The Trailblazing Royal Society

Today (30th November) is the start of the Royal Society’s year long celebrations, to mark the 350th anniversary of its founding.

To honour this, an audio slideshow appears on the BBC’s website illustrating a number of seminal moments from the Society’s history. Also launched today is Trailblazing, an interactive timeline tracing the development of the world's oldest science academy from 1660 to the present day.

Both of these websites include visual content drawn from the collections of the Wellcome Library.

For more on the Society’s 350th anniversary, see the dedicated pages on their website.

Exploring the Invisible

Back in July, we promised we would pass on more details when Exploring the Invisible - a Wellcome Trust funded collaboration between artist Anne Brodie, microbiologist Dr Simon Park and curator Dr Caterina Albano of Artakt – was installed at the Old Operating Theatre, St Thomas Street, London, SE1.

This event is now scheduled for 4th – 8th December, culminating in a live installation, with human photographic projections appearing on the Old Operating Theatre’s ancient operating table.

Using photography lit by bacterial bioluminescence – and drawing on the personal papers of Joseph Lister held in the Wellcome Library - Exploring the Invisible investigates the complex ties between human health and microscopic bacteria. From the project's publicity:

Lister was an early pioneer of the use of antiseptics in surgery and the connection between bacteria and infections, together with the modern application in biomedical research of the bacterial gene responsible for emitting light, made it particularly fitting that bacteria should help to shed light – quite literally – on Lister’s life and work.

For more details, please see the Old Operating Theatre’s website.

Item of the Month - November 2009

The journals of Arthur Wellington Clah (1831-1916) – Christian missionary and First Nations hereditary Tsimshian chief – are perhaps one of the more unexpected treasures of the Wellcome Library. Written over fifty years, from 1859 to 1910, they comprise a uniquely personal meditation of social change drawn from the tumult of European imperial adventure.

Clah grew up on an islanded bay on Canada’s northwest coast. Dense forests of cedar and pine massed behind, cut through with rivers that flowed from the glaciers of the mountain interior. These were the heartlands of the Tsimshian people, who had first come into being when the trickster, Raven, stole the light of the world from the Great Chief of the Sky and lifted darkness from the land. They grew rich on the natural wealth of their forests and waterways, and developed astounding artistic and ceremonial traditions. However, by the nineteenth century, this wealth had begun to attract the attention of European traders and in 1831 – the year of Clah’s birth – the Hudson's Bay Company founded a trading station in the bay where Clah came to live. Named Fort Simpson, its arrival transformed the Tsimshian.

The above painting by Frederick Alexcee, a Tsimshian contemporary of Clah, shows Fort Simpson as it was three or four decades after the arrival of the Hudson's Bay Company. Around the Company’s white fort the large wooden houses of the Tsimshian cluster, each decorated with painted fronts and carved totem poles. The majority of Tsimshian tribes had soon moved to Fort Simpson, to take advantage of the trade opportunities close proximity offered. Groups that were scattered now competed for social position. The greatest status was granted to those who could give away or destroy the most goods in public feasts named potlatches, and in the clamour for position increasingly extravagant potlatches came to be held. Victorian observers, shocked by such apparent waste and perturbed by lavish ceremonies involving the manifestation of animal spirits, decided the higher blessings of civilization should be called upon. And so in 1857 a young English missionary named William Duncan arrived, eager to bring the Word of God to the benighted of the world.

Clah became a native language instructor to Duncan and, in turn, Duncan taught Clah to read and write English. Clah was one of the first converts of Duncan’s hugely successful mission, which was to lead to the founding of a separate Tsimshian Christian community in Alaska named Metlakahtla that still exists to this day. Clah took up missionary work himself, preaching to villages deep in the forests of Canada and far north in the Alaskan tundra. Such ventures are recorded in his journals, which take the form of a highly personal history of the Tsimshian people. Everyday observations of the weather and of town life in Fort Simpson and Metlakahtla sit alongside reflections upon his faith and the transformation of the beliefs and practices of the Tsimshian. He writes of the banning of the potlatch and traditional winter ceremonies, and of the interweaving of these customs with the newly adopted Christian religion. Indeed, the old and the new entwine in his words – the light of God carrying the echo of Raven’s wing, the traditional spirit quest robed in the search for salvation – as he seeks to find a place for the Tsimshian in a world unravelled and created anew. [1]

After his death, Clah's journals were purchased by Henry Wellcome, founder of the Wellcome Library. Wellcome had been a committed supporter of Metlakahtla and regarded Clah's journals as something of a protogenic testament to literate cultural progress. What is certain is that, in the words that Clah set down, the great changes the Tsimshian experienced are given powerful and lasting voice.

