We're talking 'heads'

Last week self-styled 'Guru of the Gurners' Danny Rees treated Wellcome Trust staff to a display of rare and unusual library material on the subject of face reading. Items featured included book illustrations from Charles Darwin and phrenologist George Combe and an 18th Century Chinese medical diagnostic chart. Seen here, the mini-exhibition was held in the hallowed hall of 215 Euston Road. Colleagues could have their ears and lips 'read' in between lunchtime sandwiches. Face reading is just one of the free library Insight talks also open to the general public, current progamme:
http://www.wellcomecollection.org/press/2009/WTX054166.htm

A new programme will be announced later for the autumn/winter sessions.

Blood and Guts in the Wellcome Library

Currently airing on Saturday nights on BBC2 – and so available to watch through the BBC iplayer – is Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery.

First shown on BBC4 last year, the series charts the "brutal, bloody and dangerous history of surgery", often with the use of graphic imagery from modern day operations.

Slightly less visceral is the accompanying book for the series, which includes the following acknowledgement from its author, Richard Hollingham:

"If there is one institution that made this book possible, it is the Wellcome Library. I have spent many happy hours there, leafing through old books, papers and journals... The biggest problem with the Wellcome Library is that it is very easy to get diverted. I spent an afternoon reading graphic case notes on early eye operations, only to realize there was no space for them in the book..."

Was Freud Really "The Father of Psychoanalysis?"

The place of Sigmund Freud in history is assured. However, this was not always the case. In 1930 Freud regularly found himself facing accusations that he had stolen all his valuable ideas about psychoanalysis from Pierre Janet, a fellow pupil of Charcot at the Salpêtrière. Janet and his supporters accused Freud of plagiarising his ideas and slightly altering the terminology, so “psychological analysis” and “restriction of consciousness” became “psychoanalysis” and “repression”. Freud strongly denied these accusations, pointing out that the two men had never met, and claiming that he had arrived at his ideas independent of those of Janet. In 1930, Freud wrote to Dr. E. A. Bennet following a medical meeting where he had been forced to defend himself yet again. In this letter, Freud says that his ideas were inspired not by Janet, but by “the ideas of Breuer, on which I built further”. He also points out that whilst Janet made his observations earlier “they became publicly known much later”.

The letter to Dr. Bennet, recently catalogued in the Wellcome Library as MS.8677, was included in an exhibition on the history of psychotherapy held at the Wellcome Historical Medical Library in 1964. During the exhibition, which was timed to coincide with the International Congress of Psychotherapy, the letter aroused so much interest that it inspired an article in the British Medical Journal the following year (“The Freud-Janet Controversy: An Unpublished Letter,” BMJ, 1965;1:pp. 52-53).

Item of the month June 2009: The Jagannāth Triad

Wellcome Library no. 45182i

Faced with these striking figures for the first time, one could be forgiven for bemusement: who or what are these goggle-eyed black-and-white minstrels? This and eight related paintings were bought by Sir Henry Wellcome at Stevens' auction house in London on 18 October 1932. Stevens' cataloguers were also puzzled by them, cataloguing them as "interesting Eastern paintings". Perhaps because there were Mexican items in the same sale, the paintings were described in the Wellcome accessions register as Mexican. In 1988 they were identified first negatively (by Professor Anthony Shelton) as not Mexican, and then positively (by Dr Brian Durrans) as having a style and a subject matter unique to a part of the world exactly the other side of the globe from Mexico: the state of Orissa on the east coast of India. The city of Puri in Orissa contains the ancient and enormous temple of the god Jagannāth (Jagannātha), and this painting represents the three deities whose wooden effigies are contained in the inner sanctum of that temple.

