Breaking the Mould

As part of their War Beneath the Skin season, BBC4 last night broadcast Breaking the Mould: The Story of Penicillin.

Details:

"Whilst it is widely recognised that Alexander Fleming was the man who discovered penicillin, the truth is a bit more complicated than that and the extraordinary story of Professor Florey is hardly known.

Set against the background of the early years of the Second World War, this factually-based drama shows how it was Professor Florey and his team who persevered against incredible odds to make penicillin an applicable medicine, whilst refusing to patent it for commercial gain.

A revealing, poignant and witty character-driven account of a miraculous scientific breakthrough, Breaking The Mould tells the little known story of Professor Florey and the team of unsung heroes from the prestigious Dunn School of Pathology at Oxford University who were behind the discovery of penicillin, that changed the world of medicine forever".

A number of the Wellcome Library’s archive collections have a direct link to the story of penicillin’s development. These include the papers of Norman Heatley, including his laboratory notebooks and correspondence with Florey; Ernst Chain, who shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology applied to Medicine with Fleming and Florey; and Sir Edward Mellanby, Secretary of the Medical Research Council during the period, and an important figure in connecting the disparate research communities working in this field.

That the mass production of penicillin in this country was achieved during the Second World War was due in no small part to the creation in 1941 of the Therapeutic Research Corporation (TRC), a consortium of five leading UK drug companies. One of the members was the Wellcome Foundation Ltd, and the papers relating to the involvement of the company in the TRC are part of the Wellcome Foundation Archive.

Breaking the Mould is available to watch through the BBC’s iPlayer.

You'll Absolutely Lovett!

As part of an event to celebrate the launch of the new issue of One Eye Grey, tonight in the Cuming Museum, Ross MacFarlane, Research Officer, Wellcome Library, will give a short talk on Edward Lovett and his collection of folklore objects.

Lovett collected thousands of healing objects from around the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, with one main area of interest being the beliefs of working class Londoners.

Lovett’s collection is now spread across many museums in the UK, though some of the items he collected are on display in the Medicine Man gallery of Wellcome Collection. The Wellcome Library also holds detailed correspondence between Lovett and the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, on the acquisition of parts of his collection.

(Shown above is a blue bead necklace, collected by Lovett and on display in Medicine Man. It was worn to protect against Bronchitis)

25th July 1936

On this day in 1936, the death was announced of Sir Henry Wellcome.

Over his 82 years, Wellcome had overseen the growth of the pharmaceutical company he had co-founded into a multinational concern. Part of the fortune he made from this had been spent amassing a huge collection relating to the history of medicine, which formed the basis of the present day Wellcome Library.

Wellcome's death was widely reported in the newspapers of the day. His obituaries (which were collated, and now form a small part of our Wellcome Foundation Archive) illustrate how Henry Wellcome’s life and achievements were summarised in the aftermath of his death.

The obituaries range from those published in national titles to regional newspapers. They also include a statement read out on the 9.30pm news bulletin of the British Broadcasting Corporation on the 25th July.

These accounts of Wellcome’s life do their best to summarise his achievements. Some examined his business life, whilst others described Wellcome as a "Scientist and Explorer". Bazaar Exchange & Mart focused on Wellcome the collector, commenting that in his purchases from auctioneers:

"...he 'made the market' in the kinds of things he bought – medical relics, ethnological specimens and curious bygones of many kinds".

In this attempt to commemorate the anniversary of Wellcome’s death, the following lines from the The Times obituary seem apt:

“Wellcome insisted that his light should not be hidden and that the name of Wellcome should always be prominent”.

(Image above shows Sir Henry Wellcome lying in state in the Wellcome Research Institution, before his cremation at Golders Green Crematorium on the 29th July).

Hospital Infection Society

You may think that hospital infections like MRSA and C. difficile are 21st century phenomena, but this is not the case. The Hospital Infection Society was set up in 1979 to provide information to those interested in hospital acquired infections. Since then the Society has worked to create and disseminate a body of scientific knowledge about the prevention and control of hospital and other healthcare associated infections through actions such as publishing The Journal of Hospital Infection, providing grants and bursaries to support work in the field, and awarding the Diploma in Hospital Infection Control (DipHIC) along with the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) and the Laboratory of HealthCare Associated Infection (LHCAI).

