Running aground in Haiti and in cyberspace

The Wellcome Library has just acquired a monograph by the late Paul C. Appleton, Resurrecting Dr. Moss [1]. It is a biography of a short-lived Dublin-born naval surgeon Edward Lawton Moss (1843-1880), who spent much of his brief career in foreign waters—Atlantic, Pacific, and Mediterranean, with a period on land running the Esquimalt hospital on Vancouver Island, British Columbia (1872-1875). Moss was the medic on the British Arctic expedition of 1875-6, which was cut short by scurvy, and about which Moss wrote and illustrated Shores of the Polar sea (1878: currently the firm of Henry Sotheran is offering a copy of this book for £3,500). In 1878 Moss was in the Dardanelles on the fringes of the Russo-Turkish war of the time. In 1880 he was one of 280 men on HMS Atalanta who disappeared without trace off Bermuda.

In addition to telling the story of Moss's life through his letters (in British Columbia archives) and paintings (still with his descendants), Mr Appleton has clarified an early episode in Moss's career and thereby explained a hitherto puzzling document in the Wellcome Library. This episode is called the Bulldog Affair, and the document is a painting by Moss.

HMS Bulldog was Moss's first ship. In 1865 it was patrolling the seas around Haiti, trying gunboat diplomacy on the rebels warring against the Haitian government of the day. The commander noticed that a British merchant steamer RMS Jamaica Packet was being harried by an armed warship controlled by the rebels, and went towards the coast to protect it. Unfortunately Bulldog then itself ran aground on a coral reef. Unable to move, it was a sitting target for the rebels. The Bulldog crew lived up to the name of their ship and defended themselves vigorously with the artillery available. A bitter battle ensued. Edward Lawton Moss, aged 22, was the surgeon on board: he had to perform two amputations on the day of the battle. Four of his patients died after surgery, and a further five men were injured. The surviving Bulldog crew eventually made for the boats, in order to row along the coast to a part of the island under the government's control. On leaving the ship at 11.30 pm on 23 October 1865, the captain lit a fuse, and a few minutes later Bulldog was blown out of the water. On their return to London the commander and navigator of the Bulldog were submitted to a court-martial and reprimanded. Appleton found evidence that the Jamaica Packet was not as innocent as the officer claimed, as it was gun-running for the government.

The Wellcome Library has a painting of HMS Bulldog by Edward L. Moss (Wellcome Library no. 44658i, reproduced below).

It is a tiny watercolour (6 x 11 cm.), on the mount of which is inscribed "The surgery, H.M.S. Bulldog. Cape Haitien 23rd Oct 1865. E.L. Moss M.D. R.N. ". Its provenance is currently unknown, but it has been in the Wellcome Library at least since the 1930s, and it was at one time in Liverpool (it is framed and the backing sheet bears the frame-maker's label of Richard Jeffreys, 88 Bold Street, Liverpool, tel. 5231 Royal).

At first sight it looks like a depiction of a couple of tents in the open air. However, in the light of Appleton's narrative, one can see that it is Moss's operating room below deck on HMS Bulldog. On the right is a ladder leading up to the hatch, through which light floods down from the deck above. On the left is the operating table, with supports at either end to secure the patients whose limbs Moss had amputated. On the floor is a ghastly quantity of blood. On the ground on the right are three cannon-balls, and a fourth is in the foreground. Moss can hardly have painted this in the thick of battle: he must have done so while waiting nervously for the "Abandon ship", in the knowledge that, a few hours later, the site he was recording would be blown to smithereens.

What a pity that the late Paul Appleton never knew about this painting, which he surely would have used had he known about it. If he ever used Google or similar search-engines, they would not have helped him, for they cannot search databases. There is a vast amount of data needed by researchers that is inaccessible in the "hidden web". That information includes the entire contents of Wellcome Library's web-catalogue –-over 600,000 records, one of which is for this painting.

Thanks to the network of publishers and booksellers, Mr Appleton's analog book has done a better job of making Moss's story known to the Wellcome Library in London than the Wellcome Library's digital catalogue has done of making the London painting known to Mr Appleton and his publishers and editor in Calgary. We can only look forward to the day when, for the benefit of Mr Appleton's successors, that relationship is levelled. Blogs such as this one are already helping. Meanwhile the book is highly recommended; apart from its content, its attractive design makes it a pleasure to peruse.