Jagannāth himself is the figure on the right of the painting, with round eyes and a black face. The figure on the left is his brother Balabhadra (Balarāma) with oval eyes and a white face, while the stump of a figure in the middle is their sister Subhadrā with oval eyes and a yellow face. In this and similar paintings, made to provide pilgrims or tourists with a souvenir of their visit to the temple, the crude folk-image style figures are foreign both to the elegant balletic poses of conventional Hindu iconography and to the delicate outlines and hues of Mughal painting. "Although one result of the Mughal attempts to conquer Orissa was its being opened to outside influences, no amount of cross-fertilization of cultures could induce the Brahmins and the painters at Puri in the small state of Khurda to abandon their pictorial traditions." [1]

In the temple at Puri, the deities are assumed to be present in the three wooden carvings. They are therefore attended like human princes by a staff of over 600: they have a daily bath in which water is poured on reflections of the deities in metal mirrors, and they are provided with new clothes and three meals a day to the singing of the Gita Govinda. However, once a year there is a more important turn: on the first day the effigies themselves are bathed, after which they are discoloured by the bath-water and are then kept from public view for fifteen days. This period is called Aṇasara or anavasara, when the deities are supposed to have fallen sick with a fever and are taking a rest. The doors of the sanctum are closed, and during the fever period the wooden effigies are repaired and repainted. For that fortnight, substitute icons in the form of paintings are prepared by the local tribe of painters (Chitrakāra): their paintings are called "aṇasara paṭi" or fever paintings. Today they are in conventional Hindu style, one painting being devoted to each of the three deities. [2]

Very different are the souvenir type paintings of which one example of those in the Wellcome Library is shown above. These are "jātrī paṭi" or "pilgrim paintings", and have been produced by families in Puri and in surrounding villages, using a limited range of materials and techniques. For paintings produced by traditional methods, customers had a choice of canvas or paper as the support: the paper works were cheaper and were often painted on newsprint --useful for historians, as the date of the newspaper, if visible on the back, gives a terminus post quem for the date of the painting. The surface is primed with chalk mixed with tamarind gum. There was a choice of standard sizes. The paintings on canvas were painted in a range of sizes calculated to be cut from a sheet of canvas measuring 158 x 180 cm. with no pieces left over. The paint is a kind of distemper: the pigments are mixed with vegetable gum or animal skin glue. The colours are predominantly earth colours: cinnabar and lake for the prominent red backgrounds, lampblack for the blacks, orpiment for the yellow face of Subhadrā, terra verde for the green body of Jagannāth, but ground-up conch shells for the whites.

The two main subjects on offer were the Jagannāth Triad, as shown above, and ground plans of the temple. The Wellcome Library has several examples of the Triad, and one large painting of the temple (below).

Wellcome Library no. 45186i

In the centre, the gherkin-like structure is the deul or shrine containing the wooden effigies. Below is the gate on the east side of the complex guarded by two lions. Around the temple is a curved line representing the conch shell of the world in which the temple is conceived to exist. Everywhere are innumerable figures representing carved and painted deities. The details of the painting deserve a fuller study by someone familiar with the temple.

In the early twentieth century the painters of "jātrī paṭi" in Puri declined into poverty owing to competition from chromolithography, but revived in the 1950s with the aid of a marketing campaign led, surprisingly enough, by a charitable organization of American Quakers. The revival was accompanied by a switch from earth pigments to synthetic colours. [3]

The highlight of the temple's year is the Car festival (Rath Jatra), in which the re-painted effigies, recovered from their fever, are each placed on a huge chariot and paraded through the city of Puri. In 2009 the Rath Jatra occurs on 24 June, hence the choice of these paintings as the Wellcome Library's Items of the month. From faraway London the magic of the Internet sends the images of the three gods back across the world, accompanied with goodwill to the millions about to attend the festivities in Orissa.

[1] O.M. Starza, The Jagannatha temple at Puri: its architecture, art and cult, Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1993, p. 52
[2] Mildred Archer, Indian popular painting in the India Office Library, London: HMSO, 1977
[3] J.P. Das, Puri paintings: the Chitrakāra and his work, Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1982, pp. 81-89

Eureka!: Resource discovery at the Wellcome Library

Regular visitors to the Wellcome Library website may have noticed the launch of Encore, our new online catalogue interface, during the dark days of February. Summer arrived and brought with it an upgraded version of Encore, which has now been live for more than a week.

What makes Encore such a great discovery tool is the way it exposes all of the material formats, diverse Wellcome Library collections, languages, and subjects relevant to your search. Now that functionality is enhanced with Version 3.0, helping you not only to find resources to support your research, but also to manage that data, explore resources outside the Wellcome Library, and search more effectively. Now you can:

• Easily create lists of catalogued resources and email that list to yourself, colleagues, or friends. Look for the ‘Add to Cart’ link on every catalogue record.
• See from the search results page where to find items in the Library. Gone are the days of making extra clicks to find the crucial shelfmark and location information.
• Explore other library holdings, journal and newspaper databases, and search engines without having to re-enter your search. Click on the ‘Explore’ link from each catalogue record to view the breadth of options.
• Widen your results by wildcard searching. Substituting an asterisk for letters will let you search for variant spellings. For example, a search for anatom* will bring up records with the words anatomy, anatomist, anatomic and anatomical.

