The Royal Children’s Hospital Heritage Project is run by a project team comprising RCH staff and historians from Context. Our guest bloggers from Context will be giving regular updates on their experiences as they delve into the rich history of the RCH.
View the previous Heritage Project instalments here:
The RCH Heritage Project #2: First Look at the Archives
The RCH Heritage Project #1: Bringing Our History to Life
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The RCH Heritage Project #3: Personality in the Papers—The Snowball Casebook
What we choose to keep and record says a lot about who we are; one of the most exciting things about diving into a collection of papers and records is discovering the personalities of people from the past. Sifting through someone’s papers and learning what they considered important and what they wrote down about their work and life can be kind of like having a coffee with them.
Take Dr William Snowball, for example. Maybe you’ve heard of him, maybe you haven’t. But he is definitely the sort of person you would want looking after your children!
There are lots of things we know about William Snowball—by all accounts, he was a big, kind, funny man, apparently with a great big beard. He has been called the ‘Father of paediatrics’ in Melbourne and his compassion for the welfare of children and the nurses at the hospital was limitless.
Born in 1854, Dr Snowball practiced medicine at a time before many of the things we take for granted even existed—including penicillin and antibiotics. And while we know a fair bit about him, we don’t have any recordings of his voice, or film footage of him or many of the things we would have if he was a leading doctor today.
What we do have in the RCH archives is his casebook. Written from 1884-1888 in Dr Snowball’s own handwriting, it contains the daily observations he made about his patients. Reading them, we got to know the usual details about the boys and girls he treated— their names, ages, places of residence, family histories, conditions on admission, treatmentsand progress—but we also got to know Dr Snowball himself.
The words on the pages were written by Dr Snowball over a century ago, but reading his casebook brought Dr Snowball to life—it felt just like we were talking to him and asking him questions about the lives he had changed.
The people who care for our children when they’re sick are so very important—not just their medical training and skills, but also their personalities and approaches to care.
So we wanted to ask you – who are the people that had a big impact on you during your time at the RCH? Do you know a Dr Snowball equivalent? It doesn’t have to be a doctor; it could be anyone on the RCH team.
And if you could ask them to leave something behind to give future people a glimpse of who they were, what would it be?