Wellcome Images at the Picture Buyers' Fair, 2009

On 6 and 7 May 2009, Wellcome Images will be exhibiting at stand no. 18 at the British Association of Picture Libraries and Agencies (BAPLA) Picture Buyers' Fair 2009, at the Business Design Centre in London's Islington. The team will be on hand to show how Wellcome Images can provide easy access to its huge diversity of material for publishers, designers and broadcasters.

Now in its eighth year, the BAPLA Picture Buyers' Fair is the largest event for image buyers in the world. It is a great opportunity to meet with over 150 image suppliers face-to-face in a world where 95 per cent of business is conducted online. Exhibitors cover every conceivable subject from news and nature to architecture and art with powerful, high-quality images and a vast fund of expertise.

Wellcome Images represents the unique collections of the Wellcome Library and is the world's leading source of images on the history of medicine, contemporary healthcare, social history, biomedical science and clinical medicine. There is historical material from all over the world, including Renaissance anatomical atlases, ancient Sanskrit palm-leaf manuscripts, beautifully illuminated Persian books and archives tracing groundbreaking discoveries in science.

Biomedical and clinical sciences can also be explored through over 40 000 high-quality images from photographs to scanning electron micrographs. Selected from the UK's leading teaching hospitals and research institutions, they cover science from genetics to neuroanatomy, disease, surgery and general healthcare.

Wellcome Images is online and all images are available electronically on demand. Call to arrange an appointment with one of our expert picture researchers at the Fair on +44 (0)20 7611 8348 or email images@wellcome.ac.uk.

One hundred years since the ‘Magic Bullet’

In 1909 Paul Ehrlich, working with his Japanese student Sahachiro Hata at the National Institute for Experimental Therapeutics in Frankfurt, discovered that the 606th substance tested in their attempts to discover a specific chemotherapeutic agent to cure syphilis, the arsphenamine compound named ‘Salvarsan’ did in fact destroy the spirochaete, treponema pallidum, which caused syphilis.

In the early years of the twentieth century this sexually-transmitted disease was a major public health problem: it had long-term lingering effects on the infected individual, and was also the cause of much disability in their offspring.

The discovery of Salvarsan was also an important breakthrough in the development of specifically targeted chemotherapeutic agents. It was rapidly taken up by the medical profession, replacing the previous much less efficacious treatment with mercury.

Its history is reflected in a number of archival collections in the Wellcome Library: the Paul Ehrlich transcripts include his work on arsphenamine, case-notes among the papers of Surgeon-General Knapp, RN (GC/85) show the early use of salvarsan trreatment in the Royal Navy, while Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s index cards of autopsies include some early deaths from toxic side-effects while dosage levels were still being worked out. These are also documented (with other material on Salvarsan) in the papers of Frederick Parkes Weber.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 the supply of Salvarsan (and the later developed Neosalvarsan) was cut off since they were produced in Germany. Substitutes – Kharsivan and Neokharsivan - were developed and manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome and Co Ltd. Further information can be found in the company records.

Contemporaneously, the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases (1913-1916) was hearing evidence on the best and most effective ways to bring this radical new treatment and sufferers together. Its reports and minutes of evidence are held in the Library.

Other items of relevance in the Wellcome Library, besides numerous printed works, include the 1974 BBC educational film The Search for the Magic Bullet as well as the famous Hollywood movie, starring Edward G Robinson (better known his gangster roles) as Ehrlich, Dr Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940).

Although it was replaced in the 1940s by penicillin, a treatment which took much less time and had far fewer dangerous side-effects, Salvarsan and its clones played a major role in the reduction of syphilitic infection in the UK between the two world wars.

Centenary: Stacey Hopper, born 28 April 1909

The artist Stacey Hopper was born exactly 100 years ago, at Aberaman, now part of the town of Aberdare, South Wales, on 28 April 1909. Thousands of people will have seen his work without knowing his name. His claim to fame is that, in the role of cartoonist and illustrator, he saved many Allied soldiers in World War II from the horrors of such diseases as malaria and syphilis, and thereby played a part in the Allied victory.

