The Hammersmith Ghost

To mark Halloween, the following post relates the story of the Hammersmith Ghost – one of the more famous ghost sightings of the nineteenth century. This case captured the public imagination and representations of the ghost through engravings (see left) and magic lantern shows, were repeatedly made throughout the 1800s.

During December 1803, an apparition dressed in white was reported as haunting the neighbourhood of Hammersmith, on the outskirts of London. It was said a locksmith had died of fright, and two other locals were close to death from the shock of seeing the ghost (which rumour had it, was the spirit of a local man who had committed suicide a year or so earlier).

The panic caused was so great that a group of young men took to patrolling the area looking for the ghost. On the evening of 3rd January 1804, James Smith, an Excise Officer, fuelled into action after an evening in a local pub, caught site of a pale dressed figure in Black Lion Lane. He called out for the figure to identify himself. When no answer came, he opened fire. When Smith came to the prone figure, he discovered he had shot not a ghost, but a local bricklayer, Thomas Milward, whose white working clothes had been misinterpreted by Smith as the garb of the Hammersmith Ghost.

When Smith realised he had killed a man, he gave himself up to the authorities. He was found guilty at the Old Baliley of mudering Milward and was sentenced to death (though in July 1804 he was pardoned and released).

But what of the Hammersmith Ghost? No doubt in remorse after the shooting of Thomas Milward, a local shoemaker named Graham appeared before the Hammermsith magistrates' office and confessed that he was the original ghost. The Morning Advertiser, dated 10th January 1804, reported his confession at the magistrates' office, with Graham stating he was angered that the apprentices at his shoemaking business had taken to frightening his children with ghost stories. To teach them a lesson, Graham wrapped a blanket around himself and appeared in front of the apprentices on their journey home... So causing the panic that would eventually result in the death of Thomas Milward.

(A full account of the Hammersmith Ghost – and a reproduction of the image shown above - is given in Owen Davies's The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)).

Spilsbury notecards to be digitised

In the New Year, the Wellcome Library's recently acquired collection of notecards from the archive of Sir Bernard Spilsbury will be available online.

The digital images will be accessible via the Archives and Manuscripts catalogue records as PDFs. Images can be downloaded and reused under a Creative Commons license.

Please note: the notecards will be digitised in November and December 2009, and will be unavailable for consultation in the Library until 4 January 2010.

James Graham: Doctor of Love

On 26th November, author Lydia Syson will give a talk in the Wellcome Library on James Graham, the controversial eighteenth century healer, widely regarded as the world's first sex therapist and subject of Lydia's recent book, Doctor of Love: James Graham and his Celestial Bed (2008).

This is the latest in our strand of evening events, held in our Reading Room, which explore how authors have drawn on the resources of the Wellcome Library to inspire and inform their writing.

The talk is free and open to all, though places must be booked in advance. Booking opens at 2pm today, 29 October. More details can be found on the Wellcome Collection website.

Happy 1st Birthday Wellcome Blog!

The Wellcome Library Blog was born a year ago today. On that day, a small group of staff at the Library decided to try to bring our audiences closer to the holdings and work of the Library in an engaging, personal, but professional way. Drawing on the natural enthusiasm and interests of the Library's staff, a blog would, we hoped, allow us to achieve this.

As a result, Library staff have in the past 12 months waxed lyrical about the Library's collections in the areas of cataloguing and digitisation projects, new accessions, and new discoveries about existing items in the collections; bragged about the use of Library material in the media, news topics about the Library's activities, and events and workshops going on at the Library or involving Library staff, or pontificated to the wider world about so many other areas of relevance to the Library and the History of Medicine that I can't possibly list them all here.

Our efforts haven't gone in vain: this blog has been visited over 20,000 times in the past year, and those visitors have viewed our pages over 40,000 times. People keep coming back again and again, with nearly 40% returning multiple times. We're truly global as well. We've attracted fingers at keyboards and eyes on screens in 139 countries, representing 78 languages.

We haven't done this completely on our own, however. A good proportion of traffic to our site was routed via several other blogs such as Wonders and Marvels and Morbid Anatomy who pick up on our stories and take them to new levels on a regular basis (thanks guys!). Twitter has also raised our profile by a significant margin - all those fans retweeting our stories for the delectation of their followers has spread the word to audiences we would never otherwise be able to reach.

So here's a big thank you to all the Library staff who have contributed to the blog, and an even bigger thank you to those who read it. We hope you will keep coming back for more!

For more specific information on the blog statistics over the past 12 months, see this staff presentation.

Note: The word cloud at the top of this page is based on the labels we use to tag individual posts.

Jesty in Dorchester: Return of the native

Detail of painting of Benjamin Jesty by Michael William Sharp, 1805.
Wellcome Library no. 654136i

In 2006 the Wellcome Library repatriated from South Africa the portrait of Benjamin Jesty, a farmer who practised vaccination in Dorset in 1774, twenty-two years before Edward Jenner conducted his first experiment with vaccination. The portrait had been commissioned in honour of Jesty in 1805 by the Original Vaccine Pock Institution, and was painted from the life. Its whereabouts later became unknown to researchers, until in 2004 it was located by Patrick Pead in a farmhouse on a large estate in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.