[1] Susan Neylan, The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), p.174.

Wellcome Library Workshop

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshop is:

Medicine and Literature
Whether you're interested in Love in the Time of Cholera or scaling The Magic Mountain, this workshop will help you explore the relationship between medicine and literature, through the resources of the Wellcome Library.
Tuesday 1 December, 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 from the library website.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

A Friday night curry

We are what we eat. This is most obviously true in the physical sense, but also culturally: our diet expresses our society and encodes a wide variety of cultural influences. Not only does our food say who we are now as a society; it also tells us of where we have been, of the history of our society and its encounters with other cultures, other gastronomic spheres, over time.

This is National Curry Week in the United Kingdom, and it would be hard to find a better example of food as a route into social history. The dominance of curry in the British diet – the Roast Beef of Old England is now eclipsed by Chicken Korma as a favourite dish – is of course the result of Britain’s encounters, by trade and then imperialism, with the Indian Subcontinent. As curry was assimilated into the British diet, it was transformed and becomes a cultural hybrid, located somewhere between the two culinary cultures. The delicate flavours that come from using fresh spices are eclipsed when the nearest fresh cumin is several thousand miles away and the cook is working with dried powders or paste: instead, we end up with a thicker, hotter sauce which becomes, at its most extreme, the brick-red paintstripper favoured as a rite of passage by the weekend beer monster.

It can be a surprise to see how early curry recipes begin to appear in domestic recipe books: long before Britain had a formal empire in India and long, long before mass immigration from the Subcontinent. One of the most influential early cookery books, Hannah Glasse’s The art of cookery, made plain and easy (1748), contains recipes for curries and pilaus:

"To make a Currey the India Way"
TAKE two Fowls or Rabbits, cut them into small Pieces, and three or four small Onions, peeled and cut very small, thirty Pepper Corns, and a large Spoonfull of Rice, brown some Coriander Seeds over the Fire in a clean Shovel, and beat them to Powder, take a Tea Spoonful of Salt, and mix all well together with the Meat, put all together in a Sauce-pan or Stew-pan, with a Pint of Water, let it stew softly till the Meat is enough, then put in a Piece of Fresh Butter, about as big as a large Walnut, shake it well together, and when it is smooth and of a fine Thickness dish it up, and send it to Table. If the Sauce be too thick, add a little more Water before it is done, and more Salt if it wants it. You are to observe the Sauce must be pretty thick.

This is no isolated exotic recipe: below it are two recipes for Pellow (pilau). Each ends with a note of hard-won, presumably bitter experience: the first one reads

"You must be sure to take great Care the Rice don't burn to the Pot."


By the nineteenth century, the British love affair with curry is well established. Recipe books in the collection such as MS.7111 contain instructions on how to mix spices to make curry powder. The powder might be applied to a wider variety of meats than we now expect, as we learn from the Johnson family recipe book (MS.3082) compiled during the 18th and early 19th century: on page 148 of this, we read

"A curry may be made of Meat, a Rabbit, Fowl or Lobster, cut in limbs or cucumbers. First [fry?] them a light brown, then put it in the Gravy to stew with the Juice of a Large Lemon, a little Salt and one Onion chopt small when almost finished stir in it nearly a large Spoonful of curry powder … Either dish your Rice up by itself or put it on a Dish & put your Curry in the middle – You may Thicken the Gravy with a few Blanchd Almonds."