Left: Mussolini and Hitler. Wellcome Library no. 583972i

The Wellcome Library has two collections of Stacey Hopper's works, one from the Royal Army Medical Corps and one from Stacey Hopper himself; the latter was acquired from his family in 2003, together with valuable contextual information about his life and work. Other works by him are in the Imperial War Museum and the National Army Museum in London.

Before the war, Stacey Hopper taught art in Ealing and was an accomplished caricaturist. In 1934 he published a caricature "The origin of the Nazi salute" which was reproduced in newspapers at home and abroad: it showed the Nazi salute evolving from the action of Hitler holding up a paintbrush when painting. Stacey Hopper was called up and joined the Royal Corps of Signals in August 1941, and was initially posted to Prestatyn, North Wales. In November 1942 he was among the troops sent to Algeria. There his artistic ability and sense of humour brought him to the attention of Major General Ernest Cowell, who asked him to help with health promotion for the Army Medical Department (the initials "AMD" appear on many of his works).

In Algeria the main problem was malaria. The disease was attacked in several ways. In the first place it was necessary to get into the minds of soldiers that mosquitoes were vectors of disease. As the Australian hygiene expert Neil Hamilton Fairley impressed on General Wavell, there was a danger of losing more men through malaria than through military casualties at the hands of Hitler and Mussolini.

These mosquitoes (right) discuss sucking blood from the troops as if they were ladies discussing tea at the Ritz.

Wellcome Library no. 584189i

Practical measures included blocking off the mosquitoes' breeding grounds, for example by excluding them from the latrines …

Wellcome Library no. 584263i

Another method was to spray everything in sight with "Paris Green" (copper (II) acetoarsenite), a toxic substance used as an insecticide …

"But he distinctly said - spray every drop of water and all the female adults".

Above: Wellcome Library no. 584264i

The medicine of choice against malaria was Atebrin, which was strongly supported by Hamilton Fairley and eventually replaced quinine as the main prophylactic against malaria. However, compliance was so difficult to enforce that eventually officers were ordered to place the pills in the men's mouths themselves. This exercise (below) in the style of H.M. Bateman refers to Atebrin.

"Tablet day -- the man who forgot". Wellcome Library no. 584428i

In November 1943 Stacey Hopper was promoted to Second Lieutenant and took part in the invasion of mainland Italy. Some wash drawings by him in the Wellcome Library record the bringing of casualties by air from the Anzio campaign in Lazio to Capodichino airport near Naples. This example, dated Naples 1944, shows the wounded being carried by stretcher-bearers into a tent where they are served with mugs of tea by the Red Cross. A lot of casualties are anticipated, for the first arrivals are being laid down at the back of the tent, and the tea urn and a quantity of mugs are on a table near the front. After tea, they were taken by ambulance to military hospitals for treatment. Above left: Wellcome Library no. 583973i

As the troops fought their way northwards towards Rome, Stacey Hopper's artistic skills were again called on to protect the troops, no longer from malaria but from typhus and dysentery.

Left, Wellcome Library no. 585129i. Above, a detail from it.

Right: Wellcome Library no. 585148i

And as Italians went over to the Allies in the areas liberated from the Axis, thought was given to Italian women who were infected with sexually transmitted diseases by Allied soldiers. Right: Wellcome Library no. 585150i

It was also now in the Allies' interest to make sure that Italian cooks recruited to serve the troops obeyed the stricter hygiene regulations that were required when catering for large numbers. Left: Wellcome Library no. 585122i

Having returned safely from the war Stacey Hopper returned to his pre-War profession as a teacher of art, at first in Ealing in West London and later in Somerset. He also continued to produce caricatures for publication, especially of popular entertainers and of actors in the West End theatres: his work was published in the Musical Express. He died in Bristol on 6 February 1996.

Works by Stacey Hopper are in copyright and are reproduced here under a licence granted to the Wellcome Library.