The portrait is now on loan from the Wellcome Library to Dorset County Museum as the centrepiece of the exhibition Benjamin Jesty: Dorset's Vaccination Pioneer at Dorset County Museum, High West Street, Dorchester, Dorset DT1 1XA. The exhibition was opened on 26 October 2009 by Professor Frances Gotch, Professor in Immunology at Imperial College, London, an authority on vaccines against AIDS, smallpox and other diseases, and a relative of Benjamin Jesty. It is open until the end of February 2010. Also on display in Dorchester are documents related to the painting, objects documenting the history of vaccination, and the museum's wide-ranging collection. There is an entrance charge: see Dorset County Museum's website for details.

The exhibition marks the 30th anniversary of the announcement on 26 October 1979 in Nairobi by Dr Halfdan Mahler of the World Health Organization that the global eradication of smallpox was complete. The opening of the exhibition also coincided with the UK government's roll-out of 4.4 million doses of H1N1 swine-flu vaccine to GPs for high-risk groups. Both events have their historical roots in Jesty's actions in Dorset in 1774. The remarkable story of Jesty's innovation is recounted in Patrick Pead's new book Benjamin Jesty: Dorset's vaccination pioneer (Chichester: Timefile Books, 2009, ISBN 9780955156113, email tfbooks@hotmail.co.uk).

Above: Amanda Paulley (the conservator who restored the the painting for the Wellcome Library), and Patrick Pead (the rediscoverer of the painting and author of the new book on Benjamin Jesty), with the portrait at the opening of the exhibition

Wellcome Library Workshops

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshops are:

Pubmed and Pubmed Central: an introduction
Take a closer look at PubMed, one of the leading databases for locating research articles in the fields of health, medicine and dentistry. It contains over 15 million references back to the 1950s and is freely available to anyone with access to the internet. It is linked to PubMed Central, a free archive of life sciences journals.
Tuesday 27th October, 2-3pm

Using historical newspapers online
Discover the world of nineteenth century newspapers. In this workshop you can explore the Times Digital Archive, and learn how to search the text of newspapers from the British Library's newspaper archive online. A wealth of social history for all!
Thursday 29th October, 2-3pm

Our programme of free workshops offer short practical sessions to help you discover and make use of the wealth of information available at the Wellcome Library. Book a place through the library website.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Researching Lives: Medicine, science and archives

The Wellcome Library and the British Records Association are organising a one day conference on the wealth of resources available in medical and scientific archives to build up pictures of individual lives.

Titled Researching Lives: Medicine, science and archives, the conference will be held on the 8th December at Wellcome Collection. The lectures will examine manuscripts and personal papers, films and photographs, forensic evidence and physical remains, covering a time frame from the 15th century to the present day. Speakers include Georgina Ferry (science writer), Julianne Simpson and Helen Wakely (Wellcome Library), Dr Simon Chaplin (Royal College of Surgeons), Dr Tim Boon (Science Museum), Dr Paul Carter and Natalie Whistance (the National Archives) and Professor Allan Jamieson (Forensic Institute).

The Maurice Bond Memorial Lecture, given by Dr Richard Horton, Editor, The Lancet, will take place at the end of the day followed by a reception in the Wellcome Library which will include the launch of Research Uses of Health Archives produced by the Health Archives and Records Group (HARG).

Further details and a booking form are available from the website of the British Records Association.

The Exhibition of Living Patients, 1881

A man with Lupus erythematosus. Watercolour by Mabel Green, 1902.
Wellcome Library no. 672807i

The International Medical Congress which took place in London in 1881 was the seventh in the series, sandwiched between the sixth congress in Amsterdam and the eighth in Copenhagen. It was a crystallization of the medical knowledge of the time. Some 3,000 people attended from every continent. The four massive volumes of its Transactions make fascinating reading for the historian, and no doubt also for the historically-minded clinician.

The organizers of the Congress decided to include among the attractions a museum in which specimens of one sort or another could be shown. These were mainly drawings, photographs and casts, but in addition there were two special exhibits. The renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) brought over from Paris a life-size wax model of a recumbent woman with locomotor ataxy and disordered joints, together with her preserved skeleton, illustrating one of Charcot's many clinical discoveries; and Jonathan Hutchinson, the chairman of the Museum Committee, organized an "Exhibition of Living Patients".

The Exhibition of Living Patients was something of an experiment, and it turned out to be a victim of its own success. It was allotted one of two rooms (the museum room and the boardroom) of the Geological Society, one of the Learned Societies which have been housed since 1874 in magnificent buildings around the courtyard of Burlington House on Piccadilly.

Right: Burlington House and Piccadilly. Wood engraving, Illustrated London news, 1873. The Geological Society's rooms are on the right of the entrance archway.

According to Hutchinson there was "confusion and crowding … Our exhibition was more popular than we had expected: every morning at the hour announced, the room filled. The weather chanced to be very hot [this was the first week of August], and as the room looked into Piccadilly, it was exceedingly noisy." One of the reasons for the noise was that, while the hubbub of Piccadilly entered through the open windows, not only did the doctors presenting their patients have to speak over it but at the same time visitors were continually jostling in and out of the crowded room. [1]

Left: Jonathan Hutchinson. Oil painting by W. Swainson, one of the artists who produced pathological illustrations for Hutchinson. Wellcome Library no. 45691i

For those who could get near it, the exhibition was evidently quite a sight. Beneath the chandeliers in the fine rooms sat seven patients with leprosy, four of them supplied by Hutchinson. Six patients with diseases designated as myxoedema sat in a row and "the peculiarities of their features, and the sameness in their peculiarities, became very conspicuous". There were also many cases diagnosed as Lupus, a disease which fascinated connoisseurs of clinical conundrums. In Hutchinson's words:

All the varieties of Lupus Erythematosus were plentifully illustrated by cases produced by Mr Malcolm Morris, Mr James Startin, Mr Waren Tay, and myself. Some of the cases were very exceptional ones. Several were of the form known as lupus sebaceus; and of these, two showed the remarkable tendency to occur in the concha of the ear (symmetrically) just where a group of glands is placed, which are often the site of comedones. Other exceptional forms of Lupus, especially Lupus of Mucous Membranes, and the punctate form known as Acne Lupus, were also illustrated. In several of these cases, portraits showing the state of the disease several years before were placed by the side of the patient, thus making the cases more than doubly instructive.