[1] Paul C. Appleton, Resurrecting Dr. Moss: the life and letters of a Royal Navy surgeon, Edward Lawton Moss MD, RN, 1843-1880, edited by William Barr. Calgary: University of Calgary Press and Arctic Institute of North America, 2008. Designer: Melina Cusano.

Wellcome Film channel on YouTube

Wellcome Film has launched its YouTube channel, with more videos to be added soon. Watch, rate and comment on the Wellcome Library's Moving Image and Sound Collection's fascinating selection of archive films, or subscribe to the channel to get regular updates. Watch the videos here.

The most popular video so far is Childbirth as an Athletic Feat (1939), a delightful film showing a class of expectant mothers performing antenatal exercises.



Author: Lucy Smee

'Archivist, Historian and Trailblazer'

The first issue of new history magazine HerStoria, includes a feature on Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist at the Wellcome Library, the title of which we've quoted above.

The article rightly hails Lesley's work as both an archivist and historian:

"If you are a Radio 4 listener, Lesley Hall's name may be familiar. Over the past year or so her voice has been heard regularly over the airwaves, including on the Archive Hour programme 'Love at the Lighthouse' about Marie Stopes and on Case Notes, talking about the history of abortion. Lesley has also cropped up on on Women's Hour several times where she explored various aspects of the history of women's health such as medical attitudes to childbirth and the treatment of women's cancers.

As well as being an archivist at the Wellcome Library in London, Lesley is also one of the UK's leading historians of sexuality. Her books include Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain (2000) and Outspoken Women (2005) an anthology of women's writing on sex between 1870-1969.

Lesley's contribution to the development of women's history as a discipline, and to bringing it to a wider audience, has been tremendous. She has achieved this in part by encouraging people to look at history from a fresh perspective and discover different histories. Some ten or so years ago Lesley was one of the first to set up a website that explored and reflected on issues in women's history (almost 'blogging' even before the term was invented)".

The article also describes and is illustrated by some of the many sources for women's history available at the Wellcome Library. The issue of Herstoria also includes a Women's History Walk around Bloomsbury, designed by Lesley (and still available through her website).

Item of the Month – February 2009

A toast in Abyssinia. Wellcome Library no. 667946i

It could be said without fear of contradiction that wherever you are in the Wellcome Library you are never more then ten feet away from a reference to Aristotle, the Virgin Mary, Queen Victoria or the River Nile. The Nile features in many roles: as the channel whose flooding fed the civilization of the ancient Egyptians; as the waters which supported the infant Moses and thus enabled the exodus of the Jews from Egypt with momentous consequences; as a place for research into schistosomiasis with the aid of a floating laboratory commissioned by Henry S. Wellcome; or more frivolously as the holiday resort of Europeans and North Americans such as Florence Nightingale, the Prince of Wales, William Osler, and the many others who enjoyed the views from the Nile dahabeeyahs.

Many references involve the obsession with finding "the" source of the Nile, exemplified in the Victorian expeditions of Sir Samuel Baker, and John Hanning Speke. There were however earlier explorers of the source of the Nile, one of the most distinctive being James Bruce of Kinnaird (1730–1794), whose many massive volumes Travels to discover the source of the Nile in the years 1768–73 (1790) weigh heavily on the Library's shelves. Their pages record the political and tribal history as well as the fauna, flora, and natural features of the regions which Bruce, disguised as a Syrian savant and physician, passed through in his quest for the fons et origo of the river. They also include a report on the Abyssinian custom of eating raw beef cut from living cattle.

Among the Bruce of Kinnaird documents in the Wellcome Library is an unusually large etching (above). It shows Bruce at his moment of triumph in November 1770, when he and his Greek assistant Strates reach a fountain at Gisha in Abyssinia, regarded by the locals as the sole source of the Nile. Bruce described it as "an island of green turf which was in the form of an altar … I stood in rapture over the principal fountain which rises in the middle of it". To mark the occasion, Bruce and Strates raise a coconut to drink the Nile water to the health of King George III of Great Britain and to Empress Catherine the Great of Russia (the champion of the Greeks against the Ottomans).