The Atrocity Exhibition and the Wellcome Library

Obituaries of J.G. Ballard published in the last week have all mentioned the writer’s two years studying medicine at Cambridge, a period in which he dissected the physical body as prelude, he hoped, for a career in psychiatry. As it turned out his explorations of inner space took place in a different arena: his studies, however, were not lost and medical detail saturates his work. With this in mind it is perhaps no surprise that the Wellcome Library – or rather its predecessor, the Wellcome Museum – has a tiny part in one of his most notorious fictions.

The Atrocity Exhibition, published in 1970, can be seen either as a non-linear novel or as a collection of linked short stories (the bulk of it comprises changing versions of the same chapter). In it, a variously-named central character - Travis, Travers, Talbert: the name is different in each chapter - attempts to deal with a world that has ceased to cohere and make sense to him, assembling groups of objects in the hope of creating significance – elevations of a multi-storey car park, chemical analyses of human secretions, diagrams of wounds and so forth. In turn he is observed by other characters, some medical professionals, who try to make sense of his actions and of the objects he brings together. In chapter 8, “Tolerances of the Human Face”, we read:
“…Dr. Nathan pondered the list on his deskpad. (1) The catalogue of an exhibition of tropical diseases at the Wellcome museum; (2)…”

Although the Library's new 'Medicine and Literature' events aim to explore the relationship between these two themes, the example of The Atrocity Exhibition shows that Ballard was already linking the two - and in the context of the Wellcome - more than three decades ago.

Photograph: the tropical medicine section of the Wellcome Museum of Medical Science in the mid-20th century, as it was when The Atrocity Exhibition was written.

William Morris at the Wellcome Library

William Morris's library at Kelmscott House reflected his many interests. Although it contained many fine manuscripts and early printed books, it was primarily a working collection. Herbals were acquired both as source material for designs and for practical information on the uses of plants. His interest in reviving vegetable dyes led him to collect early dyeing manuals. He also acquired a comprehensive collection of works on Scandinavia and Northern Europe, particularly the Icelandic sagas. The foundation of the Kelmscott Press and his interest in book design and production resulted in the acquisition of both bibliographical reference works and examples of illuminated manuscripts and early printed books.

After Morris's death in 1896, his library was to be sold for the benefit of his widow and daughters, after they had made a limited selection. Possible purchasers included Charles Fairfax Murray and Mrs John Rylands but in the end the collection was bought by Richard Bennett, of Pendleton near Manchester. Bennett was a fastidious collector who, by and large, limited himself to manuscripts and 15th-century printed books and avoided volumes taller than 13 inches. He selected 31 manuscripts and 239 printed books from the Morris collection and put the rest up for auction at Sotheby’s in December 1898. In 1902 he sold his own collection, including his Morris acquisitions, to J. Pierpont Morgan, so that the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York now has the largest surviving remnant of Morris’s library.

The Sotheby’s sale, from 5th to 10th December 1898, caused a sensation. The 1215 lots realised £10,992.11.0. The illuminated manuscripts reached the highest prices and attracted the most press attention. Quaritch, as usual, was at the head of the field, laying out £3082.19.0 for 85 lots, followed by other leading dealers such as Leighton, Pickering & Chatto, and Tregaskis. Little notice was taken of the fact that over a third of the collection, 464 lots, went to a single bidder giving his name as Hal Wilton. This was Henry Wellcome’s preferred alias when buying at auction.

The Morris books were long ago dispersed through the collection and ceased to be a recognisable entity. After Sir Henry Wellcome’s death in 1936 the Wellcome Trustees were overwhelmed by the size and diversity of his museum and library and initiated a dispersal programme to focus the collection more specifically to the history of medicine. A series of 27 sales was held between 1937 and 1939, three of which consisted of library materials, and many of the Morris books must have been weeded out at this stage. The first library sale on 21st to 22nd March 1938 contains a section of fourteen 16th century books specified as from the Morris collection. In 1945 a bulk sale to Dawsons included ten of the eleven Morris manuscripts and doubtless more printed books.

Using the library’s original copy of the Sotheby’s sale catalogue (pictured above), we have identified 198 printed books, including 67 incunabula, and one 15th century manuscript, still held in our collection.

The books are now all identified in the Wellcome Library catalogue.

