From the beginning of Owens College in 1851, natural history (encompassing botany, zoology and geology) was taught by a local doctor, W C Williamson, who had been raised among the keen amateur geologists of Yorkshire. Our tour will touch on the Manchester Museum, of whose collections the young Williamson was at one time curator. Next to the Museum, and also built in the 1880s, are the Beyer laboratories, where specialist geologists and zoologists successively took over parts of Williamson’s domain. Williamson himself developed a focus on palaeobotany, and in particular that of the local coal measures: this specialism was continued by Marie Stopes, who lectured here from 1905 before becoming known for Married Love and birth control.

Owens College gained a medical school in 1874, when an established proprietary school in the city was incorporated into the new College site on Oxford Road. The tour will also includes the 1890s buildings associated with important public health bacteriology, and with the ultra-diffusionist cultural ‘history’ of the anatomist and Egyptologist Grafton Elliot Smith, not forgetting the discovery of the hormone pancreozymin! But in Manchester, as in most of the medical schools of industrial England – and unlike Cambridge – it was the clinicians who dominated the Faculty.

The walk will be led by Professor John Pickstone, emeritus, founding Director of the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, and advisor on university heritage.

There is no charge for this walk. Numbers will be limited, so please register in advance. You can do this at any time before the Congress by emailing tours@ichstm2013.com with your details; or you can sign up in person at the Congress Events Desk.