One of the visitors to the museum was the young Professor William Osler from McGill University in Montreal, who recorded his experience of the congress in the Canada medical and surgical journal [2]. Osler described the museum as follows:

For working purposes the Congress divided into fifteen sections, the meetings of which took place in the rooms of the various learned societies at Burlington House and of London University, and one or two other contiguous institutions. One of the most instructive parts of the congress was the Museum, held in the Geological Society's rooms. This consisted of illustrations of disease in the living subject, as well as a large assortment of rare and interesting prepared specimens. … Mr Jonathan Hutchinson had a number of cases each morning, and his demonstrations on leprosy, rheumatic arthritis and inherited syphilis attracted large audiences. Rare forms of skin diseases were exhibited by many of the leading dermatologists. The museum of specimens contained about 700 examples of interesting and rare illustrations of morbid anatomy. … The walls of the rooms in which the specimens were collected were covered with coloured drawings. Among the most remarkable of these was a set of watercolours by Sir Chas. Bell, illustrating gunshot and other wounds seen by him after Waterloo. Mr Hutchinson's enormous collection attracted particular attention, and illustrated most of the special departments in which he has become so famous. What struck me as most remarkable among them was a set illustrating eruptions due to iodide and bromide of potassium, particularly two portraits of a man, the subject of an extensive eruption of tuberous masses on the skin, many of them ulcerated. … Several beautiful coloured drawings by Raphael of Montreal were exhibited by our townsman, Dr Roddick. An excellent catalogue greatly facilitated the inspection of the specimens, and perhaps as much direct benefit to the working members of congress was obtained during the time spent in the museum as in any of the other departments.

The watercolour of a man with Lupus erythematosus shown above is one of twenty-six watercolours which have recently been acquired by the Wellcome Library and which are believed to be strays from Jonathan Hutchinson's "Clinical Museum", though their connection with Hutchinson is at present only circumstantial. The Oxford dictionary of national biography says of Hutchinson "His vast collection of pathological drawings was probably unequalled." The artist of this watercolour, Mabel Green, was one of the small band of artists who worked for Hutchinson. After Hutchinson's death in 1913 most of his watercolours were sold, and they were acquired in 1915 for the Hospital of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore: the acquisition was celebrated by William Osler (by now Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford) some thirty years after his first sight of them in Piccadilly. [3] They are now in the Institute of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins. The reason why the Wellcome watercolours did not join them is currently obscure. Another of them, also by Mabel Green, is shown below, and the catalogue records for all the 26 drawings in the Wellcome Library will be found in the Wellcome Library catalogue.

Watercolour by Mabel Green, 20 May 1896. Wellcome Library no. 675950i

[1] Transactions of the International Medical Congress, 7th session, London 1881, vol. 1, pp. 109-132

[2] Digital page-images of the Canada medical and surgical journal are available free online in the corpus Early Canadiana Online (ECO, http://www.canadiana.org/ECO ), produced by Canadiana.org. Osler's paper describing the Congress is at http://www.canadiana.org/view/8_05177_110/58

[3] William Osler, 'The Jonathan Hutchinson iconography: a preliminary note', The Johns Hopkins Hospital bulletin, vol. 26 (1915), no. 289, pp. 82-83

Open Access Week 2009

This week is Open Access Week 2009. The aim of which is to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access - the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication.

As such, we thought we'd take the opportunity to flag up United Kingdom PubMed Central (UKPMC), a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. Based on PubMed Central (PMC), the US National Institutes of Health free digital archive, UKPMC provides a stable and permanent online archive of full-text peer reviewed research publications.

Titles freely available through UKPMC include Medical History, British Medical Journal, Journal of Anatomy, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (which we've previously posted about).

For a more in-depth guide to UKPMC and other free web resources, see 'Free for All: History of Medicine on the Web', one of the Wellcome Library's Workshops.

(Image above from the British Medical Journal, 26th January 1889, from a report describing a patient with an artificial cheek and eye).

Finding Published Research

There is a free workshop for getting the best out of the Web of Science and Scopus databases on Thursday 22nd October at 2.00pm-3.00pm in the library, all are welcome, please register or drop in:

Finding Published Research

Glamour's Golden Age

BBC4's new documentary series, Glamour's Golden Age, may not initially sound a project with direct connections to the Wellcome Library, but the first episode 'The Luxe Experience' (which was broadcast 19th October) not only alluded to one of our collections, but also made reference to a major figure in Henry Wellcome's life.

The documentary examined how the architecture and design of the 1920s and 1930s, created and reflected the spirit of the time. Emphasis was placed on how the Art Deco style resulted in a streamlining of design - and how such ideas could be applied to humans as well as to objects.