Author: Julianne Simpson

The Secret Scientists - Ibn al-Haytham

Episode two of The Secret Scientists aired last week on the BBC World Service.

Just as in the first episode, the documentary used the resources of the Wellcome Library to illuminate figures from the History of Science.

In this second episode, Prof Jim al-Khalili and Dr Nader el-Bizri, visit the Library to investigate the work and legacy of Ibn al-Haytham.

In particular they discuss his groundbreaking research into light and optics and also the claims that al-Haytham was the instigator of what we now call the scientific method.

More details on how to listen again to the series are available on the World Service website.

Scouting for Boys

BBC4 repeated last week the documentary Scouting for Boys, which describes the story behind Robert Baden-Powell’s best-selling book, which kick-started the Boy Scout movement.

The documentary places the book in the context of its time, describing the social questions which dominated Edwardian thinking, and includes an interview with Dr Lesley Hall of the Wellcome Library, on concerns over the sex education of boys during this period.

More details on the BBC iplayer.

April in Beijing

On the boulevards of Beijing the trees are in blossom as the Wellcome Library's exhibition is about to open at the World Art Museum.

The exhibition is Beijing's first opportunity to see the vivid photographs of late Qing dynasty China taken between 1869 and 1872 by the Scottish traveller John Thomson (1837-1921). It has taken four years of sterling work by the curator, Betty Yao.


The exhibition posters in the streets remind us that we have only one day left to finish off the work. For each of the 150 wall labels there are two versions, one in English and one in Chinese, which doubles the work of installing them. Fortunately our Chinese colleagues are generous with their time, work as a team, and appear to be indefatigable.

The last minute tasks are finished and the opening ceremony at the Beijing World Art Museum is introduced by Betty Yao, the moving spirit behind the exhibition. She is followed at the microphone by Mme Zhao Shaohua, Vice-Minister of Culture, People's Republic of China, and H.E. the British Ambassador, Sir William Ehrman: both of them speak knowledgeably about John Thomson and the present-day significance to China of his records of Chinese people and their conditions of life in the past. Our ambassador, speaking in Mandarin Chinese and English, pays tribute to Thomson's Scottish resilience. They are invited to cut the opening ribbon, together with Mr Feng, Deputy Director of the Museum, and William Schupbach from the Wellcome Library.

Below, left to right: Betty Yao MBE, Sir William Ehrman, Mme Zhao Shaohua, Mr Feng, William Schupbach.




Lunch follows in the enormous circular hall, beautifully prepared by Mr Ashraf Jahin of the Duge Courtyard Hotel.

The hall is supported by golden columns and lined with stone reliefs of scenes from Chinese history.

In the afternoon, there are interviews with the television, radio and print media, followed by two public lectures in the cavernous auditorium. The first is by Tong Binxue (far right, with the translator), a leading historian and collector of Chinese photography. He places Thomson in the context of other photographers in China, especially the Frenchman Jules Itier (1802-1877) and the Swiss Pierre-Joseph Rossier (1829-1883?), both of whom preceded Thomson to Beijing. However, as Tong points out, Thomson surpassed the others in his range of subjects, places and genres.

Then William Schupbach outlines Thomson's biography and explains how, against all the odds, Thomson's original negatives have survived thanks to the foresight of Henry S. Wellcome, and are sitting today on the shelves of the Wellcome Library in London, available to the interested public.

There are plenty of questions afterwards. One of them comes from a teacher involved in the educational programme: students in a school specializing in photography took photographs in 2009 of the very same places that Thomson photographed in 1872. The modern photographs, taken in colour, are on display, each with a small black and white reproduction of the 1872 photograph. The educational programme is being expanded to cover all school districts in Beijing. Lucky schoolchildren!

The gallery is thronged with visitors.

The photographs are a revelation. Their power is heightened by the simple and elegant design, the work of Jehanne de Biolley and Harrison Liu. The photographs are shown in white frames and are printed in different sizes to give the sequence a shape and a rhythm. There are three different colours for the wall fabrics: wisteria for Beijing and the north, celadon-green for Shanghai and the Treaty ports on the east coast, and sea-green-blue for the south (Canton, Hong Kong and Macao). Within each section there are groupings of like subjects: the land and the river, the people, and the built environment.

