Item of the Month - August 2009

The 21st August marked the anniversary of Sir Henry Wellcome’s birth in 1853. We could use this date to highlight many interesting moments in his life, as revealed through the personal and business papers of his held in the Wellcome Library, or to focus on any of the thousands of items in our holdings which he collected.

Instead, we’ve chosen to focus on the self-described origins of Wellcome’s interest in history, anthropology and collecting.

Born in 1853, the son of a farmer in the Mid West of the United States, Wellcome’s childhood was a rural one. Accounts of his life often focus on his contact with Native American culture, and the time spent learning about medicine in his Uncle’s drugstore.

Arguably though, the other key moment in the young Henry’s life took place when he was 4 years old. Over 70 years later - whilst giving evidence to a Royal Commission on Museums – Wellcome recounted this moment, when he was asked to describe how his interest in the history of medicine and anthropology was first awakened. He replied:

“...it was almost in my infancy. When I was four years old, I got my first object lesson from a Neolithic stone implement which I found; and my father explained to me the different periods of the Stone Age, and the great improvements of this late Neolithic period over the more primitive forms of their ancestors. He also explained to me that the perfecting of this late Neolithic implement meant more to those ancient peoples for their protection and as a means of gaining their livelihood than the invention of the electric telegraph or the steam railway engine meant to us. This excited my imagination and was never forgotten...”.
(Royal Commission at the London Museum on Friday 14th December 1928 (WA/HSW/OR/L.2))

Wellcome places a good of deal emphasis on this find, suggesting that this implement was the inspiration for his interest in history, which by 1928 had resulted in an astonishing array of objects – well on the way to the 1 million objects it’s been estimated he had amassed by his death in 1936.

As far as can be ascertained though, this childhood find of Wellcome’s was never exhibited at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, nor was it part of Wellcome’s personal effects when he died.

It doesn’t appear to be part of the Wellcome medical collection at the Science Museum, suggesting that this object may have been passed on to another institution (though given the slightly romanticised air of Wellcome’s account, we should wonder if the object ever existed at all).

If the object was as important to Wellcome as his evidence suggests, then if it wasn’t for this find, the Wellcome Library and Wellcome Collection might not even be in existence.

Is this too much influence for a small, primitive tool? Whilst it might be going too far to suggest this implement offers a complete explanation for Wellcome’s collecting habits, and somehow explains his personality, this elusive object illustrates the emotions and meanings collectors can ascribe to their holdings.

It also brings to mind another (albeit fictional) American businessman from the turn of the twentieth century who amassed a vast collection of objects (the key item of which was not retained).



(Wellcome’s collecting is the subject of the forthcoming An Infinity of Things: How Henry Wellcome Collected the World by Frances Larson (OUP, 2009) – more details on this book in future posts).

Forthcoming events

News of a pair of forthcoming public events, which draw on the expertise and skills of two members of Wellcome Library staff.

On Thursday 24th September, Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist, is speaking at ‘Sex: A Victorian Mystery’, a Wellcome Collection event to tie in with the Exquisite Bodies exhibition. The evening aims to bring together visual, historical and literary perspectives, in order to illuminate Victorian contradictions to sex and sexual health.

And on Thursday 22nd October, William Schupbach, Curator, Paintings, Prints and Drawings, will give a lecture entitled ‘Physicians and scholars: libraries and learning in 17th century medical portraits’, at an evening event at the Royal College of Physicians, 'Secrets of 17th Century Portraiture’.

Cooking in the City

The Wellcome Library has recently acquired the "Book of Receipts for Cookery and Pastry 1732 & c." (MS.8687) started by Sarah Tully, who married Richard Hoare of the London banking family in 1732, and continued by other hands, presumably following her early death in 1736. The early pages of this volume are written out in a very fair hand and it seems quite likely that this was done either by Sarah Tully herself or a relative as a preparation for her wifely duties in running her husband’s household. Richard Hoare later became Lord Mayor of London and was knighted in 1745.

