The Typhoidland team at the Typhoid, Cockles & Terrorism: How a Disease Shaped Modern Dublin preview event at Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, 13th June. From left to right: Dr Samantha Vanderslott (University of Oxford), Dr Carly Collier (UCD), Dr Emily Webster (Durham University) and Dr Claas Kirchhelle (UCD). Picture Credit: Bobby Studio.
The Typhoidland team have been busy! Sunday 16th June marked the launch of our newest exhibition series, Typhoid, Cockles & Terrorism: How a Disease Shaped Modern Dublin, both online and at a Public Open Day generously hosted by our heritage partners Royal College of Physicians of Ireland. The official launch followed a preview event at RCPI on Thursday 13th June and a book signing of Typhoidland’s Fear & Fever: 14 days of typhoid in Edwardian Dublin along with artist Clare Foley at Dublin City Comics on Friay 14th June, raising money for Dublin Simon Community! Check out just some of our activities in the photos below.
We were delighted to welcome over 200 visitors to the Public Open Day. On offer were a host of physical and digital exhibition talks and tours, films and animations to watch, our graphic novel to read, and a pathogen-related colouring and craft activity for families! We showcased the physical exhibition Fear & Fever: Living and dying with typhoid in Dublin, which draws on the fantastic medical object and archive collections of RCPI Heritage Centre and features generous loans from other museums and heritage institutions. Visitors were introduced to the science behind typhoid control through objects such as a decorative leech jar, a feeding cup for invalids, and a milk bottle stamped ‘tuberculin tested’, and additionally immersed in the lived experience of typhoid victims and carers through audio content including a recording of historical typhoid case notes from the medical perspective followed by an imagined reconstruction of the patient experience. We also were lucky enough to have UCD’s own Professor Steve Gordon giving a hands-on demo of microbial pure culture to bring some of the science behind our new enthralling digital exhibition Contours of a Taboo: Bioweapons and the 1920 ‘Sinn Féin typhoid plot’ to life. We also previewed our final major exhibition, Stones & Bones: Containing Typhoid in ‘Dear Dirty Dublin’, hosted (digitially) by Dublin City Library and Archive. Stones & Bones explores the wider history of Dublin’s maladapted London-inspired sewage infrastructure – and illuminates how it remains a problematic solution in view of rising sea levels and climate change.
Explore all of this content for yourself at typhoidland.org/typhoid-in-dublin
