Bruce Summers
I have always considered it a crime, when attending international medical meetings, not to escape the academic ambience of seminar rooms, Powerpoint presentations, labelled lanyards and corporate coffee for the real and less organised world outside. Despite the excellence of the biennial Sixth International Clinical Skills Conference at Monash University in Prato, I felt little guilt in bunking off an afternoon session to visit Florence, just a 25 minute train journey away. I have visited Florence several times before, attracted, like so many other visitors, to the Renaissance art and architecture that is liberally scattered throughout the city, and so accessible, even if a wait, sometimes long, is involved for some of the main tourist attractions.
I was intent however on visiting the Spedale Degli Innocenti, the Foundling Hospital in Florence, construction of which started in 1419 and which continued as an orphanage until 1875.
[Read more…] about The Spedale Degli Innocenti: Florence’s Foundling Hospital
I knew he had died. Before reading the letters, I knew the end of his story. Sergeant Charles Leonard (Len) Hooper from Masterton, serving with the New Zealand Machine Gun Battalion on the Western Front, died in November 1918 in France just four days before the Armistice. His letters to his English fiancée, Elizabeth Sibthorp of Hornchurch – his ‘dearest Lizzie’ – are bundled in a grey folder loosely laced with thin white tape, held in the Imperial War Museum archive in London.
Professor Terence Doyle