Reference was made to the Eugenics Society, whose papers are held in the Wellcome Library, and a brief segment of a film produced by the Society, Heredity in Man, was featured in the documentary.

By also focusing on interior decoration, 'The Luxe Experience' hailed the work of the hugely influential Syrie Maugham (1879-1955), whose 'all white room' was replicated across many fashionable residences. The documentary mentioned Syrie's success as a decorator grew following her divorce from the writer Somerset Maugham. What didn't merit attention in the documentary was that Syrie's first husband was in fact, Henry Wellcome.

Syrie's life story is a fascinating one: daughter of Thomas Barnado, she married Henry Wellcome at the age of 21, separated from him before she was 30 and seven years later was married to Maugham. She divorced from him in 1929 but then established herself as one of the most respected interior decorators of her day. The section of the documentary on Syrie only alludes to this rich back story: one we hope will form the foundation of a more detailed work in the future.

'The Luxe Experience' is available to viewers in the UK through the BBC's iPlayer.

Wellcome Library Workshops

This week's free Wellcome Library workshops are:

Wellcome Images
Do you need a picture? Find what you need from the Wellcome Images catalogue: search 160 000 pictures online, covering the history of medicine and the history of human culture from the earliest periods of civilisation to the present day.
Tuesday 20th October, 2-3pm

Finding published research (using WOS and Scopus)
Find references in the scientific, medical or social sciences journal literature. Discover how easy it is to search for citations on a particular theme or by a specific author. Stay informed and find the best way to save and develop your searches using the Web of Science and Scopus databases.
Thursday 22nd October, 2-3pm

Our programme of free workshops offer short practical sessions to help you discover and make use of the wealth of information available at the Wellcome Library. Book a place through the library website.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Death of the 'Criminal Man'

Professor Cesare Lombroso died on this day, one hundred years ago. Ironically his remains became part of his own museum, his head and internal organs joining those of the criminals which he studied throughout his career.

The Wellcome Library has recently purchased a rare early work on genius and insanity along with several letters to accompany its other holdings by this influential author. His chief work L'Uomo Deliquente (Criminal Man) in 1876 helped found the field of criminal anthropology.

Lombroso characterized criminals as atavistic ‘throwbacks’ to a more primitive form of man - out-of-place evolutionary anomalies less developed than their peers. Fortunately these ‘moral defectives’ could be recognised by key facial features. A large jaw, a prominent brow and low forehead were indicators of this type.

However, holes appeared in his argument and fellow scientists questioned his evidence because he did not use a control group of non-criminals against which to test his theory. Consequently the phrase ‘Lombrosian fallacy’ came into circulation and the idea of a ‘born criminal’ lost its appeal.

Despite these later set backs this Italian professor enjoyed considerable success and influence on popular culture of the late Victorian Era; he is cited in Tolstoy’s Resurrection (1899) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897) as an expert on the nature of criminality.

Lombroso’s employment of photography as a tool for research and identification ultimately lead the French Police Department to adopt the now standard use of the ‘mug-shot’ as a routine part of the arrest process. His interest in this medium was not unique: Sir Francis Galton in England had previously sought to show a criminal type through photography but wisely abandoned the idea early on.

Lombroso’s theories were pervasive and provocative, helping to galvanise opinion that crime was primarily a social problem, not a biological one. He is honoured in sculptural form in his home town of Turin.

If you are interested in the wider history of face reading and facial types there will a free talk held in the library in December. Details will appear on this blog nearer the time.

10th Wellcome Image Awards

Dr Alice M Roberts, best known for her television appearances on BBC’s Don’t Die Young and The Incredible Human Journey, presented the winners of the 2009 Wellcome Image Awards with their trophies last night at Wellcome Collection. This year sees 19 images awarded in three categories: biomedical, illustration and photography.

The Wellcome Image Awards recognise the creators of the most informative, striking and technically excellent images among recent acquisitions to the Wellcome Images collection of medical and historical imagery.

Selected by a panel of expert judges, the winning images were created using a range of microscopic techniques, including combinations of light microscopy and innovative histological approaches, and electron microscopy; illustration, and photography.

The winning images are on display in Wellcome Collection from today until spring 2010. This space is shown in a BBC report, in which Sir Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, talks about his favourite images in the exhibition.

Author: Louise Crane

Nobel Prize Winners in the Wellcome Library

The award of the Nobel Prizes for 2009 has recently been in the news. Collections in Archives and Manuscripts in the Wellcome Library include the catalogued and available material of over a dozen Nobel Laureates from 1902 onwards, varying from a few letters or research notebooks to very extensive collections of personal papers:

• Henri Becquerel (1852-1908), physics, 1903 (MS.8642)
• Professor Sir Ernst Boris Chain (1906-1979), medicine, 1945 (PP/EBC)
• Francis Harry Compton Crick (1916-2004), physiology and medicine, 1962 (PP/CRI)
• Marie Curie (1867-1934), physics, 1903, chemistry, 1911 (MSS.1978-1979, MS.7811)
• Sir Henry Hallett Dale (1875-1968), physiology and medicine, 1936 (PP/HHD, MS.8552, WF)
• Prince Louis Victor de Broglie (1892-1987), physics, 1929 (MSS.1359 - 1361)
• Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915), medicine, 1908 (PP/EHR)
• Sir Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), medicine, 1945 (MS.7809)
• Professor Archibald Vivian Hill (1886-1977), physiology and medicine, 1922 (GC/74)
• Sir Peter Brian Medawar (1915-1987), physiology/medicine, 1960 (PP/PBM)
• Élie (Ilya) Ilyich Metchnikoff (1845-1916), medicine, 1908 (MS.7311)
• Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932), medicine, 1902 (GC/59, MS.7495)
• Dr Frederick Sanger (b. 1918), chemistry, 1958, 1980 (SA/BIO/P)

Information on Nobel winners can also be found among institutional records.