The volume contains the usual mixture of medical, household, veterinary and culinary recipes, and includes, pasted inside the front cover advertising broadside, printed in English in Venice, for the famous theriaca fina or Venice treacle, a honey- or molasses-based composition thought efficacious against poisoning, sold at the "Aquila Nera" [At the Sign of the Blak Eagle] in the Merceria San Salvatore.

The culinary recipes indicate a cosmopolitan and sophisticated household. Some connection with India, or at least the East India Company, is suggested by recipes for "A Loyn of Mutton Kebob’d" "pilau after the East Indian Manner", "currie powder" and “Indian pickle”. There is some evidence for European travel or contacts, with instructions on how "To make mackrony' [macaroni] - including "Parmason cheese", specified, and to prepare "Fromage Fondu". There are also details of how "To make Chocolate as prepared for the King". Whether these somewhat exotic items were actually prepared within the Hoare household may possibly be revealed by consulting the archives of C. Hoare and Co., private bankers, which include ten boxes of bills and receipts relating to Richard Hoare’s household expenditure, 1727-1754.

The medical recipes include "An Excellent rect. [receipt] for ye heartburn brot from Italy by the Duke of Shrewsbury", "Dr Radcliffe's Specifick for the Cholick"; "A Tincture for the Gout or Cholick in the Stomach" also ascribed to Dr Radcliffe, and "Mrs Masham's universal Purge" - which may or may not reflect the after-effects of the rich and exotic dishes described.

The Politics of Celibacy

Radio 4's Woman's Hour discussed the topic "Why do people choose to become celibate?" this week. The Wellcome Library's Senior Archivist Dr Lesley Hall offered historical context to the question, discussing both self-determined celibacy in the tradition of Aristophanes' Lysistrata as well as enforced celibacy throughout the ages.

The programme is available to UK audiences via iPlayer for a week after the broadcast date (21 August)

Thoughts for the weekend

Here is a crisply expressed idea about medical history:

In defining primary sources, context is important. A historian must strive to situate the topic in time and place. No medical subject—be it a person, a practice, an institution, a technology, or an idea—can be fully explored without also studying its political, social, economic, and cultural environment. Sometimes the environmental conditions are revealed by contrasting them with those elsewhere. For example, revolution or famine in one country will influence its medicine, while the medicine of another country which may be enjoying peace and prosperity will not be so affected.

(From Jacalyn Duffin, History of medicine: a scandalously short introduction, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999, p. 362)

Above: a hand coloured engraving from 1798, showing a mock coat of arms for a revolutionary British guild or college combining surgeons, obstetricians, quack doctors, barbers, veterinarians, apothecaries etc., supposed to be instituted in year 1 of the British Revolution (on the model of the French Revolution). The supporters are (on the sinister side) Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford, who was the leading supporter in the House of Lords of Charles James Fox and the radicals, and (on the dexter side) Tom Paine, author of Rights of man (1791). Wellcome Library no. 12185i

The British Revolution did not happen: the imagined united college in which all health practitioners would be democratic equals never came into being.

And while it's at hand, here's another quotation from the same "scandalously short" book (p. 374):

Never use the word ‘progress’. If you feel an urge to do so, ask yourself why you think it is necessary and what you might really be avoiding. Take a deep breath, and if that doesn’t work, take a Valium.

(This blog does not endorse that last clause, except as a "primary source" of medical history in its own right.)

Evolutionary Thinker Slams Vaccination!

The Wellcome Library's Archives and Manuscripts department recently purchased a manuscript letter accompanied by a printed pamphlet by Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). This letter has been added to our small group of writings by the great naturalist, explorer, geographer, biologist and anthropologist (see MS.7798 and MS.7830/54-59).