It is doubtful whether this would be recognised as curry by anyone east of Suez, but such recipes added variety to the native diet and hinted at the great networks of trade and empire that fanned out from Britain at this time. Within this country, recipes would be exchanged and disseminated. One of the Library's quietly evocative items is a collection of loose recipes collected by a Mrs Turnbull in the mid-19th century (MS.5853): internal evidence suggests that in the 1820s she had been in India, but was now resident back in Surrey. The recipes, for things such as Dhall Bhât (MS.5853/86) or "Colonel R's curry" (MS.5853/91), speak of old India hands swapping recipes and of memories of the Subcontinent kept alive by cookery. It can surely only have been nostalgia that led her to preserve the recipe for a lethal compound to be spread on furniture as a preservative against termites, which has as one of its ingredients "1 quart of the worst Bazar Mustard" (MS.5853/85); unless Surrey has changed beyond all measure in the last 150 years.

The top illustration shows the frontespiece to Hannah Glasse's The art of cookery, made plain and easy, in an edition dating from c.1770. The lower illustration shows a curry powder recipe from MS.7111.

Wellcome Library Insight - Anatomies of London

This Saturday (28th November) offers another chance to discover some fascinating tales of London life, through our Anatomies of London 'Insight' session.

One of our most popular 'Insights', previous versions of Anatomies of London have been recommended by Time Out, and inspired the Patterson Challenge.

The session starts at 2.30pm and there is no need to book. For more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Our identity at our fingertips?

Here’s a challenge to mark the opening of the new Wellcome Collection exhibition Identity: Eight rooms, nine lives.

What can you deduce from these handprints about the identities of their authors?



If you need to brush up your palm-reading skills, try dipping into the archive of Dr Charlotte Wolff, a German psychotherapist and sexologist who in the 1930s embarked on a mission to place chirology (the study of hands) on a firm scientific basis.

Wolff was born in 1897 in West Prussia and for a while practised medicine in Berlin, but as a Jewish lesbian with a rebellious streak she was destined for Nazi harassment and had to flee Germany in 1933. She initially earned her living in France and England by reading hands (her 1936 book Studies in Hand Reading reads like a celebrity A-list), but in 1937 became a permanent resident of England and practised as a psychotherapist in various psychiatric institutions.

Here she developed her own theories of psychological diagnosis based on the features of the hand. By conducting comparative researches into hands of 'normal' and ‘mentally defective’ children and adults, she came to believe that the hand is the most reliable means of gauging temperament, character and intelligence - in other words, that our hands can be decoded as the ‘DNA’ of our mental states.

The language used in Wolff’s research is shocking nowadays - The Hand in Psychological Diagnosis (1951) routinely describes her subjects as ‘feeble-minded’, ‘high / low grade imbeciles’ and ‘idiots’. The arrangement of her personal archive also produces some uncomfortable juxtapositions. Her 1938-1940 series of handprints, for example, is grouped into Boxers, Chimpanzees, Children with Down’s Syndrome, and Primates.

We have to remind ourselves that Wolff was using the formal terminology of her times, and that her research into identifying the ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ reflected widespread contemporary concerns about mental degeneracy, and increasing attempts by the state to care for and control children with mental impairments.

But Wolff’s classifications worry us today because they are so suggestive of the ways in which Charles Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection became horribly tangled up with social policy over the course of the 20th century. One can’t help wondering how many individuals were consigned to psychiatric interventions on the basis of her theories.

And the identities of the three handprints above?

· Top left: The writer Aldous Huxley, 1936

· Top right: Andrew, a 19 month old chimp from London Zoo, 1938

· Bottom: E- B-, a ‘mentally defective’ 11 year old boy (described by Wolff as ‘a little animal, coming from a very degenerated and …primitive family’), 1930s

24th November 1859

Today is the 150th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. This first edition consisted of 1,250 copies, with the rapid success of the book leading to a second edition of 3,000 copies being brought out in January 1860.

First editions of Origin of Species still crop up at auction – for example, an auction of a copy, scheduled for today at Christie's in London, has caught the attention of the media.

Pictured above is the first edition of Origin owned by the Wellcome Library. Details from the Library’s accession registers, state that this copy was purchased on 31st October 1962 from the booksellers H K Elliot, for the sum of £42.

As for Charles Darwin, 150 years ago today he was away from his home at Down House, staying in Ikley Moor in Yorkshire. There, he sought the water treatment, for the ill-health which plagued his adult life.