The catalogue of their archives up to 1995, deposited with the Wellcome Library in September of that year, is now available to view online for the first time through the Archives and Manuscripts catalogue

Securing our digital lives

We all lead increasingly digital and online lives, we blog, tweet, send emails, and take and share digital pictures. Our digital lives can be scattered across different places on the web, on photo sharing or social networking sites, on CD or on our computers. Often this material can be important to other people, such as family or friends. But so often no one else knows where this material is or that it even exists. If something were to happen to us this material could be lost forever. The photos of aunty Mabel and uncle Fred would never make it into the hands of the grandchildren. One way to address this issue is to create a ‘Digital Will’. A digital will is about making others aware of what our digital life has been, where it’s all stored and what we want to have happen to that material. Digital Planet, from the BBC’s World Service, has been looking at what happens to information about ourselves that’s stored electronically. The Wellcome Library’s Digital Curator Dave Thompson was interviewed for part of the programme which was broadcast in the week beginning 20 July 2009.

Hear ‘Digital Planet’ on the BBC website at - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p003nvyk

Read the Wellcome Library FAQ on digital wills.

25,000 new words to search

The Library blog generally focuses on items in the Wellcome Library’s holdings, mentioning their catalogue descriptions in passing: it rarely features the unglamorous process of how those catalogue descriptions are created. Two new additions to the catalogue of archives and manuscripts, however, highlight this process and between them present over 25,000 more words to act as targets for readers searching the database.

When the Wellcome Library switched to describing its archives and manuscripts on a database, there were many printed and typed hard-copy catalogues to convert: descriptions of 424 collections of twentieth century papers and over 8000 manuscripts. A dedicated project converted manuscript descriptions and the majority of the modern papers (c.80%), and since then Library staff have been working quietly behind the scenes to deal with the remaining catalogues. We have recently passed 400 converted catalogues and currently stand near the 95% mark.

A recently-converted catalogue, the papers of the British Medical Association (SA/BMA), demonstrates the process and the gain to the reader. The basic text of the old catalogue is transferred to a spreadsheet, with one line per database entry and each column corresponding to a database field. This transfer can be done by retyping or by cut and paste, depending on the nature of the old catalogue. Once in the spreadsheet, it is manipulated: new fields are added such as reproduction conditions and language, and HTML tags are added to the old text so that it will display correctly when viewed on the internet (paragraph breaks and italicised text are the commonest additions). Since the references by which readers have known the material previously will not always enable the database to build the records into the hierarchical “tree” used in the archive catalogue, they have to be examined and a new, slightly different version created that will sit in the database invisible to the reader but generating the “tree”. Finally, all this data is loaded to the database.

Some of our old catalogues contained not merely lists of the items held but also detailed indexing – most notably of correspondents, where collections contained a large number of letters. These indexes, too, can be converted to database form and made available to the researcher. A recent example is the correspondence of Carlos Paton Blacker (1895-1975) (PP/CPB), psychiatrist and secretary to the Eugenics Society. In the course of his long and varied life Blacker generated enough correspondence for the index to come to 39 pages. By moving this to a spreadsheet and carrying out some manipulation there to sift the entries into groups, this bulk has been broken up into nine more manageable accumulations of data, one for each of the major sections of the collection.

For researchers, the net result is 25,000 more words in the archives database: words of all varieties, expected and unexpected, whose common factor is that all can act as targets for searches. As an example, the BMA papers' previous basic entry on the database said that they included subject files on medical issues arising in particular places or with reference to particular diseases, but the database now allows one to locate, should one wish, the files relating to Llwynipia in the Glamorgan coalfield and the health problems there; Major Stevens’s controversial “Umckaloabo”, an alleged cancer cure; or the intriguingly-named Overbeck Rejuvenator. Blacker’s correspondents, similarly, can now be located, from (taking the letter B as a sample) the poet Edmund Blunden to Boxing magazine and Lieutenant A.D.A. “Fido” Balfour.

