Daniella and the Queen's Magic Potion by Susan Wright

Daniella and the Queen's Magic Potion by Susan Wright

Did you know that Walter Reed was once a librarian at the National Library of Medicine?

This book looks at the twenty-seven men and women who headed the National Library of Medicine. In its early years, the library was known as the Library of the Surgeon General s Office, and from 1836 to 1865 the Army Surgeon General acted in dual capacity as surgeon and librarian. The first person to hold this dual position (albeit informally) was Joseph Lovell, who began the library by purchasing copies of medical books for his own use. After Lovell died in 1836, his interim successor, Benjamin King, started the process of turning Lovell's collection into a formal library, which grew to become the National Library of Medicine we know today. As the decades passed, the name and functions of the Library of the Surgeon General's Office were transformed. In 1865, the roles of surgeon general and librarian were separated when Army Surgeon General Joseph K. Barnes hired John Shaw Billings to run the library. Many decades later, in 1922, the Library of the Surgeon General s Office was renamed the Army Medical Library. Eventually, in 1956, the library was transformed into the institution known today as the National Library of Medicine.

Jan Deans is the Director of the Early Learning Centre, which is the University of Melbourne's research and demonstration preschool. She is a long time advocate for teaching and learning through the arts and has worked both locally and internationally in early childhood, primary, tertiary, and special education settings. She has broadly based expertise in relation to early childhood education and service delivery and her recent research interests include learning through dance, social emotional competence and learning in the natural environment. In 1997 she established Boorai -The Children's Art Gallery to present the voices of young children as expressed through their art and narratives. Boorai collaborates with educational and community organizations locally, nationally and internationally.

Susan Wright is Chair of Arts Education in the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne and is the Director of the Melbourne UNESCO Observatory of Arts Education. Her areas of teaching and research centre on semiotics and how meaning is transmediated across modalities, with a particular focus on artistic forms. She has also focused on ontological frameworks for understanding arts education in relation to learning and pedagogy and the influence of the environment on children's and adults' co-construction of artistry. Professor Wright has published extensively in the area of early childhood arts education and her principal books include The Arts Young Children and Learning and an edited compilation entitled Children, Meaning-Making and the Arts.