Throughout the deployment process, user feedback has been very important to us. Users who submitted feedback via our online or print surveys have been overwhelmingly positive about their experience using Encore, with 77% of respondents reporting that "Encore is very easy to use." Positive comments include:

“You don't need to be overly specific - it brings up all the related hits.”

“Great way to find MA dissertations”

“It is a good adjunct to the original cataloguing system. If I am stuck for sources, I try using encore, to see the original search is missing additional material.”

“I think it is an excellent system as it is clear and leads you to look at other fields which perhaps wouldn't have been so obvious. It has helped me find a wide range of books and articles to look into for the topic I am researching.”

Spend a few minutes with Encore and see if you agree. Then let us know what you discovered via our online survey! Your feedback, both good and bad, will help us guide the ongoing development of this product.

The Morbid Age

In the books pages of the British press, one of the most heavily reviewed titles of recent weeks has been Prof Richard Overy’s new work, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars.

Published to wide acclaim, The Morbid Age is an examination of British intellectual life in the 1920s and 1930s. Overy's argument is that the British mindset during this period was extremely inward and pessimistic, and puts this down to the after-effects of the Great War, coupled with anti-capitalist fears and psychological nervousness brought on by the growth of Freudianism. It's a book where the usual interwar stereotypes of Bright Young Things and elegant flappers, are replaced with introspective intellectuals and footsore peace demonstrators.

Understandably, to make his case Overy draws heavily on a wide variety of archival sources, finding a rich vein of material to support his thesis in the Wellcome Library. Here, he draws on such sources as the papers of the Eugenics Society (who campaigned for the sterilisation for those deemed unfit for parenthood); the papers of Carlos Paton Blacker (psychiatrist, and Secretary of the Eugenics Society from the 1930s to the 1950s) and letters written to Marie Stopes, the birth control pioneer.

Orphan Works

Intellectual property: you are surrounded by it. Every literary or creative work you contribute to (such as a letter, a book, a painting) is your intellectual property and you have legal rights over how your property is distributed and used. The Wellcome Library is full of artistic and literary works that are still in copyright. Anything from a 15th century manuscript (in copyright until 2040), to the most recent medical history textbook (in copyright until 70 years after the author’s death) may be in copyright.

In practice, most pre-20th century in-copyright materials are considered “ophan works” – items where the current copyright owners are impossible to identify, or trace. However orphan work status may also apply to more recently published works. The British Library, for example estimates that 40% of in-copyright works are orphan works.

Designating an item an “orphan work” does not change its legal status (it is by definition in copyright), and there can be risks in reproducing orphan works. Copyright holders may, quite rightly, demand the destruction of any copies of their works, and the payment of compensation for any revenue lost as a result of the reproduction.

The Wellcome Trust supports an open access policy with regard to its digital materials and aims to make as much as possible available freely online, whilst at the same time respecting copyright law. Orphan works are a difficult area that must be handled with care but which en masse provide a valuable contribution to the research community.

Recognising this value, the Wellcome Library undertakes due diligence to establish whether a 20th or 21st century work is indeed an orphan work. Traceable copyright holders are contacted (sources vary depending on type of material) and asked for permission. If no response is received, and no other potential copyright holder can be identified, the item is considered an orphan work, and mounted online. If a copyright holder did, subsequently, come forward and request that the image be removed, the Library would do so (see the Library’s take down policy). The Library also welcomes information visitors may have concerning copyright holders for any material mounted on its website.