These, of course, are just samples from the long-running process behind the scenes that populates the archive database. Other recently converted collections include the papers of the sex education pioneer Marie Stopes (PP/MCS), the medical historian and tuberculosis specialist Walter Pagel (PP/PAG), and the Research Defence Society (SA/RDS). Each is now fully searchable online in a way that is sure to bring to light new ideas for research, new and strange product names, and individuals that you never knew were in correspondence with each other.

The illustration shows work in progress on the British Medical Association catalogue.

Wellcome in Space

Over the last few weeks, there have been many commemorations in the media of the 40th anniversary of the first manned mission to land on the moon. We thought we would add to this by flagging up an item from our collections. So – what’s the connection between the Wellcome and this lunar scene?

Shown here is the packaging for the Wellcome drug company’s product, ‘Marzine’, which was used as a precaution against travel sickness. Ships from the Apollo Space programme carried the product, and – as illustrated - the company later utilised this fact in the design of its packaging.

'Marzine' wasn’t the only Wellcome product used in the US space missions: 'Actifed' - for the relief of nasal congestion - was also widely used, as was 'Neosporin' (to clear up bacterial infections of the eye). Indeed, on one mission in the 1970s, Skylab carried a medical kit which included seven products provided by Burroughs Wellcome Co (USA).

It’s rather fitting that the exploration of space in the mid twentieth century utilised Wellcome products, given in the late nineteenth century, Burroughs Wellcome & Co medicine kits were essential components of many expeditions to the farthest flung corners of the Earth - Stanley, Scott and Shackleton all set forth with the company's products.

(The 'Marzine' packaging is a small part of the Wellcome Foundation Archive, which consists of material relating to the Wellcome drug business. As a result of flotations and mergers, the Wellcome drug business itself is no longer in existence. A summary of this is available).

Dr Henry Head

This Sunday sees the transmission of the last part of BBC One’s historical medical drama, Casualty 1909.

Set in the Royal London Hospital, the series is based on the Hospital’s original records, personal papers and contemporary newspapers accounts. So far in the series, the doctors and nurses of the hospital have contended with Anarchist ‘outrages’, protesting Suffragettes and militant animal rights activists.

Pictured above is one of the main characters in the series, Dr Henry Head (portrayed by actor Anton Lesser), by 1909 Assistant Physician at the Royal London.

Head is described in promotional material for the series as:

A pioneering psychologist, with a fiercely enquiring mind, yet a gentle touch. Despite the many frustrations Head perseveres where other doctors would give in and is able to reach even the most lost of his patients. He is willing to take huge personal risk to advance the development of medicine.

This ‘huge personal risk’, was the real-life Dr Henry (later Sir Henry) Head's research into the human nervous system, and his actions as a human guinea pig. In collaboration with W H R Rivers, Head (pictured left) carried out a series of experiments in which his cutaneous nerves were severed, and the stages in which sensation returned were measured.

Papers relating to Head’s medical work, reside in the archives of the Royal London Hospital, and at the Library of the Department of Experimental Psychology in the University of Cambridge. However, the Wellcome Library does contain an extensive collection of Head’s personal papers (PP/HEA).

Whilst our papers may not record Head’s major achievements in medicine, they do include an incomplete autobiography which Head dictated in his later years, and correspondence which illustrates Head’s close relationship with the literary and artistic circles of his time. This material formed the basis of Dr Stephen Jacyna's recent book, Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head (2008).

All of the episodes of Casualty 1909 – including those featuring Head’s self-experimentation - are still available to watch through the BBC’s iPlayer.

Closed Week by the numbers

Each year the Library closes for a week to allow staff to work on projects that could be disruptive to our readers during normal open hours. This year our stocktaking activities included a full tidying of all open access collections and a search of every nook and cranny for missing books. Though we do try to keep the Library tidy throughout the year, Closed Week allows the entire staff to work collectively to ensure your research materials are available where and when you need them.

Improvements to the physical environment included French polishing of the woodwork in the Reading Room and Gallery, cleaning of the air vents, fitting of magnetic door holdbacks for fire safety, and a reorganisation of the Gallery Annexe to make books easier to find on the shelves. The recently acquired quartet of paintings by Frederick Cayley Robinson were also expertly cleaned and repaired.

