The Cowlishaw Symposium 2025

Royal Australasian College of Surgeons

Presentations from a medical rare book collection

Speakers: Various

The Cowlishaw collection, which aims to illustrate the history of medicine and its development from themes such as witchcraft and monsters into a science, is a library of rare books acquired by physician and bibliophile Leslie Cowlishaw in the early 20th century. It includes incunabula (printed books before 1500), alongside works by important classical authors of medicine such as Hippocrates, and early anatomical works such as those by Andreas Vesalius and Johann Remmelin. This 2025 Cowlishaw Symposium will include talks about the Black Death, Vesalius, Aurelius Cornelius Celsus, Remmelin, and Al – Zahrāwī.

Presented by: Royal Australasian College of Surgeons
at 250 – 290 Spring Street, East Melbourne

Rare and Revealing:

The Johnston Collection

Collecting Georgette Heyer’s Novels

Speaker: Dr Jennifer Kloester

Since her death more than fifty years ago, Georgette Heyer’s novels have continued to sell in the millions, in countless editions. But it is her first editions with their dust jackets intact that entice book collectors. Today, an early Heyer first edition with a fine jacket can sell for as much as $1500 and it has become increasingly difficult to find copies from the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. However, it is not only their rarity that makes Heyer’s novels intriguing–it is also what they reveal about their author and about the changing ways in which she was perceived by her publishers and her public throughout her long career and since her death.

Presented by: The Johnston Collection at East Melbourne

The Johnston Collection is a place where people meet art and artists.

The Johnston Collection is a multi award-winning and critically acclaimed museum that invites creatives from the broader visual arts and design communities to re-interpret the Collection through a regular program of re-installation and interventions of the permanent collection.