Acts of Mercy by F. Cayley Robinson (1862-1927)

ACTS OF MERCY is the collective title of four large oil paintings on canvas painted by Frederick Cayley Robinson (1862-1927) between 1915 and 1920 for the Middlesex Hospital in London. They had been commissioned for the hospital around 1912 by the Australian-born mining tycoon and art-lover Edmund (later Sir Edmund) Davis (1861-1939).

The paintings were for many years on display in the entrance hall of the Middlesex Hospital. In 2005 the Middlesex Hospital's functions were transferred to University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (UCLH), and in 2008 the Middlesex Hospital building was demolished.

UCLH and the Wellcome Trust, with the aid of Tate and The Art Fund, have been in discussion to ensure that these works be retained for the public benefit, as Edmund Davis intended. Tate offered to safeguard the paintings while discussions about finding a permanent location proceeded. Each of the canvases measures approximately 200 x 340 cm. (6 ½ x 11 feet).

The Wellcome Trust has agreed to buy the four paintings for £235,000 and display two of them at any one time on the large walls in the entrance hall of the Wellcome Library. The other pair will be kept in the Library’s storage facilities where they can also be viewed on request. There they will join more than 1,200 oil paintings and other works collected by the founder of the Wellcome Library, Henry S. Wellcome (1853-1936).

The four canvases form two pairs. One of the pairs shows orphans and the other shows medical patients, reflecting the social and clinical roles of hospitals respectively. In the former pair (one of which is reproduced above), orphan girls are receiving sustenance and upbringing. In the latter pair, patients including soldiers injured in World War I gather at the entrance to the hospital. The paintings will be on public display in the Wellcome Library from March 2009.

Press release, 29 January 2009

Where does it come from?

Provenance is one of the most frequent subjects of questions sent to the Wellcome Library: where did the Library get a particular item from? Sometimes the names of previous owners are in the catalogue record, but in a field which is only visible behind the scenes, not in the public form of the Wellcome Library catalogue. More often however, the provenance of a given item is not in the computer catalogue at all but is buried somewhere within a huge archive of auction catalogues, dealer's catalogues, registers, catalogue cards, scrawled on the folders and slips of paper filed with the item, or implicit in the item's inclusion in a batch of documents all with the same provenance.

Sometimes however we strike lucky. The Wellcome Library has a set of "prints representing the most interesting sentimental and humorous scenes" in Laurence Sterne's novel Tristram Shandy, published in Dublin by William Allen (fl. 1787-ca. 1820).

A previous owner has written on the versos of the Wellcome Library prints the precious details of his acquisition:
"Ja[me]s Knight his picture bought it at Nath[anie]l Greacens Printer on the 10th day of July 1805 Monaghan". Click on the image below for a larger view.

A couple of surprising points: first, he calls the engraving "his picture", indicating indifference to the fact that it was an engraving, and secondly, that he bought it from the printing establishment of Nat Greacen in Monaghan town, presumably because Greacen was acting as an agent of William Allen's in the north of Ireland. Greacen's building in Monaghan later became well-known as a hotel and pub, but, as one of the favourite Protestant watering-holes in the town, it was badly damaged in the IRA bombing of 17 May 1974, after which it closed for business and reopened later as a bank.

So the Library catalogue could, if we can get the provenance to display properly, provide useful information for such subjects as the fame of Sterne's Dr Slop, the selling and buying of prints in Georgian Ireland, and the waves of movements of documents which underly those collections which happen to exist today.

Rita Simon 1921-2008

Rita Mary Simon died on 4 May 2008. Born in 1921, she was one of the leading figures in the profession of Art Therapy in the UK and internationally. Her entry into the profession in 1942 was due to the unconventional Adlerian psychoanalyst Joshua Bierer, who was trying to find new kinds of interaction between the analyst and the person being analysed, and thought that art-production might be a good linking activity. Finding she had a talent to realize the patients' unused skills and imagination, she was soon taking on a similar role for the National Association for the Prevention of Tuberculosis, for medical consultants and for psychiatrists of different schools. In the 1950s and again from 1969 to 1984, she lived in Northern Ireland and introduced art therapy as a constituent of the social and psychiatric services, was one of the founder members in 1986 of NIGAT (the Northern Ireland Group for Art as Therapy) and was also a founder member of the British Association of Art Therapists (BAAT).

