Pre Conference Programme

Monday 13th September 2010

Walk Guided Walk - Poverty, Plague and Pox: the health history of the Olde City of London

Why did the jester stop joking?
Why was Pepys worried about his periwig?
What, indeed, is a periwig?

Join a City of London Guide to find the answers. Walk over the bones of long-dead Londoners. Have a last drink with the condemned - you buy your own - and hopefully avoid the Resurrection Men.

The walk starts from Farringdon Station at 2pm and will finish at St Pauls for people to attend the service and the reception at the Florence Nightingale Museum. People will pay the guide (£5.00) at the start of the walk.

To book your place on this walk please email Stephanie Kirby at t385@btinternet.com.

Sightseeing tour - Windsor and Central London

Windsor Castle There is an opportunity to be collected by coach from Royal Holloway and taken to nearby Windsor and then on to Central London for a tour of some of the highlights. You will be escorted on the London tour by a qualified London guide.

The coach will then take you to St. Pauls Cathedral for the special evensong service and on to the Florence Nightingale Museum for a reception.

You will then be returned to Royal Holloway.

For full details, costs and to book your place please email either

Alternatively you may make your own way to St. Pauls Cathedral and join us for evensong and the reception at the Florence Nightingale Museum. Please email Carol McCubbin at c.mccubbin@sgul.kingston.ac.uk if you would like to be included in the evening events but do not wish to take part in the sightseeing programme

Evening Programme

5:00pm: Evensong at St Paul’s Cathedral

There will be a special evensong service at St Paul’s Cathedral to celebrate the life and work of Florence Nightingale in this, the centenary year of her death. There is a monument in memory of Nightingale in the crypt of the Cathedral, and delegates will be invited to lay a wreath at the memorial.

6:00pm: Reception at the Florence Nightingale Museum

There will be a reception at the newly-refurbished Florence Nightingale Museum, St Thomas’ Hospital. All delegates are invited to attend.

Tuesday 14th September 2010

10:00am-12:00pm: Pre-Conference Workshops - Windsor Building (2 Concurrent Workshops)

Workshop on Prosopography
Room 0-02 ground floor
Leader: Sue Hawkins, Kingston University

Don’t be put off by the daunting word in the title! This workshop will show you how to bring to life the ‘little people’ of Victorian society using a powerful technique which combines detective work with 21st technology.

Have you ever wondered why much of history focuses on the lives of the great and the good (or not so good), and by contrast the lives of ordinary people – whatever their role in society - are consigned to the foot notes at best and often completely erased from the record? One reason must surely be related to the availability of source material. Where source material is plentiful there be swarms of historians! And the converse is true too – where the source material is scant or difficult to access, then such subjects are often overlooked.

This is particularly true when trying to piece together the lives of ordinary people who society overlooked or disregarded at the time. In the 19th century for instance, women in general were held to be of secondary importance in the outside world, while poor women were considered uneducated and uneducatable. Similarly, children were to be ‘seen but not heard’. It is commonly assumed that little or no official record of such lives was ever made and that few direct accounts survive, outside the pages of popular fiction.

However, this workshop will show this is not the case. Using case studies, which look at two such groups – ordinary nurses and hospitalised children in the 19th century - the workshop will show how prosopography can help reconstruct the lives of members of these two underprivileged groups in Victorian society. Derived from methods familiar to family historians, it makes detailed use of publicly available databases of census returns, newspapers and other official records and demonstrates how, using the power of 21st century technology, the information, from a range of sources, can be brought together to uncover the lives of ordinary Victorian citizens.

The aim of the workshop is to inspire, encourage and provide the know-how for historians of the 19th century to go off and conduct their own prosopographical studies, either on nurses or any other group of interest. The more such studies that are carried out the better our understanding of Victorian nursing will be.

Workshop on Leader: Challenges and opportunities of reusing oral history evidence
Room 0-03 ground floor
Leader: Graham Smith, Royal Holloway University of London

While the collection of oral histories has become a well developed method, the identification, interpretation and use of oral testimonies remains for many a challenge. This two hour workshop will introduce participants to archived oral history of nursing materials and how they could be used in research. By the end of the session participants should have gained not only an insight into the range of sources, but also an understanding of:

some of the ethical considerations in reuse;
two broad interpretative approaches (biographical and survey);
the significance of individual memory, social remembering and public history in interpretation.

The workshop will involve working in small groups on set tasks as well as a discussion of the issues raised.