A final tally of Closed Week 2009:

7500 staples removed from Archives
6000 open access shelves tidied
1000 books relabelled
813 books searched for across four floors
810 books reclassified
720 shelves of Rare Books checked
600 archive collections checked
405 Archive boxes file checked
380 Rare Books tied
250 Drawings foldered
240 drawers of prints and drawings content listed
200 Rare Books assigned shelf numbers
160 Shelves of Rare Books flagged
150 files of Archives repackaged
107 Rare Books put back in sequence
90 books first aided
54 lost books found
50 fire marshals refreshed
6 missing Rare Books found
5.6 miles of open access books moved
4 Cayley Robinsons repaired

Roll up! Roll up! Event on Friday 10 July

Street traders in a market square. Oil painting, ca. 1850.
Wellcome Library no. 45034i

BBC News has put on the web an attractive slideshow with audio commentary on the history of Quacks and Cures. The "quacks" are medicine vendors who use methods derived from the marketplace to sell their goods and services (irrespective of the quality of the products), as distinct from the controlled profession of the pharmacist or apothecary. The "cures" are due to products which relieve the symptoms of disease, which were widely regarded as synonymous with the disease itself.

The webpage forms a curtain-raiser for a free event which anybody who can be in London on Friday 10 July 2009 and is interested in the history of medicine or pharmacy would not want to miss.

Created by Alex Julyan, the Quacks and cures event will include a panel of three doctors from different centuries giving their diagnoses and prescriptions, an "Orthodox" versus "Alternatives" quiz, a Victorian medicine show, and other spectacular presentations of medical history, accompanied by music and fortified by tonics. It draws on the resources of the Wellcome Library and some of the star talents of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London.

In language and typography appropriate to the occasion:

Roll up for this SINGULAR EVENT which has NEVER been seen
in ANY TOWN OR CITY in the WHOLE WIDE WORLD before!!!
Admission price NOT £5, NOT £4, NOT £3 NOT £2 NOT £1
but for THIS night only FREE!!!

(No booking is required, drop in at anytime.)

FRIDAY 10 JULY 19.00-23.00 AT THE WELLCOME BUILDING,
183 EUSTON ROAD, LONDON NW1 2BE

This may be your only opportunity to see this REMARKABLE PERFORMANCE!!!

Let it slip now and you will REPENT EVER AFTER!!!

Stories from Silence

A free storytelling event for children and adults by the Wellcome Library.

Saturday 18 July, 14.00-15.30
Sunday 19 July, 14.00-15.30

A Native American in full war dress armed with bottles of prairie medicine, an exploding bucket, Japanese demons, and a voice from plague-ridden London in 1665 all feature in a live storytelling event to be held at Wellcome Collection on 18-19 July.

Four specially commissioned storytellers will use performances, Japanese story boards and live demonstrations to tell their stories, each inspired by one of four different objects in the Wellcome Library.

Story lovers of all ages will be transported to London during the Great Plague of 1665-66, to the magical land of Japanese spirits and demons, to Clapham Common in the 1890s - where assistants dressed as Native Americans (or 'Red Indians' as the Victorians knew them) touted Sequah medicines while volunteers had their teeth pulled - and taken on a school trip to San Diego in the mid-1990s to hear Francis Crick's colourful personal account of his early youthful, and at times explosive, experiments.

These four stories, spanning different countries and centuries, bring to life four fascinating items in the Wellcome Library - the world's greatest collections of books, manuscripts, pictures and films relating to the history of medicine.

Families and adults are welcome at this free event, which also includes audio description of the four central objects, as well as speech-to-text live subtitles (on Saturday 18 July) and BSL (on Sunday 19 July).

To book your free tickets, visit the Wellcome Collection website.

Search our recipes by title

We announced in April that the Library’s 17th century recipe books have been digitised in their entirety and mounted online via the Wellcome Library Archive and Manuscript Catalogue. Now we are in the process of making the recipe title transcriptions available to enable deeper searching into the actual text of the manuscripts.