In the evening sunshine the portrait of the photographer, John Thomson, looks out from the Beijing Millennium Monument over the city which has been transformed since he visited it in 1872.

The following day China Central Television carries on its English-language programme Cultural Express an extensive report on the exhibition, and China Radio International carries an interview with Betty Yao. Among the print media, English-language papers which feature the exhibition include the Daily Telegraph, the Independent and Beijing Time Out , as do many Chinese newspapers and the April 2009 issue of Chinese photography. The web and the blogosphere also do their bit (for example the BBC website and the blog China Rhyming). With all this enthusiasm from our friends in the media, it is not surprising that the exhibition continues to attract visitors through the following days. China through the lens of John Thomson 1868-1872 is at the World Art Museum, Beijing, until 18 May 2009, and will then move south to Fujian Museum, Fuzhou City (13 June-16 August 2009), Guangzhou Museum (25 August-25 September 2009), and Dongguan Exhibition Center, Dongguan City (3 November-6 December 2009). Further showings in other countries are being arranged. Illustrated catalogue in Chinese and English: ISBN 9787802363328

Photographs by Rowan de Saulles and William Schupbach. Thanks to Betty Yao and all who helped to make the exhibition a reality.

Item of the Month - April 2009

From the Sahara to the Euston Road

April's Item of the Month is an excellent illustration of how unpredictable the Wellcome Library’s holdings, and archive material in general, can be. It occurs in the papers of the nineteenth century pathologist Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866). Its origin, however, is in the sub-Sahara region of West Africa. How it came to this library in London is a story of different cultures meeting, and of the struggle for racial tolerance.

Hodgkin’s work was not confined to his medical career: he was also a tireless campaigner for social justice and took a particular interest in the struggle against slavery. (As a Quaker, he came from a milieu with a long tradition of philanthropy and social activism.) For much of his life Hodgkin helped to support the movement that led to the creation of Liberia as a new independent country for freed American slaves. This was not without controversy: the programme was opposed not merely by slave-owners but also by some abolitionists, who argued that there should be a place in the United States for free black men and women, and that liberation should not have to involve being uprooted and repatriated (Hodgkin and others took the pragmatic line that if it was liberation with resettlement that was on offer, this was better than nothing).

In the late 1840s the campaigners’ efforts bore fruit and Liberia was established: following this, the country’s first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts (1809-1876) came to Europe in 1848 seeking recognition for the new nation, visiting Queen Victoria as part of his mission. The United Kingdom did recognise Liberia and was the first country to do so; recognition from the United States would have to wait until 1862, during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, in part because of fears that Southern congressmen would not accept a black ambassador.

While in London, Roberts took the opportunity to catch up with some of the people who had supported the Liberia project, one of them of course being Thomas Hodgkin. As a recognition of Hodgkin’s efforts he presented him with this document, an indication of the mixed nature of the new country. The item is a 19th-century Islamic talismanic scroll created by the Mandingo people of the sub-Saharan interior. Chiefly in Arabic but with some text in a local language using Arabic script, it is composed of invocations to the almighty arranged in a geometric pattern. (A similar style of talisman, albeit of Iranian origin, can be seen illustrated in Islamic Calligraphy in the Wellcome Library by Nikolai Serikoff [Chicago: Serindia, 2007], p.10.)

As the American settlers in Liberia moved inland from their beach-heads, seeking to develop the country and to involve the local African population, they met others on a similar mission coming the other way: Muslim missionaries from deeper within the continent, fanning out towards the coast. This document comes from one of those missionaries. Somewhere on the boundary between the two cultures, this document passed to an American settler before being carried by the President to London and given to Thomas Hodgkin, retained in his family for well over a century during which it moved about the United Kingdom several times, and finally presented to the Wellcome Library with the rest of the Hodgkin papers.

It would be hard to find a better example of how unpredictable the contents of personal papers can be, or of the complicated and unpredictable journeys that documents can make: it is our good fortune that this item ended its journeying here on the Euston Road.

