With the exciting news last week of the finding of one of the ships from Sir John Franklin’s last expedition, we decided to pull together some of the MHL’s resources on Arctic exploration in case this news stimulates your interest and while it’s still warm enough out that reading about the Arctic can be fun!
- You could start out with Georg Hartwig’s The polar and tropical worlds : a description of man and nature in the polar and equatorial regions of the globe (1874)
- And then try Robert DeCourcy Ward’s Climate, considered especially in relation to man (1908) and Burroughs Wellcome’s The romance of exploration and emergency first-aid from Stanley to Byrd … (1934?), created for the Chicago International Exposition of 1934.
- If you want to get personal, try The Private Journal of James Markham Ambler, M.D. (1914)
- And then you can dive right into the search for Franklin and his missing ships! There’s Sir John Richardson’s Arctic searching expedition : a journal of a boat-voyage through Rupert’s Land and the Arctic Sea : in search of the discovery ships under command of Sir John Franklin (1852) and Robert Anstruther Goodsir’s An Arctic voyage to Baffin’s Bay and Lancaster Sound : in search of friends with Sir John Franklin (1850). There’s Elisha Kent Kane’s The United States Grinnell Expedition in search of Sir John Franklin : a personal narrative (1857) and William Elder’s biography of Kane, himself a fascinating historical figure: Biography of Elisha Kent Kane (1858).
As always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!