• The membership of the Physiological Society (SA/PHY) included 14 Nobel Laureates.
• The records of the Biochemical Society (SA/BIO) include, besides a substantial collection of Frederick Sanger material, items on other Nobel Laureate members.
• The records of the Wellcome Foundation (WF) include material on the several members of staff who were awarded the Nobel Prize.

There is often also correspondence with Laureates, about nominations of specific individuals, and with the Nobel Academy in other collections of personal papers and records of organisations. The papers of Ronald Hare (PP/HAR), who wrote on the discovery of penicillin, and of Robert Gwyn Macfarlane (PP/RGM), who published biographies of Sir Alexander Fleming and Sir Howard Florey, include a substantial amount of material on these Laureates of 1945 in physiology and medicine.

Further information on these holdings can be found via the searchable online catalogue of Archives and Manuscripts.

Rackstrow's Museum

Exquisite Bodies, the Wellcome Collection exhibition which closes this Sunday, aims to provide a history of the anatomical model in the nineteenth century. The show begins however, with an introduction to anatomical museums in the eighteenth century.

One of the first items on display is the Wellcome Library’s copy of A descriptive catalogue ... of Rackstrow's Museum: consisting of a large, and very valuable collection, of most curious anatomical figures, and real preparations ... with a great variety of natural and artificial curiosities. To be seen at no. 197 Fleet-Street ... London.

Rackstrow’s was one of the most (in)famous museums of its kind in late eighteenth century London. Surviving catalogues give us not only an overview of its proclaimed contents, but also an insight into contemporary tastes. (Its most famous exhibit in its early years was a wax model figure of a heavily pregnant woman, with red liquors passing through its glass veins to illustrate the circulation of the blood).

Noted in by his contemporaries as a modeller, Benjamin Rackstrow's Museum – not in its day regarded as a salubrious environment - lived on after his death in 1772. From existing catalogues, we know that in the 1780s, Rackstrow’s Museum was arranged into three sections: the Anatomical Collection, the Collection of Natural and Artificial Rarities and the Collection of Figures resembling Life.

The Anatomical Collection contained the majority of objects in the Museum (74 out of the 117 items listed in the 1784 catalogue), and was a mix of waxwork models and specimens preserved in spirit. Here then, were to be found “diseased wombs”; “children still-born, preserved in spirit”; “miscarriages or abortions”; “monstrous births, from women” (but also “from beasts”, such as cows, ducks, cats and dogs).

A sense of the museum’s scale is given by the “astonishing skeleton of a Spermi-Ceti Whale, measuring seventy-two feet in length”, and of its enterprising nature by the fact that not only was an “An ancient Mummy, in its original coffin” exhibited, but a “fine print” of the Mummy was also available for purchase.

The “Natural and Artificial Rarities”, consisted of preserved animals “Dried and in Spirits”. Here, the paying customer would come face to face with (amongst others) an armadillo, a porcupine, a shark and two crocodiles. The “Collection of Figures resembling Life”, lends a regal air to the medico-menagerie; with a bust of George III sharing space with “a grand figure of George II” but also harks back to the extremes of life from the start of the Museum, with moulds taken from life of the recently deceased Mr Bamford (“the Staffordshire Giant”) and Mr Coan (“the Norfolk Dwarf”).

The Museum lasted until the 19th Century, during which time this part of Fleet Street became associated in fiction with a different form of anatomical study. Rackstrow’s address of 197 Fleet Street no longer registers on the mental landscape, but the fictional resident of 186 Fleet Street certainly does.

(Catalogues for Rackstrow’s Museum are available through Eighteenth Century Collections Online, one of the online resources available free of charge to Wellcome Library readers).

Sex Ed: New Aural Pleasures

On occasion our holdings throw up some odd bed fellows. Yes, the library covers much in the way of sex and drugs but not so much rock and roll. Hence my delight to discover a nice musical example that mixes new and old media.

The joy of sex education, a DVD anthology spanning 60 years of instructional films, features new scores by none other than Dave Formula - member of recently re-formed British Post-Punk band Magazine. His edgy compositions feature on two pieces from the thirties and a 1917 short aimed at Canadian troops. Whatsoever a man soweth is the cautionary tale of young Dick who is treated to a guided hospital tour by Dr Burns on the outcomes of VD. Formula's hypnotic, laid back jazzy soundtrack underpins this remarkably graphic and ultimately tragic drama-documentary, fusing a modern spin on the age-old problems of STDs. The image is of outer hair cells and Deiter's cells in the cochlea.

Author: Danny Rees

Wellcome Library Insight - Conservation in Action

This week's free Wellcome Library Insight session, 'Conservation in Action' - on Thursday 15th October, 3pm – offers an opportunity to visit the Library’s Conservation studios.

There, you’ll have a chance to meet our Conservation team, see the material they’re currently working on and also visit one of our paintings stores.

