Courier duties to the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

Leonardo di Vinci, Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn are just a few of the famous artists whose works will be displayed at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, as well as other contemporary and historical items from the collections of the Wellcome Library and Wellcome Collections. This exciting exhibition is based on the theme "Medicine and art: Imagining a future for life and love", and my colleague Stefania and I have been privileged - in our roles as conservators at the Wellcome Library - to be involved.

We travelled to Tokyo last week, arriving on 19 November when we settled into our apartments to recuperate from the long journey. Jet lag was quickly forgotten as we traveled around Tokyo, visiting the infamous fish market with Mami Hirose, the Project Manager at the Museum and two other couriers from the Science Museum (who are also loaning many items to this exhibition) - Emma Duggan and Lisa O'Sullivan among other sites.

The Mori Art Museum (located in the Mori Tower - see top image) has 6 galleries and 2 halls, and we started our first working day in Gallery 6 by unpacking the first X-ray machine and some of the iconographic items from the Wellcome Library. It was our duty to manage the unpacking and installation of items loaned by the Wellcome, and we were pleased that the objects arrived safely. Only one crate suffered minor damage; as a result, a Warhol print had dropped down in its frame and had to be rehinged and reframed. Stephania installed the largest books as well as a metal mannequin artifact that had been used as an anatomical teaching tool. This wrapped up our first busy day at work in the Mori.









Author: Gillian Boal

Wellcome Library Workshops

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshops are:

Free for all: history of medicine on the Web
Find the best places to start if you are looking for reliable, accessible history of medicine resources on the internet.
24 November, 2-3pm

Hunt the Ancestor: resources for medical family history
Was someone in your family a doctor, nurse or patient? Find out about the wealth of resources available to the family historian.
26 November, 2-3pm

Our programme of free workshops offer short practical sessions to help you discover and make use of the wealth of information available at the Wellcome Library. Book a place from the library website. [ http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/workshops ]

Early closure for Medicine in Literature event this Thursday

Just a quick reminder to let you know that the Library will be closing at 6pm, not 8pm, this coming Thursday, 26 November. This is due to us hosting another Medicine in Literature event, this time with the author Lydia Syson, who will be talking about her fabulous book Doctor of Love: James Graham and His Celestial Bed.

The event has proven very popular and is fully booked, but if you would like to go on the waiting please email me asap (p.harkins@wellcome.ac.uk). We are double-checking the attendee list tomorrow, so if we have any spare capacity we will get back to you as soon as we can.

More details here: http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents/events/WTX057073.htm

Mrs Klein

The play Mrs Klein by Nicholas Wright is currently enjoying a well-reviewed revival at the Almeida Theatre, London.

The play had its first production at the National Theatre in 1988. Two years previously Phyllis Grosskurth’s somewhat controversial biography of Klein had appeared, based on extensive research in the Klein papers while these were still in the care of Hanna Segal of the Melanie Klein Trust.

The Melanie Klein Trust gave the Klein papers to what was then the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in 1984. These were catalogued (the catalogue is now available online), and in 1987 Nicholas Wright did research on them for his play. They were also consulted by designers for both the original and the current productions. Since the receipt of the first and largest batch of her papers a number of additions have been added, including family letters and other papers from her grandchildren.

The Klein papers reflect her life and her career as an influential psychoanalyst. They include notes on the cases she saw, both from her early years of practice in Germany and the later part of her career in England – it is interesting to see how quickly she made the shift from keeping notes in German to keeping them in English. The collection also holds manuscripts of her books and articles, drafts of articles, and unpublished lectures, notes on analytical technique and theory, appointment diaries, a brief autobiographical memoir, press cuttings, and numerous photographs of Klein, her family, and colleagues, also of the small toys that she used for child analysis (as well as numerous original drawings by child patients).

There is a significant group of files concerning the Controversial Discussions within the British Psycho-Analytical Society, in which Klein and her daughter Melitta Schmideberg, also a psychoanalyst, were ranged on opposite sides: the play centres on the tensions between mother and daughter at an earlier phase of their lives. Apart from this episode, however, there is surprisingly little surviving correspondence between Klein and her professional associates.