In light of the problems around digitising orphan works, several organisations have started to address the matter. Useful developments include guidelines that set out a due diligence process for identifying rights holders, calls for changes to the law, and discussions on the urgent need for a resolution on this issue. Some particularly interesting papers on this topic from a range of UK and EU organisations are listed below:

• Orphan works in the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property
  
• UK Intellectual Property Office, on the Gowers Review
  
• European Digital Libraries, due diligence report
• European Digital Libraries High Level Expert Group – Copyright Subgroup
• JISC's assessment of the orphan work issue
• British Copyright Council response to an IPO paper on orphan works
• British Library on Orphan Works and Digitisation
• Also see Chapter 4 in the government paper "Digital Britain"
  

Wellcome Library Insight - Around the World in 100 Years

This week's free Wellcome Library Insight session, explores the 19th-century globe-trotting adventures of surgeons, medics, clerics and ordinary tourists, whose records have found their way into the Library's collections.

Details.

Galileo and Jewish Emancipation

Milton visiting Galileo. Oil painting by Solomon Hart, 1847.
Wellcome Library, London no. 45632i

During his sojourn in Italy in 1638, the English poet John Milton visited Galileo who was then under house-arrest at Arcetri near Florence. Six years later, in his Areopagitica (1644), Milton described that visit in these words:

There it was that I found and visited the famous Galileo grown old a prisoner to the Inquisition, for thinking in Astronomy otherwise than the Franciscan and Dominican licensers thought.

This episode appealed strongly to later writers and painters, for several reasons. In the first place, the story is rich in contrasts: the polarity between the youth of Milton and the old age of Galileo; the encounter of Europeans from north and south of the Alps; and the meeting of a poet and a mathematician. One expression of fondness for this episode is this large painting of the scene (above) by Solomon Alexander Hart which was exhibited in the Royal Academy in London in 1847 and is now in the Wellcome Library.

The painting also provides a subtle interplay between themes of Galileo's time and equivalent themes in later periods. The first involves censorship and freedom of speech. The Areopagitica in which Milton described his experience of Galileo's house-arrest became a foundation document in the historic English fight for freedom of speech. Through its inclusion as an example in Milton's essay, Galileo's confinement contributed to that cause.

The same theme is also played out in the centre of the back wall in the present painting (far left), where we see a painted representation of another painting, with Galileo's telescope placed pointedly in front of it. It is a reduced version of Titian's altarpiece of the murder of St Peter Martyr: Titian's vast painting was destroyed by fire in Venice in 1867, but Hart probably saw it on his voyage to Italy in 1841-1842. Several old small-scale cabinet versions of Titian's altarpiece like the one in the background of Hart's painting have survived: the one shown here (above right) was offered for sale at Sotheby's in London in 2006 (25 April 2006 lot 335)

St Peter Martyr was the chief Dominican inquisitor and persecutor of heretics. As Galileo was accused by a Dominican inquisitor, a painting of St Peter Martyr's death at the hands of those heretics would have been an appropriate picture for Galileo to contemplate. While the friar acting as Galileo's gaoler in Hart's painting opens the door to permit Milton to enter, another friar in Titian's painting meets his end at the hands of those he persecuted.

Secondly, the painting treats Galileo's freedom of thought as a precursor of Jewish emancipation. The painter was Solomon Alexander Hart (1806-1881) and the painting was executed in 1847. Hart was an observant Jew and one of the first Jewish Royal Academicians. In the 1830s a series of bills had been presented to the British Parliament to give the same full legal status to Jews as to non-Jews, but each time the bills were defeated. A new campaign began in 1840, which was finally successful in 1845, although even then Jews could still not become full Members of Parliament, and the campaign had therefore to be continued until 1858. Hart was close to the emancipationist campaign and painted portraits of its two leaders, Sir David Salomons and Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex (1773-1843), the latter a commission from the Jews' Hospital in the East End of London.

Hart's election to office in the Royal Academy was therefore indebted to the liberal values praised by Milton in the aged Galileo – the very subject of the Wellcome Library painting. Galileo is presented as as a champion of liberty, which, in the context of Hart's position in the 1840s, includes the liberty of Jews to act in parity with non-Jews wherever they lacked that degree of equality.

English readers will find a succinct new summary of Galileo's travails in Maurice A. Finocchiaro, 'Myth 8: that Galileo was imprisoned and tortured for advocating Copernicanism', in R.L. Numbers (ed.), Galileo goes to jail and other myths about science and religion, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 68-78.

