Unearthing and dissecting the records of English provincial medical education, c. 1825-1948

The archives of medical schools are a valuable resource for researchers in the history of medicine. This article offers an introduction to the standard records which comprise five of these collections for provincial England: Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield. It identifies unusual documents, including iconographic, manuscript and literary sources, which are available for some, but not all, collections. It concludes with a practical guide to accessing these collections, not all of which have been properly catalogued and stored in the archives of their associated universities.