Besides her own papers, there is material relating to Klein in Archives and Manuscripts among the papers of John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott, both of whom were analysed by her, the papers of S. H. Foulkes, and those of Michael Fordham. Her published works may be found on the Library shelves.

The American way

Lithograph after a design by Al Capp (1909-1979)

Wellcome Library no. 679768i

Behind the scenes, the Wellcome Library has been cataloguing a large collection of posters which the Library has gradually acquired over the last couple of years. They are arranged by country of publication (insofar as that can known before they are catalogued), and the most recent tranche to be catalogued consists of sixty-four works from the United States of America. As of today they are available in the Wellcome Library.

The item shown above comes from the state of Minnesota, the state in which the founder of the Library, Henry S. Wellcome (1853-1936), was brought up. This particular work is one which Wellcome could never have seen, for it dates from the 1950s and shows the American cartoon hero Li'l Abner (left) telling his girl friend Daisy Mae that he is about to have a chest X-ray for tuberculosis. The artist Al Capp controlled his own rights and used them to support several good causes, in this case the Minnesota Tuberculosis and Health Association. The poster bears their imprint and their address at 614 Portland Avenue, St. Paul 2.

Wellcome Library no. 679669i

The earliest work in the present group is probably this one (left), thought to date from the 1890s. Dr. H.M Smith Medical Company of Lee, Massachusetts, offers to chicken-farmers its product "Smith's egg and health producer. A purely scientific preparation for the prevention and cure of all diseases to which poultry is subject!". It will "make your hens lay. It will hasten the moulting. It will cure rheumatism. It will make your pullets lay a month earlier if fed according to directions. It will cure roup". (Roup is a disease of chickens, not a misprint for croup.) It appears to be produced by letterpress printing with inserted (pre-existing?) wood engravings, a method that had already disappeared for mass-printing of posters in large cities (in favour of lithography) but might allow small sheets to be printed on the same presses that small-town newspapers were printed on: this is a relatively small poster (sheet 56 x 34.3 cm or 22 x 14 inches). It lists the addresses from which testimonials can be obtained, allowing us to narrow down its catchment area to a very small region of farmland in the Berkshires (south-western Massachusetts and north-western Connecticut).

Wellcome Library no. 679907i

One of the great American health and social causes of the 1920s was Prohibition, which lasted from 1919 to 1933. The present group includes fourteen posters on the pro-Prohibition side (and none on the other side). The largest group among the newly catalogued items was produced in Westerville, Ohio ("The Dry Capital of the World"), by The American Issue Publishing Company, which was the holding company for the Anti-Saloon League, a massive and well-organized pressure group. In fact its printing and publishing industry made it the largest employer in the city. However this lithographic poster (above) of a woman preaching Prohibition to a crowd of well-dressed American citizens was published by yet another formidable pressure group, the WCTU (Woman's Christian Temperance Union) at its publishing house in Evanston, Illinois. The watchword "Observance and enforcement not repeal" upholds the WCTU's stance against the opposition, in the form of the AAPA (Association against the Prohibition Amendment) and the WONPR (Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform). The struggles of these factions are recorded in the copious literature on the episode. [1]

The collection of film (movie) posters includes a number of now forgotten comedies and romances, perhaps of more interest to today's historians than they were to their original audiences – although one of them, Tammy and the doctor (1963) elicited the comment on the Internet movie database, "I am a teenager and with all the junk out on television today this comedy/romance was refreshing". The example reproduced here advertises a film from 1939 in which a (gasp!) woman doctor apparently rescues the life of a sick patient in a "Race with death at 10,000 feet!".

Wellcome Library no. 679858i

The doctor was played by the Scottish actress Frieda Inescort (Frieda Wrightman, 1901-1976) who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and later became associated with publicity for multiple sclerosis (she herself had MS).

Another large group in the present lot records the attempts by commercial interests to modify the American diet. The National Livestock and Meat Board in Chicago thought Americans would be more healthy if they ate more meat; dairy companies were anxious that Americans might be consuming too little dairy produce; and the Florida Citrus Commission could be relied on to promote the health-giving value of oranges and grapefruit (even as trimmings for meringues and cream-cakes).

