Henrietta McBurney Ryan (Newnham College, Cambridge) will speak on “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral and ?: Dr John Addenbrooke’s Cabinet of Materia Medica”

Everyone welcome, no booking required, no admission fee. Refreshments from 17:00, Lecture 17.30-18.30

In 1711 Dr John Addenbrooke, founder of the now famous Cambridge hospital, gave his Materia Medica cabinet to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge.  The cabinet survives to this day, housed in one of the fellows’ rooms in the college. In 2016 it was the subject of a study involving an inventory and identification of its contents. While much of these contents were the animal, vegetable and mineral substances typical of remedial medical practice of the mid-seventeenth to early-eighteenth centuries, some unexpected objects were found to be part of Addenbrooke’s cabinet.

This talk will describe the contents and use of the cabinet in the context of other medical cabinets and collections of the period, highlight some of the more surprising objects discovered, and discuss the importance of this rare object in the history of collecting. 

Henrietta McBurney Ryan, MVO, FLS, FSA, is an art curator and art historian whose interests include natural history illustration, the history of collecting, and portraiture. She has curated art collections at the Royal Library, Windsor; Eton College; the Garrick Club, London, and Newnham College, Cambridge. She is currently a free-lance curator for Cambridge colleges.

She has a particular interest in the intersection of art and science and has recently completed a book on the early eighteenth-century naturalist-artist, Mark Catesby. She is currently managing a project to conserve and analyse the cabinet of Materia Medica given to St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, in 1712 by Dr John Addenbrooke, founder of the Cambridge hospital.