The Pybus Room
The Pybus Room is a large lecture theatre with substantial audio-visual equipment and screening facilities used by the School of Modern Languages.
It is named after Frederick Charles Pybus (1883-1975), who graduated from Newcastle
Medical School in 1905, and had a distinguished career as a surgeon in the Royal
Victoria Infirmary from 1920 to his retirement in 1944. He became Professor
of Surgery in the University of Durham in 1941. (What is now the Newcastle University
was still at the time the Medical School and King’s
College of the University of Durham.)
For some 40 years to about 1950, Professor Pybus built up a collection of international importance on the history of medicine, including books, engravings, letters, portraits, busts and bleeding bowls. The collection was kept in his house, Whiteknights, in Spital Tongues. In 1965 Professor Pybus donated the collection to the Library of the recently created University of Newcastle upon Tyne. The Pybus Collection remained in the Pybus Room until the building of the Robinson Library in 1982.
Modern Languages was relocated to the Old Library from Claremont Bridge in 1985. Originally the Pybus Room was used as a reading room for students. However, in the 1990s it was refurbished to provide a fully equipped lecture room.