The example below is a novelty poster from 1935 produced in Illinois by the (US) National Dairy Council. Seeing a single digital image of it like the one on the left, one might be puzzled by its message "It's always breakfast time somewhere". However, when presented with the item itself one can see that the clock can be set to suit the timetable of the family home (or school, children's home, holiday camp etc.). Six separate inserts fit into slots in the table: their bases bear the lettering "United States scrambled eggs", "United States whole grain cereal", "United States milk", "United States fruit", "United States butter", and "United States toast".

Wellcome Library no. 679461i

So if you feel like some "United States scrambled eggs" at 3.50 pm, just set the clock accordingly and you'll be Okey-dokey. Have a nice day!

[1] E.g. Jack S. Blocker, Jr., American temperance movements, Boston 1989, and Rachel E. Bohlmann, Drunken husbands, drunken state: the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's challenge to American families and public communities in Chicago, 1874-1920, Doctoral thesis--University of Iowa, Ann Arbor 2001

Darwin's Inheritance

This week's Wellcome Library Insight session, is a joint event held with Wellcome Collection.

Darwin's Inheritance will draw on a range of objects, archives and illustrative materials, in order to contextualise the life and work of Charles Darwin and investigate the legacy of his discoveries in the 20th century.

The event will be held this Thursday afternoon (19th November), from 3-4.30pm. Whilst there is no need to book, spaces will be limited.

Wellcome Library Workshops

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshops are:

Making the most of my library:
the Wellcome Library catalogue and how to personalise it
Learn the most effective way of searching the Wellcome Library catalogue and the best strategies for finding the resources you need. Dscover what you can do with your Library Account, and what it can do for you.
Tuesday 17 November, 2-3pm

Science in the news: keeping track of stories in the media
For anyone interested in science in the news and media, this workshop will introduce you to science news sources in the library and on the internet, and to tools such as RSS feeds, for keeping track of the news.
Thursday 19 November, 2-3pm

Our programme of free workshops offer short practical sessions to help you discover and make use of the wealth of information available at the Wellcome Library. Book a place through the library website.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Sir Thomas Lewis

The catalogue of the papers of Sir Thomas Lewis held by the Wellcome Library is now available to view online. The collection includes much on his wartime work at military heart hospitals in Colchester and Hampstead, and with the Ministry of Pensions, where he worked on a condition he termed “effort syndrome”. This work enabled many soldiers who would previously have had to be pensioned off to return to active duty. He was knighted for this work in 1921. Another strength of the collection is the amount of correspondence with international colleagues. Lewis was renowned throughout the world, being particularly well respected in the United States where he undertook three lecture tours.

A pioneering cardiologist who coined the term “clinical science” to describe his approach of applying experimental methods to clinical problems, Sir Thomas Lewis has links to many of the archival collections held by the Wellcome Library. Whilst still a student, he was elected to the Physiological Society before being awarded the first Beit Memorial Fellowship in 1910. He worked as house physician to Sir Thomas Barlow, and alongside Sir James Mackenzie. He was an acknowledged inspiration to Sir George Pickering, Sir John McMichael and Sir Henry Dale, amongst many others. In 1941 he was awarded the Royal Society’s most prestigious accolade, the Copley Medal. Other recipients of the Copley Medal have included Charles Darwin, Francis Crick, and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.

The Carbolic Smoke Ball

Pictured left is an advertisement for the Carbolic Smoke Ball, which on first impression appears a standard piece of late-Victorian medical ephemera, with little relevance to how we live our lives today.

However, this week’s episode of The Cases that Changed the World on BBC Radio 4 describes the groundbreaking legal case which resulted when the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company’s claims for the efficacy of their product were challenged in court; a case which established important principles about truth in advertising and – arguably – led to the birth of modern consumer protection.