The print must be exceptionally rare, for it is mentioned neither among the likenesses in Bruce's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry nor in the recent biography of Bruce by Miles Bredin, which does however describe the episode [1]. Another impression in the British Museum bears lettering which records the date 1793 and the names of the authors: the composition was attributed to Richard Morton Paye (1750-1821), and the etching to none other than James Gillray (1756–1815), the well-known caricaturist. In support of that surprising attribution, the fuzzy etched lineation is similar to Gillray's caricatures: a specialist history engraver would have used bolder and thicker lines to differentiate between the principal figures and the background. It is nevertheless strange that this work is not included in Thomas Wright's list of works by Gillray "not belonging to the province of caricature or satire" [2].

This heroic history picture of the Scottish explorer at his moment of glory in Africa must be one of Gillray's least-known works. It deserves to be drawn to the attention of historians of Nile exploration, matters Abyssinian, and Scotland.

[1] Miles Bredin, The pale Abyssinian: a life of James Bruce, African explorer and adventurer, London: HarperCollins, 2000, pp. 160-163

[2] Thomas Wright, The works of James Gillray, the caricaturist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1873, appendix pp. 372-374, 'Works, not belonging to the province of caricature or satire, executed by James Gillray as an engraver'

Polish posters at the London School of Hygiene

The Wellcome Library has a large collection of posters including a small but distinctive sample of Polish items. Frequently ironic with a grim humour, they are unusual in using solely graphic means without any slogans, as in this example showing opium poppies turning into grave-markers. The appreciation of posters in Poland goes back at least to the first ever international poster exhibition, which was held in Cracow in 1898.

An opportunity to learn more about the history of these works was provided on 16 February 2009 at a workshop on Polish and British posters at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), under the auspices of its Centre for History in Public Health. The workshop arose from an international collaborative project currently underway between the LSHTM Centre and the Medical University of Silesia, funded through a Wellcome Trust History of Medicine grant. This aims to document and analyse public health posters in Poland during the course of the twentieth century.

The first half of the workshop concentrated on the Polish poster, with talks by Krzysztof Krajewski-Siuda of the Medical University of Silesia, Katowice; Martin Gorsky of the LSHTM; and James Aulich from Manchester Metropolitan University. Among the key points were the use of star artists such as Maciej Urbaniec (1925-2004) and Andrzej Pągowski (b. 1953) as the designers of public health posters; the ambivalent position of the state as both responsible for reducing alcoholism and (qua monopoly manufacturers) as a beneficiary from the sales of alcoholic drinks; the questionable efficiency of the poster campaigns and the existence of the posters as symptoms of a crisis rather than as the solution to it.

Emerging incidentally from the presentations was the existence of splendid collections of posters in Poland, especially the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow, the Central Medical Library in Warsaw, and the Wilanów Poster Museum, established in a suburb of Warsaw in 1968. However, it was pointed out that the most collected posters are not necessarily those with the most active street-life: those posters which survive may be the unrepresentative, artistically outstanding ones.

The second half offered for comparison two talks based on the British experience. Catherine Moriarty from Brighton University introduced some posters in the collection of the International Council of Graphic Design Associations. The Council contributed representatives of their respective national outputs of posters and packaging to a central collection now in Brighton. There it joins other relevant posters in the archives of Frederick Henri Kay Henrion (1914-1990) and others. Poland and Cuba were mentioned as the two countries in which poster designers could become celebrities. Finally, Virginia Berridge of the London School of Hygiene described the ever-changing political context in which British health posters were produced from Attlee to Blair: policy swung to and fro between national and local production, leading to the present situation in which health campaigns were either run by government through the Central Office of Information or (for some topics such as alcohol) funded by industry, for example through the Drinkaware Trust. On past form, neither in Poland nor in the UK is the story likely to end with the current status quo.

Above: poster by Andrzej Pągowski (b. 1953) for the TZN (Towarzystwo Zapobiegania Narkomanii), 1987. Wellcome Library no. 646388i

Wellcome Library blog receives over 3,500 visits in 4 months

The Wellcome Library blog, born on 11 November, 2008, has to date received over 3,500 visits and over 6,000 page views. Interest was high initially with 82 visits on its second day alone, while during the run-up to Christmas, and during the holidays, visits waned. But in the New Year visits began a steep climb, and our highest daily number of visits was 99 on 15 February.