The catalogue of the Hodgkin archive (PP/HO) can be seen in the archives database; this particular document carries the reference PP/HO/D/A2057.

Wellcome Treasures in the World Digital Library

The World Digital Library prototype launches April 21st with a wide range of digital content from many libraries. The Wellcome Library is an active partner, and our content will be made available on the site shortly.

The World Digital Library "will make available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from cultures around the world, including manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, architectural drawings, and other significant cultural materials.

"The objectives of the World Digital Library are to promote international and inter-cultural understanding and awareness, provide resources to educators, expand non-English and non-Western content on the Internet, and to contribute to scholarly research."

The site is intended to be heavily curated - a showcase for the international treasures captured in digital format - rather than a mass-digitisation effort. A large number of libraries from around the world are represented in the partnership, and the Wellcome Library is honored to be included. "It is a bold project to bring the world's cultural treasures together on one website for all to see and share in. Along with the items we've 'donated' are detailed descriptions, so visitors can delve deep into the stories behind the objects as well as look at them on screen," according to Frances Norton, Head of the Wellcome Library.

An image gallery of content donated by the Wellcome Library is available. Content includes:

• The Wellcome Apocalypse, c. 1420 (see Turning the Pages view)
  
• A verger's dream: Saints Cosmas and Damian performing a miraculous cure by transplantation of the leg. Oil painting attributed to the Master of Los Balbases, ca. 1495.


• The Liber chronicarum, by Hartmann Schedel, 1493
  
• De historia stirpivm commentarii insignes ... by Leonhard Fuchs, 1542
  
• Histoires prodigieuses, by Boaistuau, Pierre, 1560
  
• An etching of Paul Ferdinand Gachet by Vincent van Gogh, 1890
  
• De humani corporis fabrica libri septome, by Andreas Vesalius, 1543
  
• The muscles of the leg, by Michelangelo Buonarotti, ca. 1515-1520
  
• Anatomical fugitive sheets of a skeleton, male figure and a female figure, 1573
  
• The double helix as first sketched by Francis Crick, c. 1953
  
• Henry Solomon Wellcome. Oil painting by Hugh Goldwin Riviere, 1906
  

New RSS feeds

The Wellcome Library has enabled an RSS feed for newly available Electronic Resources. The latest catalogued resources will appear at the top of the page while the list will contain only the top 30 records based on activation date. The Wellcome Library provides over 200 online journals and databases for its members as well as selected free-to-access websites.

The Library offers RSS feeds of many types of recently acquired items. Organised by collection - such as Rare Books, and the History of Medicine Collections - these feeds provide daily updates detailing new Library acquisitions. Registered readers can also set up weekly email alerts of newly available material which match your interests more precisely.

Anatomy of a Dictionary

So far, 2009 has been very much a year of anniversaries. Already we’ve had the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns; events to mark the 500th anniversary of Henry VIII acceding to the English throne are now underway and there’s no escaping Charles Darwin, with two anniversaries - 200 years since his birth; 150 since the publication of his most famous work – book-ending the year.

But this year is also the 300th anniversary of the birth of Samuel Johnson, and it was on this day (15th April) in 1755 that his most famous work – A Dictionary of the English Language - was first published.

The Wellcome Library holds a first edition of the Dictionary, and as Johnson’s life has often been analysed through his health, we thought looking up some of the more medical words out of the 40,000 defined within may be a worthwhile way to celebrate this anniversary.

Judging by the dictionary, it appears Johnson was not entirely a fan of members of the medical profession. Johnson relied heavily on quotations from literature to aid his definitions, and some of those chosen are clearly critical. For example, under the definition for 'doctor' – described by Johnson as 'a low word' – he quotes Jonathan Swift:

"In truth, nine parts in ten of those who recovered, owed their lives to the strength of nature and a good constitution, while such a one happened to be the doctor".

Physicians don’t get let off lightly either. To define the profession, Johnson quotes from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens:

"Trust not the physician, / His antidotes are poison, and he slays / More than you rob".

