Alun Withey

There is beauty to be had from the smallest of objects. In the 18th century, tweezers, toothpicks and clippers became the signs of a polite, and beautiful, society.

The hospital at Bamburgh Castle in Northumberland was a remote but vital resource, functioning differently from all other medical institutions in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Medicine in early modern Britain is commonly perceived as crude and ineffective. But for all its shortcomings, says Alun Withey, there was no shortage of medical practitioners.