Courier duties to the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo

Leonardo di Vinci, Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn are just a few of the famous artists whose works will be displayed at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, as well as other contemporary and historical items from the collections of the Wellcome Library and Wellcome Collections. This exciting exhibition is based on the theme "Medicine and art: Imagining a future for life and love", and my colleague Stefania and I have been privileged - in our roles as conservators at the Wellcome Library - to be involved.

We travelled to Tokyo last week, arriving on 19 November when we settled into our apartments to recuperate from the long journey. Jet lag was quickly forgotten as we traveled around Tokyo, visiting the infamous fish market with Mami Hirose, the Project Manager at the Museum and two other couriers from the Science Museum (who are also loaning many items to this exhibition) - Emma Duggan and Lisa O'Sullivan among other sites.

The Mori Art Museum (located in the Mori Tower - see top image) has 6 galleries and 2 halls, and we started our first working day in Gallery 6 by unpacking the first X-ray machine and some of the iconographic items from the Wellcome Library. It was our duty to manage the unpacking and installation of items loaned by the Wellcome, and we were pleased that the objects arrived safely. Only one crate suffered minor damage; as a result, a Warhol print had dropped down in its frame and had to be rehinged and reframed. Stephania installed the largest books as well as a metal mannequin artifact that had been used as an anatomical teaching tool. This wrapped up our first busy day at work in the Mori.









Author: Gillian Boal

Wellcome Library Workshops

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshops are:

Free for all: history of medicine on the Web
Find the best places to start if you are looking for reliable, accessible history of medicine resources on the internet.
24 November, 2-3pm

Hunt the Ancestor: resources for medical family history
Was someone in your family a doctor, nurse or patient? Find out about the wealth of resources available to the family historian.
26 November, 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 from the library website. [ http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/workshops ]

Early closure for Medicine in Literature event this Thursday

Just a quick reminder to let you know that the Library will be closing at 6pm, not 8pm, this coming Thursday, 26 November. This is due to us hosting another Medicine in Literature event, this time with the author Lydia Syson, who will be talking about her fabulous book Doctor of Love: James Graham and His Celestial Bed.

The event has proven very popular and is fully booked, but if you would like to go on the waiting please email me asap (p.harkins@wellcome.ac.uk). We are double-checking the attendee list tomorrow, so if we have any spare capacity we will get back to you as soon as we can.

More details here: http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents/events/WTX057073.htm

Mrs Klein

The play Mrs Klein by Nicholas Wright is currently enjoying a well-reviewed revival at the Almeida Theatre, London.

The play had its first production at the National Theatre in 1988. Two years previously Phyllis Grosskurth’s somewhat controversial biography of Klein had appeared, based on extensive research in the Klein papers while these were still in the care of Hanna Segal of the Melanie Klein Trust.

The Melanie Klein Trust gave the Klein papers to what was then the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine in 1984. These were catalogued (the catalogue is now available online), and in 1987 Nicholas Wright did research on them for his play. They were also consulted by designers for both the original and the current productions. Since the receipt of the first and largest batch of her papers a number of additions have been added, including family letters and other papers from her grandchildren.

The Klein papers reflect her life and her career as an influential psychoanalyst. They include notes on the cases she saw, both from her early years of practice in Germany and the later part of her career in England – it is interesting to see how quickly she made the shift from keeping notes in German to keeping them in English. The collection also holds manuscripts of her books and articles, drafts of articles, and unpublished lectures, notes on analytical technique and theory, appointment diaries, a brief autobiographical memoir, press cuttings, and numerous photographs of Klein, her family, and colleagues, also of the small toys that she used for child analysis (as well as numerous original drawings by child patients).

There is a significant group of files concerning the Controversial Discussions within the British Psycho-Analytical Society, in which Klein and her daughter Melitta Schmideberg, also a psychoanalyst, were ranged on opposite sides: the play centres on the tensions between mother and daughter at an earlier phase of their lives. Apart from this episode, however, there is surprisingly little surviving correspondence between Klein and her professional associates.

Besides her own papers, there is material relating to Klein in Archives and Manuscripts among the papers of John Bowlby and Donald Winnicott, both of whom were analysed by her, the papers of S. H. Foulkes, and those of Michael Fordham. Her published works may be found on the Library shelves.