The episode is available for listeners in the UK through the BBC’s iPlayer. A detailed description of the case is available on the BBC News website, where the Carbolic Smoke Ball story is described as: “...an odd tale set against the backdrop of the swirling mists and fog of Victorian London, a terrifying Russian flu pandemic, and a forest of unregulated quack medicines offering cures for just about everything”.

Armistice Day

To mark Armistice Day, we have chosen one item from the Wellcome Library’s diverse collections pertaining to military medicine: the diary of Captain Martin Wentworth Littlewood, Royal Army Medical Corps, British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.).

Littlewood’s diary (MSS.8025-8026) relates his experiences from his embarkation to join the British Expeditionary Force in France in January 1917, through the battles of Arras and 3rd Ypres, the German offensive of Spring 1918 and the final advance leading to the Armistice. The diary continues to Littlewood's demobilisation in March 1919.

His diary entries for November 10th and 11th 1918 offer a snapshot of one soldier’s concern for his fellow men and his celebration on the cessation of the war:

November 10th - To COURTRAI with BLANDFORD. At 9.30pm we heard that the Armistice had been signed. Dancing in village street. Band. Searchlights. Night flying by a plane and many Verey lights. Solemnly raised the blinds and enjoyed the sensation of naked lights. But what of the men lying round the Menin Road?

November 11th - A bomb shortly after going to bed, and we learned that the Armistice only began at 11am. Left by car at AUTRYVE and lunched with 36th Division Sappers.

Gave up idea of Paris leave and took car to 96th at ESCUILLES. Thence by car to FLOBECQ.

Glorious billet at mother of the Mayor. Gifts of old burgundy and fruit, bouquets etc etc

Rock 'n' Roll Suicide?

“Don’t wanna stay alive when you’re 25” wrote the young David Bowie (now 62). The history of popular music is littered with tales of self-destruction - Del Shannon, Johnny Thunders, Joe Meek, Keith Moon and even Sister Luc-Gabrielle (the Singing Nun) to name just a tiny fraction. Music and intense emotions seem to go together like ill-matched lovers, often leaving haunting melodic memories for us all.

Among the more obscure treasures in the library are intriguing tales of Country Music and suicide (think: divorce, drink and guns as themes) and the story of Gloomy Sunday. This is a Hungarian tune banned by the BBC in 1937 because of its reputed link with at least 18 deaths. It features a ghost attending his own funeral. The programme mentions, among others, the demise of Billy MacKenzie, singer with the Associates, who recorded the number prior to his tragic end in 1997.

Fans of Joy Division may like to note the library has a copy of Control the 2007 biopic of Ian Curtis whose battles with depression and epilepsy contributed to his suicide at the age of 23 when the band was at its height.

On a lighter note, you can also enjoy Richard Doll’s musical selection on Desert island discs.

Wellcome Film officially launched

Readers of this blog, subscribers to our Wellcome Film YouTube channel, and those who regularly use our film collection will know that digital video has been available online for several months now, with more titles added on a regular basis as the Wellcome Film project moves forward. This week we took a moment to celebrate 2 years of work on this project by holding an official Launch party at the Wellcome Library on 2 November 2009. The official press release is on the Wellcome Trust website.

Around 90 people attended, with a champagne reception to kick off. Richard Aspin, Head of Research and Scholarship at the Wellcome Library, introduced the project and the collection, saying that "Wellcome Film is the one of the most important digitisation project to date in our ambition to transform the user experience of The Wellcome Library."

Following Richard, our keynote speaker Jordan Baseman talked about his film project Nature's Great Experiment, a thought-provoking documentary on behaviour and genetics of twins. The film explores themes researched by Professor Terrie Moffitt and the Twin Studies Research Team at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. Jordan's project was partly funded by the Wellcome Trust. Jordan discussed one particular film that he discovered in the Library's Moving Image and Sound Collection, The Management of Twins in Pregnancy and Labour (1958), produced by the Wellcome Trust and filmed at University College Hospital, London. The film proved to be a catalyst for his project, providing much-needed inspiration to bring his ideas together. Before showing a short clip from his project, Jordan described the 1958 film during his speech as

"...an extraordinary document that at its heart focuses on the delivery of two sets of twins. It is a stunningly beautiful, profound and slightly disturbing document. It is disturbing because of the passivity of the mothers, but also because of the location and presence of the camera. The camera is not passive. It is an active instrument that records these momentous events from a privileged vantage point. The twins are literally delivered to camera: displayed for us to see."