Wallace was virulently against small-pox vaccination and expressed his views in the forthright pamphlet 'The Army and Navy: A Demonstration of the Uselessness of Vaccination' published by the National Anti-Vaccination League (c.1898) (MS.7798/5). Slamming the practice of re-vaccinating males entering the military services, Wallace insisted that any reduction in Army and Navy small-pox mortality was due in fact to much better sanitation and a great improvement in the food, general treatment and medical attention. He insists the statistics show that “it is the exceptionally unvaccinated that possess the exceptional advantages, while the ‘exceptionally re-vaccinated’ Army and Navy show quite exceptional disadvantages…” in small-pox mortality over the last twenty years. In addition to being scientifically unproven and insufficiently understood, Wallace claimed that vaccination was dangerous because of the dirty conditions in which it was often carried out. Compulsory vaccination (introduced in 1853) was an “injurious operation”, a “Gigantic Medical Imposture”, and was being promoted by doctors driven by economic interests and a government bent on interfering with personal liberty.

In this pamphlet Wallace keenly criticises the report of the Royal Commission of 1884, which ultimately found that vaccination was effective and should remain compulsory. Interestingly, his attack focuses on the apparent denial, misinterpretation and manipulation of disease and mortality statistics. As we can tell from his letter to William Young on 14th June 1884 (MS.7798/4), Wallace was indeed concerned about using valid and accurate statistics. He tells Young that he cannot put his name to an anti-vaccination pamphlet unless he can personally “verify the facts & figures from the original authorities”. In reality however, ‘lies, damned lies, and statistics’ were used by both pro and anti vaccination camps to support their arguments and disparage each other. The 1884 Royal Commission found discrepancies in the statistical evidence Wallace had submitted and The Lancet pointed out that the 1898 pamphlets he put his name to (including ‘Vaccination a Delusion’) repeated much of the erroneous information that they had condemned in 1884!

It seems that whilst Wallace was right to point out the risks of vaccinating in a filthy environment, and the tangible benefits resulting from improved sanitation, food and medical treatment, he was, it turns out, on the loser’s side of the vaccination issue. Considering Wallace’s interest and opinions covered a wide range of issues it is not surprising that he was instinctively right about some things - natural selection, the impact of human activities on the natural world - but on distinctly dodgy ground with his views on mesmerism, phrenology and spiritualism.

Author: Amanda Engineer

JISC funding for the Wellcome Arabic Manuscript Cataloguing Project

The Wellcome Library, Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and Kings College London have been awarded a grant by the JISC's Islamic Studies Catalogue and Manuscript Digitisation funding stream.

This collaborative project will create a searchable digital collection of Arabic manuscripts to be hosted by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt. Images and metadata will also be available from the Wellcome Library's website. The partners will be jointly designing and implementing a cataloguing system to enable the creation and management of descriptive metadata for Asian manuscripts. Cover-to-cover images of the manuscripts and TEI-compliant metadata will be available freely to search, view and reuse.

500 manuscripts from the 14th - 20th century sourced from the Wellcome Library's collections will be digitised and catalogued. This collection, containing major significant works pertaining to the history of Islamic medicine from the 9th - 20th century, is of great interest to scholars of Islamic medicine and science as well as historians of Islam. By virtually repatriating these works to the Middle East, the project contributes to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina's aim to become the premier Digital Library of Islamic scholarly resources and Arabic culture in the world.

Currently, the Wellcome Library holds only very basic MARC21 records for most of its Arabic manuscripts. In recent years, an online catalogue using the TEI MASTER metadata standard was created for a small sub-collection of the Arabic manuscripts (the Haddad collection), establishing some basic working principles for cataloguing these items. A new cataloguing tool will build on the existing Haddad system, extending its usefulness in many ways and reflecting changes in the new TEI standard. It will facilitate the comprehensive and accurate description of the manuscripts both as objects and text, including the ability to display and store non-standard Arabic characters and bi-directional text, and enabling full-text searching of the metadata in both English and Arabic. Open source, the tool will have an extensible structure that could be modified for other Asian scripts.