Over the lifetime of the blog so far, we have managed to keep the interest of our loyal returning visitors, while also luring in new visitors with around 60% of visits being newcomers. People spend quite a lot of time reading the site as well, averaging 1.44 minutes on the site (with a maximum of just over 5 minutes having been achieved on a few particular days).

Visitors find us from all over the globe - the majority from the UK and the US. Over 90% of US visitors are new, while the UK visitors are 60% returnees.

How do our readers find us? Well, mostly through Google, as expected (33%), while 16% find the blog by clicking directly on a link (presumably in emails or using their favourites). Blogger.com is a great advertiser, bring in exactly as many readers as the link on the main Library website. Twitter is fast becoming a huge draw for the blog, in the past month being the 3rd most likely source for visitors, with Stumbleupon, oddly, being the number 4 most likely source in the past month (we must have been recommended). We are also linked to by many other blogs (most of them are in our blogroll), and this draws in a lot of readers - so a big thank you to all our fellow blog-owners who mention us or add us to their blogroll.

The Library staff have worked hard to bring blog readers a wide variety of interesting and topical news stories, and these statistics demonstrate the value of sharing information in an easy-to-access, informal way.

Kitchen sink dramas

Is it just me, or does recipe-swapping seem to be spreading across the media like a benign virus? Every weekend paper worth its salt has a recipe-exchange corner nowadays, while online you’re spoilt for choice, from the reassuring videos on What's Cooking Grandma? to the erudite and frankly surreal offerings on Ken Albala’s Food Rant.

Recipes have long been a staple of the print media, but perhaps the economic downturn is sharpening our appetite? Recipe-swapping is just so comforting – it gives us a warm glow to imagine ourselves thrifty cooks using up those leftovers, to recall beloved family and friends through meals shared, to enter a virtual community of fellow swappers.

Popular interest in recipes is matched by a growth in academic research into historical recipe collections. You would expect to find food history and material culture on the menu, but recipe collections provide rich pickings for a wider range of themes including women as medical practitioners, cultural and economic trends, and the literary role of recipes in life-writing.

Research by Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell on recipe exchange as a form of currency highlights just how familiar our recipe-swapping would seem in early modern England. 17th century housewives didn’t blog, but their recipe collections were as interactive as any wiki, the frequent amendments and annotations reflecting their compilers’ social, familial and economic networks.

The issue of trust spans the centuries - both manuscript and online swappers need to make judgements about the reliability of the recipe’s source. As Leong and Pennell show, the same criteria came into play then as now – do we know the source personally? If not, do we have a friend in common? Or is the source trustworthy by professional reputation?

Well, I’ve think I’ve talked myself into swapping some recipes. As my cooking is definitely not worth trusting, I’ll share some from the Wellcome Library’s manuscript collection. Digital images of the 17th century recipes are now available online, so to tempt you into exploring this rich resource and to test your kitchen skills to the limit, I’ll be posting 17th century recipes here from time to time. To start things off, I’ll do a little name-dropping with a recipe for ‘Sugar Cakes’ from Lady Ann Fanshawe, the wife of Charles II’s ambassador to Portugal and Madrid:

‘Take 2 pound of Butter, one pound of fine Sugar, ye yolkes of nine Egs, a full Spoonfull of Mace beat & searsed [sifted], as much Flower as this will well wett making them so stiffe as you may rowle it out, then with the Cup of a glasse of what Size you please cutt them into round Cakes & pricke them and bake them.’ (Reference MS.7113, p.286)


Let us know how you get on…

In your face?

This week's free Insight talk 'Fascinating Faces' is proving popular and topical. It is fully booked and has generated interest from the media. Ever at the cutting edge, the subject of face reading features on the cover of the New Scientist (14 February 2009). Another opportunity to hear the story of its rise, fall and rise again is planned for the future so get ready to book early.

Live launch - Encore: a new way to discover what the library has for you

Launching today, take part in a new era of easy catalogue searching with Encore. From its Google-like single search box, access a wealth of different material from our catalogue in just one click. Enjoy the benefits of tag clouds, and why not add your own? In response to our User Survey, Encore aims to make your searching experience more intuitive, easier and quicker. Have your say by using the feedback form. Follow the Encore links to be part of a brave new world.