Angela Saward, Curator of the Moving Images and Sound Collection at the Library, rounded off the evening by thanking the long list of people and organisations involved in the project - in particular the Project Advisory Board, JISC Collections who part funded this project, and Lucy Smee, who spent 17 months cataloguing, quality checking, and segmenting almost every single title. Angela then showed a film trailer created for the project by JCA tv, the facilities house that provided telecine, video recording, encoding and transcription services (see below).

New Product Trials

The Library has set up trials for the following products:

American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections

"The AAS Historical Periodicals Collection: 1691-1820 presents 550 titles dating from 1693 through 1820. The collection represents over two centuries of print culture, ranging from early works imported by the colonists to later titles published on American soil on the eve of the Revolution and during the early republic. Series 1 is first of the five series created from periodical holdings belonging to one of the premier repositories in the United States, the American Antiquarian Society. The entire AAS collection features about 6,500 titles from the seventeenth through the late nineteenth century. The subject matter covered in Series 1 is broad in scope and covers all aspects of American society during this time period."

Humanities International Complete

"Humanities International Complete provides full text of hundreds of journals, books and other published sources from around the world.This database includes all data from Humanities International Index (more than 2,100 journals and 2.47 million records) plus unique full text content, much of which is not found in other databases. The database includes full text for more than 890 journals. "

You can access them via the catalogue record (username 'wellcome' and password 'trial'). The trial runs until the end of November. We are very keen to have your feedback and there is a link to the feedback form on the catalogue entries.

Darwin's Inheritance

Tomorrow's Wellcome Library Insight session, is a joint event held with Wellcome Collection.

Darwin's Inheritance will draw on a range of objects, archives and illustrative materials, in order to contextualise the life and work of Charles Darwin and investigate the legacy of his discoveries in the 20th century.

The event will start at 3pm, and although there is no need to book, spaces will be limited.

Norman Levitt: science warrior

Norman Levitt, Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University died on 24th October 2009. He was probably best known for championing the role of science in society. With fellow scientist Paul Gross, he wrote Higher Superstition, in which he challenged the post-modern activities of humanities and social science academics who practised literary criticism of scientific texts and deconstructed scientific theories with little understanding of the science in question.

The book was cited as a major influence by Alan Sokal, physics professor at New York University, who perpetrated the notorious Sokal Hoax. In 1996, Sokal submitted a paper to the cultural studies journal Social Text, as an experiment to see if it would be published. The paper, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process. The paper argued that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct. On the day of publication Sokal announced the paper to be a hoax, "structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics". Sokal revisited the affair in his own book, Beyond the Hoax.

Higher Superstition and the Sokal Hoax precipitated the so called Science Wars, a series of intellectual debates in the 1990s about the nature of science. Some of those practicing science and technology studies and cultural studies questioned the objectivity of science, employing a variety of post-modern critiques on scientific knowledge and methods. While, some in the scientific community argued that there was such a thing as objective scientific knowledge and criticized the lack of scientific understanding in these critiques.

You can discover more about both sides of the science wars debates in many books to be found at classmarks HJ (the nature of science) and HK (science in society) in the Science and Society Collection in the Wellcome Library.

Levitt went on to write Prometheus Bedeviled: science and the contradictions of contemporary culture, in which he discussed the role of science in politics and policy, a topic that continues to be relevant today.

Image above: Rowena Dugdale, Science Good or Bad?

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Find your way back in time

The Wellcome Library has collected web based material for inclusion in the UK Web Archive since its beginning in 2005. Three new search features on the UK Web Archive site make it easier to go back and see how websites looked in the past or to use the archive for research. The archive is free to view and has already collected over 4,000 selected websites since it was set up in mid-2005.