Each image has now been described in the catalogue. This comprises the fully transcribed recipe titles (using original spellings) visible on that image, and the appropriate Medical Subject Headings and/or Library of Congress subject headings.

Each record contains a link to a PDF of the image in question, which can be reused under a Creative Commons license. To see the complete cover-to-cover PDF of a manuscript, and/or the other pages contained in it, click on “See this in context” near the top of the record.

So far over a dozen manuscripts have been described in this way, with the rest coming online over the summer.

For examples, see Lady Ayscough’s Receits of phisick and chirurgery, dated 1692, including such recipes as: For the Piles being outward, For ye wormis for A child, Wind Collicke, and To expell ye Pox and preserve ye heart.

Cleaner and clearer search results in Encore

Encore, the Library’s new user-friendly catalogue interface, has recently undergone a few changes. Just a few weeks ago we upgraded to a new version which offers a better way of saving and emailing records, improved search functionality, and the ability to see other library holdings via WebBridge.

Now, not only is catalogue searching becoming simpler, it’s also getting easier on the eyes. The new Encore has a modern, softer look, with rounded edges, larger display fonts, and enhanced book jacket images. Though we can't claim that Encore will save your eyes, we hope that the new design and the enhanced functionality make it easier to discover what's in the Wellcome Library collections.

Take a look at the new Encore and let us know what you think by completing a feedback survey, located on every catalogue search page.

Codex Sinaiticus online

We normally post about our own holdings, or something related to our own holdings, but when I saw the Guardian article and British Library news today on the Codex Sinaiticus project, I was so impressed, I had to share. The Codex Sinaiticus is a 4th century Bible with the earliest known New Testament text. Written in Greek, it contains a large number of annotations correcting the original text.

The Codex Sinaiticus website is beautifully and lovingly crafted with a depth of information on the manuscript rarely seen on any website. It is so much more than just digital images - although bringing the manuscript together virtually from its 4 physical locations (the British Library, the National Library of Russia, St. Catherine's Monastery, and Leipzig University Library) is in itself of huge benefit to scholars. You can view images in two different lights - "standard" light, which allows you to see the text well, and "raking" light, which shows the texture and natural undulations of the pages.

It has also been transcribed to allow full use of the texts, and much of it has been translated into Russian, English, German and modern Greek. Dig deep for extensive information on the history of the manuscript, the content and context of the texts, and - of particular interest to me personally - the details of the project itself. The site is a little slow at the moment, due to the press attention, but don't let that put you off.

The British Library is hosting an exhibition and will be holding a conference on this manuscript and project.

Well done to the team of conservators, researchers, photographers, transcribers and techies who made it possible to bring this international treasure to the world in such a rich and engaging way.

Item of the month - July 2009

Suffused with an ethereal phosphorescent glow, artist Anne Brodie’s ghostly images cast new light on the human body's inextricable relationship with unseen forces of nature. In 'Exploring the Invisible', a Wellcome Trust funded collaboration with microbiologist Dr Simon Park and curator Dr Caterina Albano of Artakt, Anne uses photography lit by bacterial bioluminescence to investigate the complex ties between human health and microscopic bacteria.

The role of invisible microbes in spreading disease and infection is taken for granted today, but only came to the fore in the mid-19th century. Driven by public health epidemics and the devastating surgical mortality rates of large urban hospitals, researchers such as Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister worked towards a theory of infection by minute living organisms which transformed approaches to hygiene, surgery and public health.

Today bacteria play a crucial new role in contemporary biomedical research, with the light-emitting bacterium Photobacterium phosphoreum acting as a marker for tracking disease pathways. But in Anne's hands, P. phosphoreum also becomes a tool for tracing the private history of people and ideas.

Working with drawings, letters and notebooks by Joseph Lister from his personal papers at the Wellcome Library, Anne uses sealed plates of P. phosphoreum to illuminate Lister’s very human characteristics; his library fines, a complaining letter to his sister, the way in which he made his notes and filled his sketch book as a child help us to understand just who Joseph Lister was.