Happy Birthday Dear Darwin!

He's the man you cannot escape this year, and although we've already drawn attention to the images we hold of him and also of the launch of the 'Tree of Life' website, we could not go through the 12th February 2009 without a post about Charles Darwin.

It was 200 years ago today that Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, but how best to celebrate? Well, perhaps unsurprisingly given the Wellcome Library has many editions of all of his books, how about reading some of them?

And for those who don't have any of his works at hand - or who have yet to access Darwin online - here's the last paragraph from the first edition of "On the Origin of species by means of natural selection..."(1859):

"It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth with Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved".

Happy Birthday!

British Periodicals - Collections I & II

British Periodicals, now accessable at the Wellcome Library, provides searchable full text of hundreds of periodicals from the late 17th century to the early 20th. It consists of two separate collections, British Periodicals Collection I and British Periodicals Collection II.

British Periodicals Collection I consists of more than 160 journals that comprise the UMI microfilm collection Early British Periodicals, the equivalent of 5,238 printed volumes containing approximately 3.1 million pages. Topics covered include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences.

British Periodicals Collection II consists of more than 300 journals from the UMI microfilm collections English Literary Periodicals and British Periodicals in the Creative Arts together with additional titles, amounting to almost 3 million pages. Topics covered include literature, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture.

The collection can also be accessed on Periodicals Archive Online, and the two electronic resources are cross-searchable.

Author: Victoria Sinclair

A design for life?

How would you sum up the significance of DNA in a single sentence? When challenged by an Essex biology teacher in 1989, the DNA pioneer Francis Crick didn’t hesitate:

As you may have noticed, 2009 is a major anniversary for evolutionary theory. But 150 years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, arguments still rage around evolution, creationism and intelligent design. The clash of ideologies is neatly summed up by a recently catalogued exchange of letters from 2003 in Crick's archive. The writer, a US medical professor, interprets DNA’s significance rather differently to Crick, seeing it as evidence of intelligent design by a supernatural being:

'From your [DNA] model, I could only think of a supernatural or divine design and revelation through your ingenuity… [Y]our discovery has truly transformed my view of religion and strengthened my belief of a creator which I was previously very skeptical [sic] about…’

How did Crick the dogmatic atheist respond to such opinions? Back in 1991 he showed fighting spirit, rushing to the aid of a Minnesota biology teacher under pressure to teach creationist learning packs. Crick’s letter influenced the local education board to reject the packs:

‘No scientific theory is ever fully proven, though its truth can, in favourable circumstances, be made highly probable. This does not mean that some other nonsensical theory is automatically of equal value, and therefore should be presented to students.’

Evolutionary theory won the day temporarily, but 12 years later Crick’s reply to the medical professor is terse and resigned in tone:

‘I am an agnostic with a strong inclination to atheism. I think the God hypothesis is bankrupt, and that we have evolved from non-living matter by Natural Selection. Our DNA model only confirmed me in these beliefs.’

Lacking the instincts of Darwin’s Rottweiler, the letter reveals an older and wearier man unwilling to engage in apparently pointless debate.

The Patterson Challenge - Completed!

We recently brought you news on 'The Patterson Challenge' – a proposed 20 mile walk across London, which would follow in the footsteps of James Patterson, a Victorian tourist, who had recorded his perambulations in a diary now in the Wellcome Library.

The walk was attempted on Sunday 1st February and, even despite blizzard snows on the last leg, 8 hardy souls managed to complete the gruelling route, winding their way as Patterson had done, from Camden to Fenchurch Street via Greenwich...

On completion, the walkers marvelled at the fitness of Patterson and the obduracy of his footwear. They had also seen at first hand how much – but also at times how little – London had changed over the last 150 years.

A summary of the walk has now been posted on Londonist, the website about London which was inspired to undertake the challenge. James Patterson – and the 'Patterson challengers' - we salute you!

17th-18th century Burney Collection newspapers

This outstanding collection of parliamentary papers, newspapers and pamphlets gathered by the Revd Dr Charles Burney (1757-1817) can now be accessed from the Wellcome Library. The Burney Collection, held at the British Library, represents the largest single collection of news media for this period. It covers over 200 years of accounts from England, Ireland, and Scotland and a handful of papers from British colonies in the Americas and Asia.