On her return to England in the 1960s she introduced art therapy at the Cheadle Royal Astell Day Hospital, Cheshire. From 1975 to 1983 she provided regular short residential courses in art therapy through Queen's University Belfast and through evening classes at Belfast Metropolitan College. She ran small art-therapy groups such as a children's art group in a disturbed and violent suburb of Belfast. Between 1975 and 1995 she published two books and 18 papers. Her archive of paintings is preserved in the Wellcome Library, where it has its own webpage and catalogue record and other works are in NIGAT's archive.

Her life is now celebrated in an illustrated colour issue of NIGAT's newsletter. It includes photographs of Rita Simon, a biography of her by Eileen McCourt and Alice Graham, memories of her by friends and family, some of her own poems and paintings, and a vivid array of personalia.

Newsletter: In memory of Rita M. Simon, published by Northern Ireland Group for Art as Therapy (http://www.nigat.org/), November 2008, is available for GBP3.66 including postage from Ceri McKervill, NIGAT Treasurer, 1 Brocklamont Park, Old Galgorm Road, Ballymena, Co. Antrim., BT42 1AS (Email: c.j.mckervill@btinternet.com).

Puzzling proteins

Put your visualisation skills to work for scientific research at Foldit, a computer game pitting humans against computers in the race to understand the function of proteins.

Why humans, when computers are so much faster? According to the people at Foldit: "We’re collecting data to find out if humans' pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities make them more efficient than existing computer programs at pattern-folding tasks. If this turns out to be true, we can then teach human strategies to computers and fold proteins faster than ever!"

You can search our contemporary research images for some eye-catching folds like the one below. Wellcome Images also has a gallery of research images from the recent Wellcome Image Awards available to view online.

Follow the Wellcome Library blog on Twitter

Wellcome Library blog posts are now available to follow on Twitter. Sign up for our updates at http://twitter.com/WellcomeLibrary.

Charles Darwin in Wellcome Images

Feb 12th 2009 marks the 200th anniversary of Darwin's birth. This portrait of Darwin taken by Julia Margaret Cameron in 1868 is just one of many images on the theme "Darwin" drawn from the Wellcome Library collections.

If you want to learn more about using the Wellcome Images web site to research images we are offering a free workshop on Thursday 5th February from 2-3pm at the Wellcome Library. You can secure a place by booking online.

For advice or assistance on making a booking, telephone 020 7611 8722 or email library@wellcome.ac.uk.

Item of the Month – January

In an attempt to showcase the range of material held by the Wellcome Library, we will be highlighting one item a month from across our collections.

To start, here's the earliest documented library acquisition, a manuscript which was bought for Henry Wellcome in 1897.

A collection of recipes and receipts, Receits of phisick and chirugery, was written in 1692 by one Lady Ayscough. The item was bought at auction for £2 10s, and would become the first of the many manuscript recipe books to be acquired by Wellcome.

The manuscript numbers over 200 pages, and consists of mostly medicinal receipts, though with some culinary recipes towards the end - this mix, in itself, offering an insight into lay medical practice during the Early Modern Period.

Receits of phisick and chirugery stands as an exemplar of our other receipt books. Written in English in a readable hand, it takes us back to a previous age of sickness and healthcare. If some of the titles of the receipts are anything to go by; even if the methods may have changed some of the complaints remain with us:

'To Stop Bleeding'
'To Cause Speedy Deliverance'
'For the Piles Being Outward'
'For a Sore Brest'
'For a Cough'

Interest in our receipt books has risen over the last two decades, in no small part due to changing patterns of historical research, and the rise of such fields of study as Food History. Their popularity makes them an ideal collection to be made available through the Library’s first venture into full-text digitisation.

For more information on this manuscript, and to look at a digitised version of it, please see its details on the Library catalogue.

Writers' Rooms

When the Wellcome Library appears in the national press, its usually in relation to our collections - not our furnishings.

However, Saturday's edition of The Guardian - in their series on 'Writers' Rooms' - contained a endorsement of the Wellcome Library's chairs from the writer Sebastian Faulks:

"The chair I got via the Wellcome Trust; it's the same as those in their library and very good for someone with a chronically painful back".

Sebastian's connection with the Library stemmed from research carried out here on 19th century psychiatry for his novel Human Traces (2005). He would later contribute a Foreword to Cures and Curiosities: Inside the Wellcome Library (2007), an introduction to our collections.