Ayurvedic man. Wellcome Library Item of the month, October 2009

It was on 15 September 1986 that the Wellcome Institute received a letter from the London art dealer David Salmon, who ran a shop called David Tremayne Ltd towards the western end of the King's Road in Chelsea. He had something which he thought would be of interest. Tremayne was not one of the Wellcome Institute Library's regular suppliers, but an appointment was made for 3.30 pm on Monday 13 October, and one of the Wellcome Institute's curators duly attended the shop at that time, on this day in 1986. The shop was filled with sculptures and textiles from Nepal, from which Mr Salmon had recently returned, and he was evidently a specialist in Nepali art. And it was a painting from Nepal that he wished to show the Library.

"Ayurvedic man". Wellcome Library no. 574912i

It was certainly an extraordinary sight. About equivalent to A2 in size (60 x 42 cm.), the figure was not exactly as shown in the traditional "Alexandrian series", nor did it obviously fall into any style of Hindu art that would be readily recognizable to a non-expert. The nearest resemblance was to Nepali diagrams of chakras, showing the passage of Kundalini forces through them and around the body; but those do not show discrete organs. [1] Nor was it, or anything like it, shown in standard reference books such as Herrlinger and Putscher's two-volume history of medical illustration. The price was substantial (£1,750), and would wipe out most of the remaining funds in the acquisitions budget, but given the painting's rarity and good condition, would not be out of line with the market. The Wellcome Library did therefore agree to buy it, and when the funds had been transferred, the painting made its final journey from the King's Road to the Wellcome Library in the Euston Road on 26 October 1986.

There over the years it was frequently reproduced, exhibited and commented on, but the uniqueness which had made it desirable in the first place also made it difficult to understand. Now however two articles have appeared in quick succession which shed light on its content and context.

In his article in Asian medicine, Dr Dominik Wujastyk identifies the lettering surrounding the work as verses from a classic Ayurvedic work called Bhāvaprakāśa by Bhāvamiśra (fl. ca. 1650–1690). [2] Bhāvamiśra is thought to have been born near Madras (Chennai) and to have worked in Benares (Varanasi). The extracts are taken from chapter 3 of his work, that deals with anatomy and embryology. The verses on and around the painting do not function as tightly-integrated labels to the body image, but rather as reflections on related anatomical issues. Most of the texts (in Sanskrit and other Indic tongues) are garbled, suggesting that they might have been copied from an earlier version of the painting now untraced, by someone who did not understand what was being transcribed. Dr Wujastyk provides an image, a transliteration and a translation of each of the blocks of text.

The parts depicted and described by Bhāvamiśra by do not necessarily correspond one-to-one with organs of the body familiar to those brought up with Traditional Western Medicine or its present day derivatives. For instance the sequence of parts involved in digestion and excretion includes numerous "receptacles" (of wind, of impurities, of urine, of phlegm, of raw matter, of digested food etc.) that are not necessarily identifiable with specific service stations along the highway of the western alimentary canal. Likewise there are separate names for two separate parts between the ankle and the heel, which have no western names. The two lungs, regarded in the west as identical organs in reverse, have two different and unrelated names in Sanskrit, and both organs are given different functions from respiration.

The descriptions explain the functions of the parts in vivid terms. The humour Bile is described as "Cook, dyer, reacher, illuminator and shiner", each function depending on its location in the body, while the humour Phlegm is described as "Moistener, dripper, taster, oiler and gluer", again according to location.

For further analysis please see the article, which includes an extensive bibliography. A hard copy of the journal is available in the Wellcome Library , and an electronic version is available free from the e-repository of University College London.

The same painting has re-appeared in an article in a new journal from Buenos Aires: Eä - Revista de humanidades médicas & estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología [3]. The electronic article is available free on the publisher's website, supported by SAHIME, the Argentinean Association for the History of Medicine. The author emphasizes the difference between the understanding of functions according to Ayurvedic teaching and according to the western anatomy introduced into India by Imperial colonisers. The Wellcome painting expresses the Ayurvedic doctrine rather than colonial anatomy derived from French eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pathology. The article contains some interesting quotations from both sides.

[1] Ajit Mookerjee, Kundalini: the arousal of the inner energy, London: Thames and Hudson, 1982, pp. 50-51, 81-82 (thanks to T. Richard Blurton for this reference).

[2] Dominik Wujastyk, 'A body of knowledge: the Wellcome Ayurvedic anatomical man and his Sanskrit context', Asian Medicine: tradition and modernity 4 (2008): 201-248

[3] Jayanta Bhattacharya, 'The knowledge of anatomy and health in Āyurveda and modern medicine: colonial confrontation and its outcome', Eä - Revista de humanidades médicas & estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología, 2009, 1:1-51 (Wellcome Library painting reproduced p. 25)

Online Journals and Science in the News Workshops

Our new Autumn programme of Wellcome Library workshops launch this week, with introductory sessions on the following topics:

Online Journals
This session offers a guide to finding full-text online journals in the Wellcome Library and beyond. It covers both contemporary and historically-related themes and includes both the Library´s subscribed journals and other freely available resources.

The workshop lasts for approximately one hour and will be running on the following dates:

Tuesday 13th October, 2.00pm-3.00pm
Tuesday 10th November, 2.00pm-3.00pm

Places are limited and pre-booking is essential. You can reserve a place by booking online.