This sporting life

Archives and Manuscripts has recently added to its holdings the records of the British Association of Sport and Exercise Medicine (BASEM), founded as the British Association of Sport and Medicine in 1953 to constitute an authoritative body on every medical aspect of athletics and exercise. The records cover the years 1952 to 2003 and document the work of the association: they consist of minutes of the Executive, AGMs and Council meetings; executive correspondence; conference programmes; as well as personal papers collected by BASM officers. There is also a section on the National Sports Medicine Institute (NSMI), an organisation established to co-ordinate all organisations with an interest in sports medicine, which provided financial and administrative assistance for the running of BASEM Education courses. This collection is now catalogued. The catalogue can be consulted via the Archives and Manuscripts online catalogue, and the collection is available subject to the usual conditions of access.

This has provided the stimulus for the production of a new A&M sources guide on Exercise, Fitness and Sport, a subject on which we hold material going back as far as recommendations on remedial exercises made by the famous Greek physician of the Roman Empire, Galen.

Particular strengths of our holdings in this area include material on the development of Swedish gymnastics, in the papers of Edgar Cyriax himself and the other manuscript items on the subject which he collected and which were presented to the Royal Society of Medicine on his death in 1955, from whom they were subsequently purchased by the Wellcome. An article on the Cyriax collection, which included a substantial amount of printed material, and the history of medical gymnastics more generally, by the former Assistant Curator of Early Printed Books, Sarah Bakewell, appeared in Medical History 1997 Vol 41.

The archives of the Wellcome Foundation pharmaceutical company include substantial amounts of material on sport and other recreational activities of the staff. We also hold the papers of Sir Ludwig Guttman, pioneer of sports for the disabled and founder of the Paralympic Games.

Library closed week 2009

The library will close for its annual stock take and related activities at 16:00 on Saturday 27 June and re-open at 10:00 on Monday 6 July.

Even while we are closed, registered members of the Library can access a growing number of online resources remotely.

A further reminder and information about our plans for Closed Week will be posted nearer the time.

Anatomies of London - As recommended in 'Time Out'

Last week we brought you news that our popular Library Insight Session 'Anatomies of London', was being run on Saturday afternoon as part of the Story of London Festival.

We're rather pleased that news of the event was picked up by Time Out, and chosen by them as one of the 10 best Story of London events taking place that weekend.

For those that missed out, Anatomies of London will be run again this Saturday, 13th June, 3-4pm.

Scaling the walls of the citadel

Today's Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Life of the Day is the pioneering woman doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She was admitted to the Medical Register in 1865, having received the Licentiate in Medicine of the Society of Apothecaries as the result of a loophole which was promptly closed.


Archives and Manuscripts recently acquired a Garrett Anderson letter, 26 April 1891: to Mrs Fitch, extending a lunch invitation and asking whether Mr Fitch might let her have a look at the Report of the Commission on London University, for a paper she was writing on the Medical Women's Association. This has been added to the file of Elizabeth Garrett Anderson autograph letters - MS.7776.


The Medical Women's Association mentioned in the letter was the Association of Registered Medical Women of London, founded in 1879, when, following various legal and educational changes, several other women besides Garrett Anderson were inscribed on the Medical Register as permitted to practise. There are relatively sparse records surviving of this body of pioneer women, but the archives of the successor body, the Medical Women's Federation, now held in the Wellcome Library, do include the earliest minute book and a few other items.


An online sources guide provides a brief overview of Archives and Manuscripts' substantial holdings on women in medicine since the medieval period; a further guide provides information on sources about women in nursing, midwifery and health visiting.

International Archives Day

June the 9th is International Archives Day, designated by the International Council on Archives (ICA). Of course, archives are everywhere: wherever there is writing, there are people using it to document their activities. Less obvious, perhaps, is the global span of the archives held at the Wellcome Library. It is, however, a sad truth that wherever human beings go, disease and injury follows them, so the medical profession is needed everywhere, and as the European powers expanded across the world in previous centuries medical men and women followed, noting their impressions. Below are a few samples from the Wellcome Library holdings of archives generated in far corners of the world during the nineteenth century, the tip of an iceberg.


John Temperley Gray (1835-1892), a ship’s surgeon for P&O, between 1862 and 1888 filled a volume (MS.5875) with notes on local wildlife (including beautiful coloured pictures of snakes, birds and a caterpillar), the population of Bombay (inter alia, sketching the various characteristic types of hat worn by the Parsees), local customs such as the different child-birth practices of various religious communities, local songs (which he transcribes with musical notation) and a whole gallery of other subjects, as well as the notes on scientific subjects and the French lessons with which, presumably, he sought to fill productively the long hours at sea.

