, unfortunately more successful incendiary misdemeanours from our history, specifically those related to our libraries.

With the relaunch of the Bookclub at hand, I was reflecting on what we were trying to achieve through building such a digital resource. It didn’t take long to accept that libraries have been a feature of man’s existence for as long as we have written on something less hefty than a stone wall, even if we are now regressing to tablets. We still hold that same fundamental motivation to source, collate, reference and store the labours of our authors, bringing together themed knowledge not just for posterity, but also for the purposes of knowing where we have already been, what we already know, and what we might say about all of it.  So the loss of a library is nothing short of calamitous, and not just for the immediate benefactors; it can have consequences that reach far beyond the myopic vision of the aggressors through the loss of historical, cultural and scientific knowledge.

We start, indubitably, at the great library in Alexandria, Egypt, founded by the Ptolomaic dynasty and constructed in 3rd century BC (featured image, Bookclub homepage). There are many theories as to who torched what has been considered one of the greatest libraries of the Ancient World, but the finger has been pointed at Julius Caesar in 48 BC, Aurelian in the 270s AD, the Coptic Pope Theophilus in 391, and the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 642. Would you like to back-up your device now? Certainly! And so did the founding scholars of the day, building a daughter library at a Serapeum temple in another part of the city, only to be supposedly destroyed by Theophilus too. We are extremely lucky that much Classical Greek and Roman learning had been preserved through translation to Arabic, for example by Ibn Ishaq (704-770 AD) and Ibn-Sina (aka Avicenna, c. 980-1037), who was a prolific author of treatises in medicine and philosophy in his own right, and both master scholars of Abassid Caliphate in their day.*

More recently, we have had to mourn a loss of central African history through the torching of buildings in Timbuktu, Mali, by retreating insurgents in January 2013 (reported by The Guardian). These contained wonderful and unique records, manuscripts dating back to the 13th century that are now sadly lost for ever. And these are not the only two such incidents: Wikipedia provides us with a list of destroyed libraries, littered with reminders that human intolerance and repression is often meted out through the enforced loss of knowledge. Libraries have always lived precariously, venerated as icons of knowledge in their own culture, but also hated as a symbol of that culture by would-be iconoclastic enemies. Indeed, I was particularly sad to read that the Cornish language may have been extinguished as result of such an action.

Given our preference to store, access and distribute all our works digitally (see previous blog, Keep those Wagons Rolling | Kindling), are our libraries any safer today? Presumably digital servers are just as vulnerable to fire, but perhaps the ability to back-up at multiple off-site locations is an important step forward. The physical remoteness of these stores also makes them less inclined to physical attack, but I wonder if we will soon see a cyber-attack on a digital library? But what we gain from pure digitial libraries, we also lose the hushed physical grandeur and of real libraries that can only be felt by walking through their impressive corridors, stacked with tomes both ancient and modern. I fondly recall be asked to adhere to the Bodleian Library declaration “…not to bring into the Library or kindle therein any fire or flame…”. If only it were that simple.

*I do note that both lived after the last proposed date of the torching of the library at Alexandria, and so assume that many works (or copies) were shared in earlier times. For more on the history of medicine, see Roy Porter’s The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine, CUP, ISBN 978-0521002523

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About the author

Tom Turmezei's picture

Tom Turmezei

Tom completed his training in radiology with a musculoskeletal specialist interest in 2011, having worked as a Specialist Registrar in Norwich, Nottingham and Cambridge.  He then won a one year Evelyn Trust research fellowship to study imaging in hip osteoarthritis with the Cambridge Bone Research Group and is now in the second of a three-year Wellcome Trust research fellowship at the Department of Engineering in Cambridge, developing automated analysis of hip imaging data.  His long-term goal is to set up his own musculoskeletal imaging research group.  Cross-disciplinary research and training experiences at a number of hospitals have reinforced his belief that the NHS has much to learn from other professional cultures as well as those prospering within it.  

Tom is a medical writer, having co-authored previous editions of the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine and the Oxford Handbook of Clinical Specialties.  It was with this experience that he approached the FMLM with the concept of an online 'bookclub' to bring together ideas on leadership and management from diverse sources for the benefit of all those with a vested interest in the future of the NHS. Tom is now co-editor of the FMLM Bookclub (with Sam Byrne).

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Comments

10 years 1 month ago

In Our Time

I came across excellent discussion on 'The Library of Alexandria' in the In Our Time archives... enjoy!

Tom

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