Science in the News
For anyone interested in keeping up with news about science and medicine. The workshop will introduce you to news resources available at the Wellcome Library or free on the internet, as well as online tools for keeping up to date, such as RSS feeds and discussion forums. We will also look at how to analyse the news and check the facts behind stories in the media.

Participants will be encouraged to share their own knowledge and experiences of researching science news topics.

The workshop lasts for approximately one hour and will be running on the following dates:

Thursday 15th October, 2.00pm-3.00pm
Thursday 19th November, 2.00pm-3.00pm

Places are limited and pre-booking is essential. You can reserve a place by booking online.


Authors: Lalita Kaplish, Simon Warburton

From Wellcome Library to Google Books

What do you do if you've found an interesting looking item on the Wellcome Library catalogue but you're not in the Wellcome Library? Or maybe you are in the Library, but aren't sure if you want to request the item from the stack? Wouldn't it be useful if you could get a bit more information?

We've added a new feature to our catalogue to help. Items that are likely to be in Google Books now have a 'Search for this title at Google Books' link to the right of the title, making it easy to
find and read all or part of it from your browser. This could help you decide to request the item from the stack - or could even save you a trip to the Library. Here's an example of something that's in the Wellcome Library catalogue where you can easily link to online text at Google Books.

We'd like to hear your comments on this, either via the blog or our feedback form, so please let us know what you think.

Proteins and Prizes

Wellcome Image Award winner and current Wellcome Trust grant holder, Venkatraman (Venki) Ramakrishnan, has been named as one of the winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2009.

Venki's computer-generated molecular model of a ribosome, showing its 3D structure in great detail, impressed the judges of the Wellcome Image Awards in 2008. It is for his research on the structure and function of the ribosome, which converts DNA information into proteins, that the Nobel Prize has been awarded.

Specifically, it is Venki's use of X-ray crystallography to map the atomic structure that has been recognised. This technique has advanced from the standard X-ray, early examples of which are held in the Library's collections.

Venki's Wellcome Award-winning image, the accompanying protein-synthesis animation and a recording of Venki describing his image, background and research are available online.

Author: Louise Crane

3,000 AIDS posters catalogued

A project to catalogue and digitise the Library's collection of 3,000 international AIDS posters has just been completed. Forming one of the largest collections in the world, almost all the posters were acquired from a single collector based in Amsterdam. They derive from 99 countries and include a staggering 75 different languages. The two largest collections come from the USA and Germany. Posters from the latter country proved also to be the most graphic.

The posters offer an insight into the reactions and prejudices surrounding the worldwide AIDS epidemic during the 1980s and '90s. They were designed to be displayed to warn people against the causes of AIDS, to educate them on the disease and reveal health policies and concerns in specific countries and regions through a variety of words and designs.

Dates of the posters range from 1978, before AIDS became known, to 1998 as it continued to be a concern. The early posters during the 1980s relay simple messages about how the disease is transmitted. Extensive advertising campaigns raising awareness were produced as the AIDS epidemic increased. More complex messages about the signs of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases appear throughout the period but the majority of posters simply hammer home the importance of safer sex and condoms.

Digital images of the copyright-cleared collection (work on this is still ongoing) are freely available online via Wellcome Images. See a selection of posters in the Image gallery. The full range of posters are described on the Wellcome Library catalogue.

Picture: Wellcome Library ref. 666683i

Gothick impressions, Bohemian innovations

It's Monday and the week gets off to a good start: the next job lined up is to catalogue a collection of unknown mezzotints. These have been in the Wellcome Library for at least seventy years but have only recently been put into folders by a work-experience student (thank you Tim Brown from St Cecilia's School), and are therefore now in a well enough ordered state to be catalogued.

The wilder and more gloomy mezzotints from the reign of King George III are associated with the "gothick" aspect of the Romantic Movement. This folder reveals a superb example, dated 1785: a woman telling a dramatic tale to a group of terrified young women and girls on a wintry night.

With a bit of investigation, it goes into the catalogue as number 674375i, meaning that it's the 674,375th work in the Wellcome Library to be catalogued. And it happens to be the 1,100th (eleven hundredth) mezzotint in the Wellcome Library catalogue. That's another one that should be of interest to the new Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary University of London, which already uses a George Stubbs print from the Wellcome Library on its publicity.

Hello, what's this? Something completely different. A laundry maid about to squeeze a wet shirt out of the window. She looks down toward the street, we hope to make sure that nobody is walking underneath. The Georgian sash-window is minutely depicted: click on the image to relish the detail. The composition is of Philip Dawe's 1774 mezzotint of The laundry maid, after a painting by his friend Henry Morland.

An impression of the original mezzotint was offered for sale earlier this year at Christie's South Kensington (Christopher Lennox-Boyd sale, 25 February 2009 lot 1161).
However, in the present example, the paper is smooth and shiny, and the original 18th century lettering is missing: that means that it's a reproduction, not an original. Being of lesser importance, it can be put to the bottom of the cataloguing pile. In this one, the original lettering has been replaced by "Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Co. Ltd., Lancaster".

Goodness, what have we here?

The same printed in blue! And two other impressions in blue! And other impressions in brown!


Questions crowd in. Why so many impressions? What on earth was the "Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Co."? Why was it based in Lancaster? And was that Lancaster in Lancashire or Lancaster in Pennsylvania, or one of the many other Lancasters?

