Pleasing that the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum and the heritage of the hospital are integral to the latest master plan for the redevelopment of St Mary’s Hospital www.stmarys.imperial.nhs.uk/media/0dkop5...

“The best armour of old age is a well spent life preceding it; a life employed in the pursuit of useful knowledge, in honourable actions and the practice of virtue; in which he who labours to improve himself from his youth, will in age reap the happiest fruits of them” (Cicero)

“We owe our early & middle manhood to our country, our last years are due to ourselves. When shall I attain the age at which I may honourably retire? When shall I be able to enjoy calm retreat without people calling it not peaceful tranquillity but laziness & sloth?” (Pliny the Younger)

Sea Ailments: “health & medical care are being delivered without any outside help. And also the contained world of a ship meant they could experiment with ways to deliver better health care because there were fewer variables.” podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/h... omny.fm/shows/health...

Remembered for Hutchinson’s Triad of notched teeth, keratitis & nerve deafness as signs of congenital syphilis, surgeon Jonathan Hutchinson’s interests ranged across many medical specialties; his enquiring attitude to nature & history led him to found Haslemere Educational Museum

Engaging with the public & sharing a personal passion for a subject is what makes a good museum curator. Ornithologist Robert Blockey inspired young visitors to Haslemere Educational Museum in the 1930s by showing them the falcon on his arm & letting it soar to their wonderment

Talking to Lauren Bristow about the ever fascinating history of health at sea for “Health Wanted” broadcast from Atlanta, Georgia by WABE, National Public Radio, & Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University www.wabe.org/podcasts/hea...

One of the joys of researching & writing about the history of maritime health & medicine has been being able to range widely both chronologically & across medical, social & naval history with a bit of politics occasionally thrown in

A lonely coffee cup in a deserted courtyard. I should have been enjoying a return to the Aegean this week but sailing on Oceania Nautica from Piraeus to Doha while lecturing was never going to happen given the international situation, leaving only memories of previous visits to the area.

“Death be not proud”: standing beneath his effigy is a suitable place to consider John Donne’s reflection on mortality that “when youth’s wasted, Age and you shall meet; then I alone shall sadly moan”

Florence Nightingale is remembered & idealised as a nurse yet perhaps her greatest contribution to health & medicine was wider as an epidemiologist & statistician whose ideas for reform were based on hard evidence

In his lifetime Almroth Wright liked to keep his ever loyal protege Alexander Fleming in his place, even belittling him at times, yet it was Fleming who achieved the greater fame & whose discovery of penicillin was to lead to a more lasting legacy

Is it really 33 years since the opening of the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum, half a lifetime, the focus of a career?

“Men moralise among ruins, or, in the throng & tumult of successful cities, recall past visions of urban desolation for prophetic warning. London is a modern Babylon; Paris has aped imperial Rome, & may share its catastrophe” (Disraeli, “Tancred”, 1847). Moralise, romanticise or fantasise?

How heroism was constructed & portrayed after the sinking of Titanic, the social reality behind the myths, explored by Kevin Brown, author of “Titanic: Ship of Lost Illusions” www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/Titanic-Ship...

Watching a modern stage performance of “Three Men in a Boat” takes me back to studying the book at school in 3rd year English Literature. It seemed like a period piece with its very English humour even then back in 1975

Catherine of Braganza supported the clandestine nunnery & convent school established in 1669 in the Great House at Hammersmith next to Cupola House residence of the Portuguese ambassador

When the schools run by religious orders in France were suppressed & their assets confiscated in 1904 the nuns of the Society of the Sacred Heart smuggled their 1861 pipe-organ by Hippolyte Lorat from Paris & altar to be re-erected in the chapel of their school in Hammersmith

Louis the Great (1326-82), King of Hungary, Croatia 1342-82 & Poland 1370-82, portrayed in the manuscript he commissioned of “Secretum Secretorum”, supposed to be advice from Aristotle to Alexander the Great, donated by Edmund Hall in 1658 to Magdalen Hall, Oxford

For Mark Twain “What can be more depressing than the sombre black which custom requires men to wear upon state occasions? A group of men in evening clothes looks like a flock of crows & is just about as inspiring.” Yet individuality triumphs over uniformity among men in black tie

Lighten our darkness … and by thy great mercy defend us from all perils and dangers of this night

John Donne’s funerary effigy showing the Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral wrapped in his shroud, a survivor of the Fire of London, is a contrast to the fashionably dressed metaphysical poet when a younger man

A protege of Horatio Nelson, Captain William Hoste was the father of Priscilla Hoste whose relationship with the 2nd Earl of Kilmorey who built a mausoleum for his mistress caused a scandal

Horatio Nelson and Cuthbert Collingwood were both loved by their crews for their attention to the health of their seamen www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Seasick-...

In the the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral at Night a researcher into the medical history of Nelson and the health of the navy in sombre mood next to the tomb of the Seasick Admiral & his memorial

Paying respects to Alexander Fleming at St Paul’s Cathedral at Night

“One face, one voice, one habit, and two persons; A natural perspective, that is, and is not!” Different suit and tie, but someone pointed out a portrait that could be of my art gallery doppelgänger thanks to facial similarities though I’m not convinced myself

The Kilmorey Mausoleum, exotically built in 1854 in fashionably romantic Egyptian style to house the remains of the earl of Kilmorey & his younger mistress Priscilla Hoste, was twice moved from Brompton Cemetery then to the grounds of Kilmorey’s various homes.

The allure of ancient Egyptian culture has exerted a fascination on the imagination for thousands of years, influenced art and architecture through archaeolgical discovery, and conferred a timeless glamour on all connected with it 𓎡𓇋𓆑𓇌𓈖𓀀

“Under the greenwood tree … Who doth ambition shun And loves to live i' the sun” If only we could leave behind the stresses & cares of a busy life for simpler natural pleasures … if only