Not surprising, given Johnson’s infamous wit, the dictionary is a more enjoyable read than most reference works. For example, here’s the entry for the word "pox", which combines the origin of the word with some grand synonyms:

Pox [properly pocks, which originally signified a small bag or pustule; of the same original, perhaps, with powke or pouch. We still use pock; for a single pustule]
1. Pustules; efflorescencies; exanthematous eruptions
2. The venereal disease. This is the sense when it has no epithet.

And if you look closely, Johnson’s beloved London pops up in the Dictionary. So, for the word "medicate":

To Medicate
To tincture or impregnate with any thing medicinal
"The fume, steams, and stenches of London, do so medicate and impregnate the air around it, that it becomes capable of little more" (Graunt's Bills of Mortality).

Johnson suffered from such ailments as scrofula, asthma, insomnia, depression and gout, but few of them are described in the Dictionary. But perhaps the most striking absence from the Dictionary – and here we move away from the medical – is the word flagged up in the famous episode of Blackadder. That’s right: Johnson’s Dictionary includes over 40,000 words, but "Sausage" is not one of them...

The Secret Scientists

The BBC World Service today aired the first part of a new series, The Secret Scientists.

Details:

"According to the popular notion of science history, the period between the ninth and 13th centuries was what has come to be called the Dark Ages. Scientific advance ground to a halt and the world languished in an intellectual backwater. Then the Renaissance happened, the world woke up and great science got going again – picking up where the ancient Greeks and Romans had left off.

But, as Professor Jim Al-Khalili shows listeners in this new, three-part series, that simply isn't true. While Europe may have been less productive during this period, elsewhere in the world a vast Islamic empire was buzzing with intellectual activity. A massive movement to translate the work of other cultures allowed scholars working in Arabic to understand, build on and then surpass the scientific achievements of the past – leaving a valuable legacy to the scientists of the European Renaissance. Today, however, these men are hardly household names. They are "the Secret Scientists".

In today's opener, Jim meets Professor Peter Pormann, a specialist in the history of medicine, at the great library of the medical charity the Wellcome Trust in London. He introduces listeners to the great physician, Mohammed Ibn Zakariya ar-Razi, whose ground-breaking work on differential diagnosis, specifically with measles and smallpox, was still being quoted in English and French texts hundreds of years after his death.

Jim also goes to the chemistry laboratory of chemist Dr Andrea Sella, who talks about Jabir ibn Hayyan. Jim believes that Jabir was the true father of chemistry – responsible for elevating previous work to the status of a science. Andrea talks about the process of sublimation, which was invented during this period and is still in use today – for example, in the production of freeze-dried food".

Whilst in the Wellcome Library, Profs Al-Khalili and Pormann examine copies we hold of works by ar-Razi (or Rhases), including a 19th century English translation of ar-Razi's Treatise on Smallpox and Measles and also works by Ibn Sina (or Avicenna), such as his famous Canon of Medicine.

The documentary is available through the BBC’s iPlayer for the next 7 days.

Wellcome Library Insight - Native Americans

Next week's free Wellcome Library Insight session, explores the cultures of the native populations of North America, as represented in our collections.

Book your place at the session online.

Bon Appetit

The Wellcome Library is pleased to announce that its entire collection of 17th century receipt (recipe) books - 75 manuscripts in total - have been made available online. They are currently available as PDFs from our catalogue records. We have further information on this project on our Library website digitisation pages and in our latest edition of Wellcome News.

In order to keep the PDF file sizes down, they have been compressed, and in many cases, blank pages have been left out. We also store high-resolution images of every page of these manuscripts, and if required you can order these by visiting Wellcome Images.

Mounting the images online is only half the project - stay tuned for our announcement regarding the indexing of the recipe titles, which is currently in progress.

"Nature's art forms"

The Wellcome Library has acquired a set of Kunstformen der Natur ("Nature's art forms") by the German evolutionary biologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919). Kunstformen der Natur is described by Breidbach as the last and most ambitious of Haeckel's major graphic works and the summing up of his world view [1]. It consists of one hundred colour plates which are intended to justify Haeckel's adaptation of Goethe's "typological" biology. The "typologies" which they publicise are analogous forms in different domains, such as the antlers of the African antelope, the scales of fish and the sense-organs of bats.

