Scholarship, skill and community: collections and the creation of ‘provincial’ medical education in Manchester, 1750–1850

Abstract

Abstract This article explores how medical collections, representing repositories of knowledge and prestige, were used in the communication and representation of medical education and provincial identity in Manchester in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It charts the changing ways in which medical collections and knowledge were represented as both pedagogical and promotional devices, demonstrating the importance of a localized approach to medical culture and, particularly, collecting in the long eighteenth century, and a sensitivity to how different generations inherited their recent past. It argues against any assumption of the easy transmission of scholarly cultural codes from metropolitan ‘centres’ to provincial ‘peripheries’.