At one point Gray records a couple of humorous anecdotes in which dialogue takes place in an Indian language and the peremptory sahib and mem-sahib (fluent chiefly in command and abuse) are wrong-footed by the responses of their Indian servants. In contrast to these, fifty years early a young surgeon on the East India Company ship the William Miles records a child of English parents who "does not speak a word of English. . . . It certainly did strike me as a singular thing, to see a little fellow of 5 or 6 speaking to the natives so fluently, close to several of his own countrymen, trying to speak a word or two, with such difficulty." (MS.7114, p.180)

On the other side of the world, the naval surgeon Henry Piers passed around the coast of South America in the 1860s on his way to Vancouver. On the way, he recorded his impressions of the Falkland Islands: "the land [was] boggy and covered with a coarse grass, but not a tree or shrub was to be seen - a heath, bearing small berries resembling but smaller than cranberries, was very common and called, from the geese feeding on its fruit, 'Gooseberry'... It was difficult, in many parts, to avoid sinking into the bog ... The land was undulating, with hills of moderate elevation - some of them topped with crags - the aspect of the place, in general, was very uninviting ..." (MS.6110, p.7)
He notes that, doubtless in compensation for the unappealing landscape, the town of Stanley although small boasts four beer shops. A few weeks later he gives a vivid description of being anchored in the narrow Straits of Magellan: "Our anchorage at 'Sandy Point' was so close to the shore - within half a mile I should think - that we could distinctly hear noises resembling the croaking of frogs &c. and the ripple breaking on the shore..." (MS.6110, p.17)

This is, of course, only a tiny sample of the international content of the Wellcome Library’s holdings of archives and manuscripts. Sources guides on the Library website provide a route into various geographic areas, and the collection as a whole can also be searched for particular place-names or any other words via the online archives catalogue.

NOT Turning the Pages

Armadillo Systems, who - along with the British Library - have designed the popular Turning the Pages software for viewing books online, are currently developing a new version that will cater for large 2D images such as maps and scrolls that do not require page turning technology. The new version will enable enhanced zooming and panning instead. Obviously "Turning the Pages", a well-known and catchy title for the original software, will not apply to this new version, so Armadillo are looking for suggestions for a new name. You can email them your suggestions.

The Wellcome Trust has four Turning the Pages kiosks at both 215 and 183 Euston Road premises. The 183 kiosks are open to the public in line with Wellcome Collection opening hours.

There are also three items on the Library website using Turning the Pages technology:

• Wellcome Apocalypse [Western MS 49]
• Nujum al-'Ulum (Stars of Sciences) [Persian MS 373]
• On Cutaneous Diseases - by Robert Willan

New Medical London walk

Last year saw the publication of Medical London, a work which drew heavily on the resources of the Wellcome Library.

To mark the publication of the second edition of the book, the Medical London website now offers a new, self-guided walk – Bloomsbury: Blood, guts, children and power.

The walk comes with a downloadable audio guide, narrated by Medical London’s author Richard Barnett, and a map of the route, illustrated with historical imagery chosen from the Wellcome Library’s collections.

New study on Web Archives: how do you use them?

The UK Web Archiving Consortium and The National Archives are pleased to announce a study into how archived websites are collected and made available to users. The study is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee. Culturally significant websites are collected and archived for researchers, historians and the public. We are keen to hear from you with your views on collecting and future access. Do you used archived websites in your research? Are you considering using them?

The study aims to:
• Investigate how UK web archives are delivered to users now, and how they might be delivered in the future
• Define the long-term historical and research value of online content in the UK
• Look at different organisations that collect web archives, and their interests

Please contact researchandcollect@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk if you would like to take part in surveys or discussions. The time commitment will be a couple of emails and a 30 minute telephone interview.

The study will run until late June 2009, and the results will be published on The National Archives and UK Web Archiving Consortium websites in August 2009.

Bulletin of the WHO - now available in PMC

The Bulletin of the World Health Organisation - digitised under the auspices of the Wellcome Library/JISC/National Library of Medicine's Medical Journals Backfiles Digitisation project is now freely available in PubMed Central (PMC) and UKPMC.