It's now possible to search the archive for the URL of a website, to search for its 'Title' or to search for a key word. URLs and titles are pretty self explanatory. Try searching for the title, Wellcome Trust, to see how many of our own websites have been archived since 2005. Or you can search for library.wellcome.ac.uk to find archived copies of the Library website. The i icon between the search boxes provides some search help.

Full text searching allows users to really dig deep into the archive. Any word can be used, from Aardvark to Zombie (both return plenty of hits) or numbers such as 2012. Full text searching allows users to find words and phrases within individual pages of archived websites. Results are returned as links to pages within the UK Web Archive.

It is still possible to browse the archive by either 'Subject', alphabetically by the first letter of the title or one of the 'Collections' of websites arranged on a theme.

These search features are new and we welcome your feedback and comments. You can do so through the UK Web Archive's 'Contact' page

Author: Dave Thompson

Wellcome Library Workshop

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshop is:

Wellcome Images
Discover how to search the from Wellcome Images collection: a database of 160,000 pictures online, covering the history of medicine and the history of human culture from the earliest periods of civilisation to the present day.

Our programme of free workshops offer short practical sessions to help you discover and make use of the wealth of information available at the Wellcome Library. Book a place from the library website.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

The Hammersmith Ghost

To mark Halloween, the following post relates the story of the Hammersmith Ghost – one of the more famous ghost sightings of the nineteenth century. This case captured the public imagination and representations of the ghost through engravings (see left) and magic lantern shows, were repeatedly made throughout the 1800s.

During December 1803, an apparition dressed in white was reported as haunting the neighbourhood of Hammersmith, on the outskirts of London. It was said a locksmith had died of fright, and two other locals were close to death from the shock of seeing the ghost (which rumour had it, was the spirit of a local man who had committed suicide a year or so earlier).

The panic caused was so great that a group of young men took to patrolling the area looking for the ghost. On the evening of 3rd January 1804, James Smith, an Excise Officer, fuelled into action after an evening in a local pub, caught site of a pale dressed figure in Black Lion Lane. He called out for the figure to identify himself. When no answer came, he opened fire. When Smith came to the prone figure, he discovered he had shot not a ghost, but a local bricklayer, Thomas Milward, whose white working clothes had been misinterpreted by Smith as the garb of the Hammersmith Ghost.

When Smith realised he had killed a man, he gave himself up to the authorities. He was found guilty at the Old Baliley of mudering Milward and was sentenced to death (though in July 1804 he was pardoned and released).

But what of the Hammersmith Ghost? No doubt in remorse after the shooting of Thomas Milward, a local shoemaker named Graham appeared before the Hammermsith magistrates' office and confessed that he was the original ghost. The Morning Advertiser, dated 10th January 1804, reported his confession at the magistrates' office, with Graham stating he was angered that the apprentices at his shoemaking business had taken to frightening his children with ghost stories. To teach them a lesson, Graham wrapped a blanket around himself and appeared in front of the apprentices on their journey home... So causing the panic that would eventually result in the death of Thomas Milward.

(A full account of the Hammersmith Ghost – and a reproduction of the image shown above - is given in Owen Davies's The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)).

Spilsbury notecards to be digitised

In the New Year, the Wellcome Library's recently acquired collection of notecards from the archive of Sir Bernard Spilsbury will be available online.

The digital images will be accessible via the Archives and Manuscripts catalogue records as PDFs. Images can be downloaded and reused under a Creative Commons license.

Please note: the notecards will be digitised in November and December 2009, and will be unavailable for consultation in the Library until 4 January 2010.

James Graham: Doctor of Love

On 26th November, author Lydia Syson will give a talk in the Wellcome Library on James Graham, the controversial eighteenth century healer, widely regarded as the world's first sex therapist and subject of Lydia's recent book, Doctor of Love: James Graham and his Celestial Bed (2008).

This is the latest in our strand of evening events, held in our Reading Room, which explore how authors have drawn on the resources of the Wellcome Library to inspire and inform their writing.

The talk is free and open to all, though places must be booked in advance. Booking opens at 2pm today, 29 October. More details can be found on the Wellcome Collection website.