By combining data (critically of course) from the websites of Lancashire Museums Service and Sun Printers in Watford we discover the improbable story of the Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Co. It starts with a Viennese of Bohemian origin called Karel Václav Klíč (1841-1926). Klíč seems to have been an inspired caricaturist, painter in oils, and inventor who devised a way of making photogravure plates that could be printed on a rotary press (wrapped around a cylinder) rather than on the usual flat-bed press.[1] He made no commercial advance with his discovery until he brought it to England in 1895 and offered his process to a textile-printing company called Storey's in Lancaster, the family firm of Sir Thomas Storey. The managers at Storey's put Klíč together with their technical expert, a Lancastrian called Samuel Fawcett, and as a result of their synergy, the firm really took off. They formed a separate company within Storey's called Rembrandt Intaglio Printing Co., specialising in printing reproductions of old masters using Klíč's rotary photogravure process. The firm was very successful. In 1926 Rembrandt Intaglio moved from Lancaster to Norwood near London, and eventually became part of the massive complex of printing companies in and around Watford.

Two pictures neatly encapsulate this narrative. Lancaster City Museum has a portrait of the company owner Sir Thomas Storey painted by Klič (recorded in the relatively new database of the National Inventory of Continental European Paintings in the UK); and Sun Printers website includes this photograph from their archives of Klíč with his arm round Fawcett, from a group photograph of their staff in 1906. It looks as if Klíč has been celebrating their success in an appropriate fashion.

So this "reproduction of lesser importance" is one of Klíč and Fawcett's actual products: an incunable of rotary photogravure! And the Lancaster imprint means that it dates from the period before they moved south. The fact that Henry S. Wellcome's collection includes several impressions in different colours suggests that they were sent to him as printing samples, to show what Storey's firm could do: with its large packaging and publicity output, the Wellcome pharmaceutical company was a big print-buyer. Purchasers of Rembrandt Intaglio prints must have been amazed at the fidelity of their photogravures to the original mezzotints. The lettering was presumably omitted because it was customary to trim the lettering off mezzotints when framing them (as has happened with the mezzotint of the girls listening to the horror story, reproduced above).

And what looked like a Monday morning with eighteenth-century mezzotints has opened out into an interesting lesson in technology transfer. For Karel Václav Klíč was not the first Viennese to introduce a printing advance into England. A recent posting on this blog described a process called "photogalvanography" which was introduced into England in 1854 by Paul Pretsch from Vienna. The "photogalvanograph" by Pretsch sits in the Wellcome Library on the next shelf to the blue and brown "mezzotintogravures" (to coin a phrase) invented by Klíč. Citizens of the Austro-Hungarian Empire have made a substantial contribution to the technology of printing and therefore of communications. To think what we in western Europe missed during that far too long period of the Warsaw Pact, when communication was impeded between Central/Eastern Europe and the United Kingdom!

[1] Biography of Klíč in Czech: http://www.libri.cz/databaze/kdo18/list.php?od=k&start=21&count=20

Miracle rat?

Recent research has discovered that the naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber) has some interesting genetic characteristics that may lead to a cure for cancer. The fact they can live longer than any other rodent, combined with their inability to contract cancer, has piqued the interest of geneticists, and resulted in one discovery in particular that could be used to inhibit the growth of tumors.

The Wellcome Library holds a wide range of literature on genetic research and the history of cancer treatments and cancer care, including a number of films and videos on genetics and inheritance, as well as cancer, from the 1930s to the present day. The following video, Book of Life, from 2001 highlights the Sanger Institute and some of the genetic research carried out there. This video has been digitised as part of the Wellcome Film project (to watch, see below), and a transcription (PDF) is also available.

And the naked mole rat? Well, the Wellcome Trust featured a naked mole rat in its cine magazine Looking Around (1952) with an enthusiastic narrative by Gerard Hoffnung on its physical appearance and habits (to watch see segment 2). In 1952, of course, scientists were unaware of how significant this "extraordinary little animal" might prove to be in developing genetic therapies for cancer.

John Symons

We were saddened to learn of the death last week of John Symons, former Curator of Early Printed Books and a long-time member of the Library's staff. Though John had suffered from ill health since his early retirement in 2005, he kept in touch with old friends and only recently attended the retirement party for Professor Vivian Nutton (a long time colleague and friend) held in the library.

After reading Greats at Oxford, and attending the library school at University College London, he joined the Wellcome staff in 1968 as an Assistant Librarian, specializing in early printed books. Here he stayed, succeeding Harold Denham as Chief Cataloguer in 1982, and gaining an unrivalled knowledge of the bibliography of medicine. He was appointed as the first specialist Curator of Early Printed Books in 1988.

John will be remembered as a supremely dedicated rare books librarian with an encyclopaedic knowledge of both the Library's collections and internal Wellcome history. His history of the Wellcome Institute, published in 1993, only hinted at the many ways in which he had sought out members of staff, some from the 1920s, and their families, and collected documents and reminiscences. He was joint compiler of the third volume of the Wellcome Catalogue of Books printed before 1850, and was responsible for its continuation – the fifth and final volume being published in 2006. Its completion was a fitting monument to his devoted work over a lifetime of bibliographical scholarship. He was always eager to place his learning at the service of scholars and many within and beyond the Library will have cause to remember his myriad kindnesses in assisting them with enquiries and more extensive research questions.

Few former Wellcome Library staff have made a greater impact on the Library as experienced by its users over time, and surely none ever will again.