It's a wrap !

 Yesteday I went down to Lake View to get a day's work in - I'd hoped to finish the medical instruments in the display case but didn't quite get there but I did sort of finish on a high note with a beautifully made set of male uretheral dilators made by Franz Hajek in Vienna around 1890

The set is interesting as it  belonged to a Dr Charles Fitzmaurice Harkin (it's his name on the box) who bought Lake View in 1890 as well as the medical practice associated with it from a Dr Walter who was to die a year or so later in mysterious circumstances.

Harkin didn't stay long at Lake View buying another house in Chiltern in 1892 and moving his practice there.

What's interesting of course is the Dr Harkin's instruments are one of the few items in the house collection that has a direct demonstrable connection to the house.

Identifying the instruments has been fun - I've been using Google Lens to help me identify the objects but even then it had been a little hit and miss, with objects being misidentified as car components, or else over identified - one set of forceps looks much like another, but another annoying feature of Google Lens is for it to be overly exact.

If it only has ovarian forceps in its data set, it will identify the objects as ovarian forceps, even if there are also instruments of a similar design used for a different purpose. As I've said elsewhere it's best not to accept the results uncritically.

At the Athenaeum, all we did was go out for a Christmas lunch, which was enjoyable but I've been thinking about those damned prayerbooks and the use of pencil, which lead me to put together a little blogpost about the use of pencil in the latter half of the nineteenth century.

And that's probably it for 2024 ...