Cabinet of Curiosities
On this page you can find out more about the RCPsych's Cabinet of Curiosities, which illuminates the history of psychiatry and psychiatrists through a changing display of objects.
In this new venture we plan to display one object each month relating to the history of psychiatry and psychiatrists.
We are beginning by exhibiting items belonging to the RCPsych but in due course hope also to display loan items.
Manchester, c.1960
Dr Kitching influenced the design of the pioneering general hospital psychiatric unit (inpatient / outpatient / teaching) at Withington, but he died in 1968, before it opened.
Provenance: salvaged from an office waste-paper bin by a trainee psychiatrist at Withington Hospital, c.1990; donated to RCPsych 2024
Further information on Dr Kitching: see Royal College of Physicians ‘Inspiring Physicians’
If you have additional information about this object please email Claire Hilton, honorary.archivist@rcpsych.ac.uk
Invented in the early 1980s, the first 3½ inch floppy discs each stored about 300KB. In 1986, IBM introduced one that featured 1.44 MB within a plastic case, a format that became the mainstay of computing in the 1990s.
More than 5 billion floppy disks were sold annually at their peak in the mid-1990s. Most desktop and laptop computers were supplied with a floppy disk drive until 2005 when floppy disk drives were abandoned in favour of USB ports.
This defunct format is memorialised in the save icon but would you be able to access the information on one?
This raises the question of how we preserve digital information through the trials of format and device obsolescence, just as traditional records have been preserved for us on paper and parchment.
This floppy disc contains the manuscript of the book Psychotherapy of Psychosis (1997) and comes from the records of the College’s publications team. The editors worked for the NHS and must have saved it on one of their floppy discs before submitting it for editing.
This strange object contains glass, sand and a small metal antenna contained in an aluminium shell. It is inactive: it has no crystals and no radio or radioactive components.
It was offered for sale by the king of mail-order psychology scams ‘Professor’ Elmer Knowles (a.k.a. Elmer S. Prather), as part of his correspondence course in hypnotism and suggestion.
It was supposed to be used to focus the mind to facilitate auto-suggestion, hypnotism and distance healing. Prather and his wife ran a highly lucrative mail-order business for 50 years (1890-1940), regularly moving countries to avoid the authorities.
Loaned by Dr Gordon Bates, the College’s Historian in Residence from his personal collection. Originally sourced from eBay.