The Centre for Computing in the Humanties department at Kings College London will be bringing their expertise to bear on the design and development of this software, and the TEI schema to be implemented. The system will then be used by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina to carry out in-depth cataloguing of the manuscripts. Images and metadata will be made available primarily by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina via a dedicated website. The Wellcome Library will also provide access via its existing catalogue.

Example PDFs of four manuscripts from the Haddad collection are available online.

Professor R A Soloway

We in Archives and Manuscripts were saddened to learn this week of the death of Professor Richard Allen Soloway, Eugen Merzbacher Distinguished Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a longstanding reader in our holdings. Professor Soloway was a distinguished historian of the British eugenics movement, birth control, and demography, after having had earlier careers in journalism and aviation. He produced two outstanding works: Birth control and the population question in England, 1877-1930 (1982) and Demography and degeneration: eugenics and the declining birthrate in twentieth-century Britain (1990), which remain definitive studies on these topics, as well as several important articles on particular facets. His knowledge in these areas was extensive and based in solid archival research. He visited the Wellcome many times following his first visit to what was then the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre in 1983, mainly to consult the archives of the Eugenics Society and the Family Planning Association and the papers of C. P. Blacker, General Secretary of the Eugenics Society, and was an exemplar of good archival research practice. He was latterly working on a history of contraceptive research in Britain in the early twentieth century, although his responsibilities as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences somewhat curtailed his opportunities for pursuing this project. His works also included the influential Prelates and people: ecclesiastical social thought in England, 1783-1852 (1969). He was a fine scholar and always ready to advise and support other scholars and students. He will be much missed.

Cell

The latest strand of BBC4's War Beneath the Skin season was broadcast last night - part one of Cell, a three-part series which in its own words:

"...delves deep into the history of science to tell the story of how we unlocked the mystery of all life on Earth.

'Cell' explores how the discovery of the cell challenged centuries of religious and scientific dogma and then examines how scientists have come to manipulate and exploit the cell for the benefit of modern medicine and science".

Like previous programmes in the season, Cell utilised the Wellcome Library's resources. It drew heavily on Wellcome Images, our photographic library, using both historical and contemporary imagery to trace the growth in our understanding of life's microscopic building blocks.

(The themes of the episode - particularly the erosion of theories such as spontaneous generation - chime with another recent project which drew from Wellcome Images: Making Visible Embryos, an online exhibition created by staff from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge, which explores images of embryos and the issues surrounding their depiction throughout history).

London Museums of Health and Medicine

If Medical London and Chris Hilton’s Insight talk have developed a taste for the capital’s medical past, then make sure you visit the re-launched London Museums of Health and Medicine website.

There you’ll find information on over 20 museums and libraries (including Wellcome Collection and the Wellcome Library), dedicated in their own way to exploring the health and wellbeing of London through time. The site offers general summaries on the institutions listed, and details of their latest news and events, and specific details for Family Historians and on Group Visits.

To quote the website:

From rare plants, heart surgery, illuminated manuscripts, and helicopter emergency services, to pharmacies, false teeth and Freud, the exhibits in these museums help to place the history and development of medicine and health care in its widest context. Along the way, they provide some remarkable insights into an age-long campaign against illness, disease and injury.

From the Alexander Fleming Laboratory Museum to the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries, plan your visit(s) now.

The Body in History summer school

A group of young women from a number of local schools recently attended 'The Body in History' summer school, run by the Wellcome Library and UCL Museums and Collections.

During the week , students experienced a range of activites exploring the human body from scientific, historical, ethical and artistic viewpoints. These included:

• an osteoarchaeology session with staff and specimens from the Museum of London


• a demonstration of Renaissance surgery - complete with leeches and 'wound' make-up


• a visit to the Medicine Man gallery in Wellcome Collection


• a crash course in the history of anatomy, drawing on the resources of the Wellcome Library, followed by an animation workshop at the South Camden City Learning Centre


• comparative anatomy and the secrets of digestion at the Grant Museum


• an exploration of ethical issues surrounding transplants, DNA and truth in medicine


• talks about reading faces, and about perception and the brain


• a visit to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons - including a surgical skills workshop


• an anatomical art session

The animation below is one of four created in one day by the students. This group were particularly interested in Van Leeuwenhoek's discovery of sperm and his theory about miniature babies being ready-formed within each, ready to be transplanted into the mother.