The Bulletin of the World Health Organization is an international journal of public health with a special focus on developing countries. Since it was first published in 1948, the Bulletin has become one of the world’s leading public health journals and is one of the top five most-cited public, environmental and occupational health journals.


In its second issue, in September 1947, the Bulletin covered the cholera epidemic in Egypt. This coverage now forms an important historical record of the first emergency outbreak dealt with by the newly founded WHO. The current issue (June 2009) includes an interview with Dr Harvey Fineberg about the swine flu outbreak of 1976 and its parallels with the current outbreak.



All articles are made freely available at the time of publication.

Chris Carter

This week, after close to 40 years of working for the Wellcome, Chris Carter retires from his job as Senior Photographer in the Wellcome Library.

The image shown above is one of the rare examples we have of Chris actually in front of the camera. From behind the lens, however, Chris has photographed a vast array of Wellcome Library materials and Wellcome personnel: almost any search on Wellcome Images will produce images taken by him. And, given that Chris has photographed across the Library's holdings, the case could be made that he has actually seen more of our collections than any other person.

Chris has been a witness to a huge range of the Wellcome's activities over the last few decades, and recorded many of these events for posterity. His photography has also formed an integral part of thousands of books, journals and dissertation during this time, and will continue to be used by a wide audience long into the future.

Happy retirement Chris - thanks for all your hard work and fantastic photography!

Wellcome Library Insights - Healing Herbs and Anatomies of London

This week there are two free Wellcome Library Insight Sessions.

On Thursday afternoon, at 'Healing Herbs', discover the history of 'herbals' - manuscripts and books that preserve our knowledge of the plant-based remedies used by people in the past (more details).

And on Saturday afternoon, as part of the Story of London, discover tales of London life contained within our collections at 'Anatomies of London'.

As the previous 'Anatomies of London' session led the Patterson Challenge, we wonder what the next may inspire...

Ode to muscle relaxants

Lucy Smee, Assistant Curator in the Moving Image and Sound Department at the Wellcome Library, has been cataloguing moving images for the Wellcome Film project since June 2008. As part of her work, Lucy has seen every single title digitised so far, cataloguing and segmenting them for online delivery. A year on, and over 200 titles later, there are a few that she has found particular interesting, unique - or just plain weird:

'Neuromuscular block, 1956, is one of my favourites. Its delivery is amazing; possibly the only film in existence in which a clay model man in a dress suit and beard cheerfully delivers a rhyming poem about muscle relaxants.'

The film explains the theory and clinical practice of muscle relaxants using actual experiments and stop-frame animated cartoon characters. You can read more about Neuromuscular block on the Library's online catalogue or (for HE/FE subscribers) on Film and Sound Online.

The Birth of Mankind

The Birth of Mankind, otherwise named the Woman’s book was the most important English language work on midwifery in the 16th century. The text was a translation and adaptation of Der schwangern Frauwen und Hebammen Rosengarten, written by Eucharius Rösslin. The first English translation, by Richard Jonas, was published in 1540. A second translation, by Thomas Raynalde, was first published in 1545 and it is this version which was reprinted many times in the next 100 years. Not only did it provide information on fertility, pregnancy, birth, and infant care, but it also included up to date anatomical descriptions. Its illustrations were copied from Vesalius via Thomas Geminus’s Compendiosa totius anatomiae delineatio which was also first published in 1545.




The Wellcome Library has 11 editions of the Birth of Mankind, all of which you can find in the library catalogue. We purchased a copy of the 1545 edition at the sale of the Haskell Norman medical and scientific collection at Christie’s New York in 1998. In 2006 we added a later edition, with interesting annotations by two different readers, one from the 16th century and another in the 19th century. The title page is signed by Sir Edward Burrowes Sinclair (1824-1882) who was Professor of Midwifery at Trinity College Dublin from 1867. We have a copy of one of Sinclair’s publications entitled Practical midwifery : comprising an account of 13,748 deliveries which occurred in the Dublin lying-in hospital, during a period of seven years, commencing November, 1847 / by Edward B. Sinclair ... and George Johnston (London, 1858). He had obviously gained a lot of practical experience.

A modern annotated edition of The Birth of Mankind, based on the 1560 edition, has recently been published by Elaine Hobby.