These analogous forms or types are demonstrated graphically in an overwhelmingly generous supply of colour lithographs. They purport to show how the simplicity and uniformity of nature is expressed in invertebrates and some vertebrates in an almost unbelievable profusion and multiplicity of repeating and varying patterns. Most are from Haeckel's favourite research areas in natural history such as jelly-fish, protozoa, infusoria, and corals, some of them newly discovered on a research trip to Malaya and Java. Who would have believed that slime could be so colourful and well-constructed? Some higher animals such as insects, frogs, snakes and birds are also included.

The spectacular lithographs were sketched by Haeckel from his research notes going back many years, then drawn professionally by his lithographer Adolf Giltsch (1852-1911) of Jena, emended by Haeckel, and finally redrawn on the stone in colours by Giltsch for printing. Most of the plates are in a single delicate colour (one in a variety of hues), but some are in three or four colours, such as the print of hummingbirds (right).

The plates act as a visual source book comparable to the works on the Alhambra and on the "grammar of ornament" by Owen Jones . Indeed, the last chapter of Jones's The grammar of ornament (1856) discusses ornamental patterns taken from flowers and foliage, providing a starting-point from which Haeckel (and others, including Haeckel's opponent D'Arcy Thompson) could extend the discovery of patterns to animals. Like those other works, Kunstformen der Natur was also raided by designers of lamps, vases, drinking fountains and ceramic tiles [2].

The plates for Kunstformen der Natur were published loose in fascicules. The set acquired by the Wellcome Library comes from the firm of Henry Sotheran and is perfectly preserved with its original covers and boxes as issued--a remarkable survival. There is also a supplement containing textual tables.

Within a few years World War I would break out and such luxuries would become a thing of the past.

Kunstformen der Natur. Von Prof. Dr. Ernst Haeckel. Hundert Illustrationstafeln mit beschreibendem Text, allgemeine Erläuterung und systematische Übersicht. Leipzig ; Wien [Vienna]:Bibliographisches Institut, 1899-1904.

Wellcome Library no. 674505i

[1] Olaf Breidbach, Ernst Haeckel: Bildwelten der Natur. München; London : Prestel, 2006.

[2] Christoph Kockerbeck, Ernst Haeckels "Kunstformen der Natur" und ihr Einfluss auf die deutsche bildende Kunst der Jahrhundertwende: Studie zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Naturwissenschaften im Wilhelminischen Zeitalter. (Europaïsche Hochschulschriften. Reihe XX, Philosophie, Bd. 194), Frankfurt am Main & New York: P. Lang, 1986.

Exploring Wellcome Collection: A History of the Human Body in Europe

A new short course in the history of medicine has been created by Dr An Vleugels, Birkbeck College, University of London.

'Exploring Wellcome Collection: A History of the Human Body in Europe' draws on the rich holdings of Wellcome Collection, both in the Library and the galleries, to trace how ideas about the human body changed throughout history.

Full details can be found on the Birkbeck website.

William Sargant documentary

BBC Radio 4 today aired a documentary called Revealing the Mind Bender General.

Details:

James Maw on the controversial psychiatrist Dr William Sargant, who tested drugs on his patients with, some say, catastrophic results.

In the 1960s and 1970s he developed his controversial Deep Sleep Treatment in the Sleep Room of St Thomas's Hospital in London. James talks to some of those who worked under Sargant in the late-1960s and to some of his former patients, who all say that they are still suffering from his treatment to this day.

The documentary also investigates allegations that Sargant was involved in secret military experiments with hallucinogenic drugs.

Sargant's papers are held by the Wellcome Library, and the documentary quotes from Sargant's notes on patients undergoing Deep Sleep Treatment and also his correspondence with the writer Robert Graves (in particular, on Graves taking the drug psilocybin - "magic mushrooms").

The documentary is available through the BBC’s iPlayer for the next 7 days.

Wellcome Library Insight - Madness

This week's free Wellcome Library Insight session, explores the theme of 'Madness' and Mental Health.