16th century anatomical sheets - images and animations now online

The Library’s rare and important collection of printed anatomical sheets dating from the 16th century are now freely available online via Wellcome Images. These intriguing prints depict the human body through labelled illustrations, often using a three-dimensional 'pop-up' device of superimposed flaps, which can be raised in sequence to display the internal anatomy of the male or female figure. The fugitive sheet thus mimics the act of dissection.

They were a popular instructional aid in the 16th century and many were produced in vernacular languages which could be read by a lay audience interested in the workings of the human body. The earliest recorded sheets were printed in Strasbourg by Heinrich Vogtherr in 1538. They were probably produced in great numbers but only a very few survive today. There are 19 sheets in our collection, many in pairs of male and female figures and one set of three with a skeleton sheet. This is the largest single collection in any institution. The surviving examples represent only a fraction of a much larger number most of which are now lost for ever, but there is always the hope of fresh discoveries in unexpected places.

Images have been created showing each flap in sequence. Animated versions are also available from the catalogue records, showing the flaps raised and lowered in sequence.

Image is Interiorum corporis humani partium viva delineatio, Paris, 1539.

The Forgotten Fallen

"My Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Members of the Council,

I have the honour to submit my Report on the health of the City of Manchester for the year 1918. The chief fact of the year, so far as the death-rate is concerned, is the disastrous incidence of Influenza, which caused well over 2,000 deaths. Much more investigation and administrative provision will have to be made before such visitations can be seriously mitigated".

So begins the Annual Report for 1918, of the Medical Officer of Health for Manchester, Dr James Niven.

Niven’s attempts to combat the spread of this influenza – now remembered as 'Spanish Flu' – formed the basis of Spanish Flu: The Forgotten Fallen, which was broadcast last night as part of BBC4’s War Beneath the Skin season.

The Forgotten Fallen was partly funded by the Wellcome Trust, and the resources of the Wellcome Library – along with other libraries and museums - were utilised by its makers.

Although the programme makers acknowledge that scenes in the film were created for dramatic effect, the drama is rooted in surviving records from the period.

As a Medical Officer of Health – local government appointed figures, who were charged with investigating and controlling local outbreaks of disease – Niven had to compile an annual report of his work and the health of the area he was responsible for. The Wellcome Library has one of the largest collection of Medical Officer of Health reports in the United Kingdom - covering over 2,800 locations, numbering over 70,000 reports in total.

These reports add up to a continuous record of public health activity from the 1850s to the 1970s, and are one of the richest sources available for tracing patterns of disease and social conditions in this country. Here can be found detailed accounts of how infectious diseases affected local districts, and how Medical Officers of Health attempted to improve the health and wellbeing of their areas.

In the case of Niven, his advice on influenza – taken from his Report for 1918 – could be from Government literature on Swine Flu in 2009:

"So far as one can judge at present, in checking further outbreaks, it will be necessary to rely chiefly on general preventative measures. The measures alluded to include the maintenance of a reasonable distance between the sick and the healthy, care of the hands, avoidance of common towels and common soap, careful washing out of common basins, avoidance of the handling in common of food to be afterwards cooked, and other like precautions; above all, the immediate segregation of persons attacked".

(Spanish Flu: The Forgotten Fallen is available to watch through the BBC’s iPlayer).

Wellcome Film has a new homepage

Wellcome Film, the Library's film digitisation project, has a new home page. This page includes a dedicated search function for this collection. Some interesting keyword suggestions are: 'birth', 'diabetes' and 'brain tumour.' The search returns results from our online catalogue providing comprehensive descriptions of the titles and links to the videos.