It is particularly rich in 18th century London newspapers including all the major titles, such as the Daily Courant and the London Gazette.

Author: Victoria Sinclair

Why Reading Matters

As part of BBC4's Why Reading Matters season, a documentary will air on Monday evening (9th February), also called Why Reading Matters:

"Science writer Rita Carter tells the story of how modern neuroscience has revealed that reading, something most of us take for granted, unlocks remarkable powers. Carter explains how the classic novel Wuthering Heights allows us to step inside other minds and understand the world from different points of view, and she wonders whether the new digital revolution could threaten the values of classic reading".

The documentary will also feature the work of The Reader Organisation, and their pioneering wellbeing project, Get into Reading.

The Wellcome Library recently helped to organise an event held in Wellcome Collection, 'The Reading Cure', which showcased the work of the Reader Organisation, and discussed the relationship between reading and health. More details on the event.

Tree of Life

As part of its contribution to Darwin200, the Wellcome Trust and its partners have created the website Tree of Life featuring a video on evolution presented by David Attenborough. The website includes an interactive Tree of Life showing the development of life on earth. To keep abreast of news regarding the Tree of Life project, or comment on it, view the blog.

The last Frost Fair

As London reels under its worst "snow event" for 18 years, we're bombarded with archive footage of previous worst winters: 1947 and 1962/3 in particular. The most marvellous of London's winter events, however, last happened nearly 200 years ago: the Frost Fairs that would take place on the frozen Thames in the hardest winters have now died out. The last took place in 1814 and changes to the river mean that they will not happen again: they were dependant on the way the narrow arches of old London Bridge kept the river level upstream of the bridge relatively constant, and the large tidal range that affects the upper river since the bridge was replaced by one with wider arches, makes it impossible for the Thames to freeze so solidly.

In the 1860s, John Hodgkin – a retired lawyer, born in 1800, and the younger brother of the pathologist Thomas Hodgkin – was asked by his children to write down some of his early memories. Among them was a recollection of how, half a century before, he and his brother had seen the last Frost Fair:

"In the winter of 1813-14 occurred the great frost. It commenced the day after or the next day but one after Christmas day. It was ushered in by an intense fog which lasted two or three days, & in which an accident befel the carriage of the Prince Regent, which both alarmed him and detained him a considerable time on a journey he was taking to some nobleman's… The frost lasted till about the 8th or 9th of 2nd month [February: as a good Quaker, Hodgkin does not use the customary names for months or days as these are seen as pagan]… 6 weeks & 1 day.

A fair was held for several days on the Thames between Blackfriars & London Bridge. My Brother and I walked there one day from Pentonville & remained a short time on the River close to the Fair. I do not remember many of the details [Hodgkin's background probably meant that the boys looked at the fair from outside rather than exploring it!] but besides the vast crowds & the usual features of a pleasure fair, we saw a fire & also a large broad wheeled waggon on the ice."

Hodgkin's memories of this time also include skaters on the frozen Serpentine and, more prosaically, the nasty cold he got after walking long distances in the snow then standing in the cold when hot and sweaty. Some things never change: the Frost Fairs are gone but sadly the common cold lives on. Hodgkin's memories can be consulted in the Library quoting the reference PP/HO/E/C5; the huge Hodgkin archive, including many more items relating to the Hodgkin brothers and their relatives, can be explored on the Archives department database under the reference PP/HO.

The origins of The origin

In the Wellcome Trust's headquarters, this colossal bust of Georges Cuvier stands in the atrium outside a meeting room called the Darwin Room. The irony of that conjuncture may be lost on many of the people who use the meeting room. If so, they will be in a good position to appreciate it after listening to a talk by Dr Andrew Cunningham of Cambridge University on the connections between French and English evolutionary thought, to be broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday evening (8 February 2009) at 9.30 pm London time.

Were European researchers thinking along the same lines as Darwin, or were they following separate paths of enquiry? What impact did the intellectual environment of post-revolutionary France have on their scientific theories of animal development? And what role did Cuvier play in the events? Tune in on Sunday evening.

Above: Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier (1769-1832), comparative anatomist, palaeontologist, and educational reformer. Plaster bust by David d'Angers (1788-1856). Wellcome Library no. 11959i