Exemplar digital libraries

Subscribers to the diglib mailing list were forthcoming in responding to a recent post by the Wellcome Library. We asked for links to exemplar digital library sites focused on delivering full text material, and the results are listed here...

Listings:

Digital collections on Wordpress
Listing at the end of the JISC publication Digitised Content in the UK.

Collections/libraries:

Mark Twain Project
Internet Archive
The Morgan Picture Bible (single manuscript)
Czech Digital Mathematics Library
Roman de la Rose Digital Library
British Library, Turning the Pages
Staten Generaal Digitaal
Manuscriptorium
NLA Australian Newspapers
NLA Digital Collections
Claremont Colleges Digital Library
Europeana portal
University of Pennsylvania online books
Universal Digital Library "Million Book Collection"
Directory of Open Access Journals
University of Wisconson Digital Collections

Commercial:

Judaic Digital Library
AIAA eBooks

Medical women's obituaries

A useful new biographical resource has been added to the catalogue of the archives of the Medical Women's Federation (SA/MWF).

Thanks to the painstaking work of Emma Milliken, an index to the obituaries of women doctors which appeared in the various differently entitled incarnations of its Newsletter/Quarterly Review/Journal has been added to the 'Notes' field of the collection level description of SA/MWF.

To find it, go to A&M Catalogue at Search Interface input SA/MWF into Reference field and Collection into Level field > click on the blue numeral in the lefthand column of hitlist to reach detailed entry and then scroll down.

The index can be browsed there: or individual names can be searched via the Any Text field of the catalogue. Though please note that it will only provide references to the relevant volumes, not access to the actual obituaries.

The Patterson Challenge

Inspired by one of our manuscripts, readers of Londonist are attempting a 20 mile walk across London to track how the city has changed over the last 150 years.

They’re following in the footsteps of James Patterson, a master at the Deaf and Dumb Institution, in Manchester, who recorded a visit to London over Christmas 1858 in his diary. Patterson's seemingly inexhaustible perambulations took him across the metropolis, and the detailed notes he made offer a fascinating view of sights to see for a mid-Victorian tourist.

For more on 'The Patterson Challenge' – including how to take part – have a look here. We'll keep you posted on how these intrepid souls get on.

(A less tiring insight into Patterson is offered here by Dr Chris Hilton of the Wellcome Library, in an article originally published in the Newsletter of the London Topographical Society).

Upcoming Library workshops

The winter/spring programme of Wellcome Library workshops begins on January 20th 2009. The workshops offer introductions to resources and research methods, and are aimed at the general public.

The programme includes thematic workshops such as science in the news, the history of medicine on the internet, training on specific resources such as the Wellcome Images database and PubMed Central, and introductions to the Wellcome Archives and genealogical research resources at the library.

All workshops are free and available to everyone who joins the library (library membership is also free and open to all). To book a place on any of the workshops, please use the new online booking facility link on the library web site.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

The after-effects of Vril

Dr Lesley Hall of the Wellcome Library was one of the contributors to a recent BBC Radio 3 documentary discussing the curious afterlife of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Vril.

"Matthew Sweet finds out about Vril, the infinitely powerful energy source of the species of superhumans which featured in Victorian author and politician Edward Bulwer Lytton’s pioneering science fiction novel 'The Coming Race'. Although it was completely fictional, many people were desperate to believe it really existed and had the power to transform their lives".

One of these people was a Harley Street doctor, Herbert Tibbits, who along with a handful of aristocrats, tried to promote the notion of electrical cures and the possibility of a "coming race" in a bizarre bazaar at the Royal Albert Hall.

Another believer was Arthur Lovell. In the documentary, Dr Hall describes his work The Breath of Life, which claimed to offer practical advice on how to breathe your way to a higher state of human evolution.

The Wellcome Library holds a copy of this book, and other works by both Tibbits and Lovell. The documentary is available here until 11 January 2009.

Spilsbury Case Reports in The Times

Our recently catalogued case reports of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, received further promotion through a recent article in The Times.

Ben Macintyre writes:

“The archive offers a unique insight into the British way of death in an earlier age, but it also casts fresh light on the rise and fall of a scientist whose gruesome expertise solved some of the most famous crimes in British history”

Read the rest of the article here.