Follow the highlighted links on the new homepage to see some of our video suggestions on topics ranging from the tsetse fly to Russian recreations of Pavlov's conditioning experiments.

The search term 'public health' will find public information films on medicine and health provided by the BFI National Archive, such as the following video Dying for a smoke (1967), a cartoon warning schoolchildren against smoking:

Wellcome Film also has its own YouTube channel with a selection of titles from our collections.

The Battle of the Haggis

Recent historical work casts doubt on the provenance of Scotland’s national dish, as reported on the BBC website on Monday 3rd August. Historian Catherine Brown has located a reference to haggis in Gervase Markham’s 1615 work The English Hus-Wife, which predates Burns’ celebration of the dish by more than a century and a half (and is, of course, held in the Wellcome Library).

The hunt is on, then, for more seventeenth-century references to haggis, to prove or disprove its Scots origins. The Wellcome Library’s recent launch of a digitisation programme is timed perfectly, making available as it will the contents of seventy recipe books from this period, indexed down to individual recipes and available for remote study via the internet. Already one haggis recipe is visible to the public, in an early seventeenth-century volume held as MS.635. In a faded but perfectly legible hand, the author instructs one in the art of making a haggis:

“Take a calves chaldron [entrails] and parboyle it; when it is cold mince it fine with a pound of beefe suet & penny loafe grated, some Rosemary, tyme, Winter Savory & Penny royall of all a small handful, a little cloves, mace, nutmeg,& Cinamon, a quarter of a pound of currants, a little suger, a little salt, a little Rosewater all these mixt together well with 6 yolkes of Eggs boyle it in a sheepes paunch and so boyle it”.

Does this help to settle the argument? Not quite: the snag is that we do not know who wrote MS.635 or where. This sounds like sitting on the fence, or maybe on Hadrian’s Wall: but all we can do is invite readers in to the Library or onto our website, to view the manuscript, try to work out its origins, and join in the argument.

The illustration shows Wellcome MS.635 open on the haggis recipe.

Death of a novelist

Eighty-five years ago today, on August 3rd 1924, the novelist Joseph Conrad died of a heart attack at his home in Kent.

Conrad’s narratives are slippery constructions, with lavish use of fractured timescales, unreliable narrators and indirect speech. Their indirection and refusal to commit to unambiguous statements is appropriate for their shape-shifting author: born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in Russian Poland, he left Poland first for France and then for England, the Polish aristocrat remaking himself as a sailor and spending long years in the merchant marine before turning to fiction.

Conrad’s life was marked by illness from an early age as well as exile: his parents, Polish nationalists who were sent to Siberia with their infant son following a failed insurrection, were both dead from tuberculosis before Conrad was ten. His own life was characterised by periods of mental collapse: a suicide attempt at nineteen is still the centre of biographical debate, and later, in his fifties, he underwent a major breakdown after the completion of his novel Under Western Eyes in 1911. Novels such as Lord Jim analyse human behaviour when stressed to the limit and beyond. Physically, he was dogged by pain, suffering severely from gout for many years.


Some years after his death, in 1936, the German doctor Paul Wohlfarth wrote to two of his associates – his personal assistant Richard Curle and his French translator Gérard Jean-Aubry – to ask their opinion of how Conrad’s health had affected his writing. Both respond at some length to Wohlfarth’s query, and each is sure that Conrad’s medical history had a definite effect upon his fiction. Wohlfarth later donated these papers to the Wellcome Library: they can be consulted as MS.8512. Until recently they have been unknown to Conrad scholars but it is hoped that now they have been catalogued and made visible they will be published as part of a supplement to his collected correspondence.

The lower illustration is taken from The Malay Archipelago by Alfred Russel Wallace. Conrad travelled extensively in the Far East and Wallace's description of the area was one of his favorite books: his fiction is often set East of Suez, most notably Lord Jim.