Modern technology such as CAT scans, X-ray fluorescence and multispectral imaging is increasingly being used to reveal the hidden contents in documents that would otherwise remain closed to research. But the beauty of the 'Exploring the Invisible' project is the symbiosis between the bioluminescence technology and the archives under the lens. What could be more fitting than for the unseen bacteria that Lister helped bring to light in the 1860s to illuminate the intimate self behind his public persona for a 21st century audience?

The project will culminate with an installation at the end of 2009 at the Old Operating Theatre at London Bridge, so keep an eye on Anne's website for further details.

Baffling Bodies

If you have difficulty telling your clavicle from your patella, and have never considered who discovered Fallopian tubes this is the course for you. A weekend of workshops and activities will take you through the history of how we have understood and learnt about our bodies, looking at the human form through the eyes of artists, scientists and history buffs. Designed for beginners, you’ll need curiosity and enthusiasm but no previous knowledge. The event will be held on September 5-6 between 10am and 4pm.

Activities will include:

Dem Bones – exploring human remains with osteoarchaeologists from the Museum of London

Renaissance surgery demonstration – Roll up ! Roll up ! Get your gangrene seen to here ! Volunteers for amputation will be required.

Pickled bits and stitches – a visit to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, plus a surgical skills workshop.

A beginner’s guide to the history of anatomy - an informal talk with the chance to explore original material from the Wellcome Library’s collections.

Exquisite Bodies – a tour of the Wellcome Collection temporary exhibition looking at 19th century anatomical models.

Creative workshop – inspired by the Exquisite Bodies exhibition, you will create your own model with the help of a professional artist.
Cost: £30 per person. Refreshments and lunch will be included on both days.

Booking will open later in July. If you would like to be notified when booking opens, or have any queries, please email us.

Author: Eleanor Lanyon

Apple pie order

Ayurveda all in a row

The Wellcome Library is closed this week (29 June-5 July) to enable the staff to carry out numerous stocktaking and ordering projects for the benefit of its users. For example books on the open shelves inevitably get out of order during the year and need to be put back into sequence.

Essentials of fevers

The Library has a formidable collection of old textbooks on selected medical subjects. Browsing the open shelves is in itself an education in medical history, provided the books are in the correct order: the sort order is first subject and then date. The order enables one to pinpoint changes in thought and vocabulary, for example from "fevers" to "communicable diseases".

Revising in hospital, by Moyra Sheldon. Wellcome Library no. 532906i

Moyra Sheldon was a medical illustrator at Addenbrooke's Hospital in Cambridge around 1971. The Wellcome Library has had since 2001 a sample of her drawings, and Closed week has provided an opportunity to get this collection into order. It shows the range of work that an illustrator might be called on to carry out in a teaching hospital, whether illustrating research papers for scientists or creating posters for common rooms.

All done by hand of course -- no Apple Macs or Clipart in those days. Some of the subjects are always with us: a broken leg does not excuse a young patient from maths revision when exams are imminent(above). By contrast this drawing (right) of a 1971 hippy is a real period piece.

"Then there are the ones my doctor gives me". Pen and ink drawing by Moyra Sheldon, 1971. Wellcome Library no. 532906i

This is the time of year for work experience placements (interns). Thanks to Lydia Figes, Mae Hazell, Artan Perjuci and Isabel Errington for their help with the above and similar projects.

Wellcome Library Year in Review published

The Library’s Year in Review is out now and is available as a PDF document for viewing and downloading. It covers our activities during 2008, specifically highlighting our digitisation programme. We also showcase some of our exciting acquisitions from the year, including the casebooks of the ‘father of modern forensics’ Sir Bernard Spilsbury and the notebooks of double Nobel Prize winning geneticist Fred Sanger.

Two of our regular readers, independent researcher Andy Clark and postgraduate student Katherine Rawling, also offer their insights into the experience of a Wellcome Library user.

The live links within the PDF document allow you to click straight through to the most recent updates on the Library catalogues and websites.

In 2008 Wellcome Library recorded over 33,000 visitors to its facilities and over 486,000 unique visitors to its website. For more information like this, see our complimentary Vital Statistics sheet, compiled to bring you up to date on the facts and figures behind the Library.

A limited number of print copies of the Year in Review will be available. If you would like to request a copy please contact t.tillotson@wellcome.ac.uk.