The American way

Lithograph after a design by Al Capp (1909-1979)

Wellcome Library no. 679768i

Behind the scenes, the Wellcome Library has been cataloguing a large collection of posters which the Library has gradually acquired over the last couple of years. They are arranged by country of publication (insofar as that can known before they are catalogued), and the most recent tranche to be catalogued consists of sixty-four works from the United States of America. As of today they are available in the Wellcome Library.

The item shown above comes from the state of Minnesota, the state in which the founder of the Library, Henry S. Wellcome (1853-1936), was brought up. This particular work is one which Wellcome could never have seen, for it dates from the 1950s and shows the American cartoon hero Li'l Abner (left) telling his girl friend Daisy Mae that he is about to have a chest X-ray for tuberculosis. The artist Al Capp controlled his own rights and used them to support several good causes, in this case the Minnesota Tuberculosis and Health Association. The poster bears their imprint and their address at 614 Portland Avenue, St. Paul 2.

Wellcome Library no. 679669i

The earliest work in the present group is probably this one (left), thought to date from the 1890s. Dr. H.M Smith Medical Company of Lee, Massachusetts, offers to chicken-farmers its product "Smith's egg and health producer. A purely scientific preparation for the prevention and cure of all diseases to which poultry is subject!". It will "make your hens lay. It will hasten the moulting. It will cure rheumatism. It will make your pullets lay a month earlier if fed according to directions. It will cure roup". (Roup is a disease of chickens, not a misprint for croup.) It appears to be produced by letterpress printing with inserted (pre-existing?) wood engravings, a method that had already disappeared for mass-printing of posters in large cities (in favour of lithography) but might allow small sheets to be printed on the same presses that small-town newspapers were printed on: this is a relatively small poster (sheet 56 x 34.3 cm or 22 x 14 inches). It lists the addresses from which testimonials can be obtained, allowing us to narrow down its catchment area to a very small region of farmland in the Berkshires (south-western Massachusetts and north-western Connecticut).

Wellcome Library no. 679907i

One of the great American health and social causes of the 1920s was Prohibition, which lasted from 1919 to 1933. The present group includes fourteen posters on the pro-Prohibition side (and none on the other side). The largest group among the newly catalogued items was produced in Westerville, Ohio ("The Dry Capital of the World"), by The American Issue Publishing Company, which was the holding company for the Anti-Saloon League, a massive and well-organized pressure group. In fact its printing and publishing industry made it the largest employer in the city. However this lithographic poster (above) of a woman preaching Prohibition to a crowd of well-dressed American citizens was published by yet another formidable pressure group, the WCTU (Woman's Christian Temperance Union) at its publishing house in Evanston, Illinois. The watchword "Observance and enforcement not repeal" upholds the WCTU's stance against the opposition, in the form of the AAPA (Association against the Prohibition Amendment) and the WONPR (Women's Organization for National Prohibition Reform). The struggles of these factions are recorded in the copious literature on the episode. [1]

The collection of film (movie) posters includes a number of now forgotten comedies and romances, perhaps of more interest to today's historians than they were to their original audiences – although one of them, Tammy and the doctor (1963) elicited the comment on the Internet movie database, "I am a teenager and with all the junk out on television today this comedy/romance was refreshing". The example reproduced here advertises a film from 1939 in which a (gasp!) woman doctor apparently rescues the life of a sick patient in a "Race with death at 10,000 feet!".

Wellcome Library no. 679858i

The doctor was played by the Scottish actress Frieda Inescort (Frieda Wrightman, 1901-1976) who moved to Hollywood in the 1930s and later became associated with publicity for multiple sclerosis (she herself had MS).

Another large group in the present lot records the attempts by commercial interests to modify the American diet. The National Livestock and Meat Board in Chicago thought Americans would be more healthy if they ate more meat; dairy companies were anxious that Americans might be consuming too little dairy produce; and the Florida Citrus Commission could be relied on to promote the health-giving value of oranges and grapefruit (even as trimmings for meringues and cream-cakes).

The example below is a novelty poster from 1935 produced in Illinois by the (US) National Dairy Council. Seeing a single digital image of it like the one on the left, one might be puzzled by its message "It's always breakfast time somewhere". However, when presented with the item itself one can see that the clock can be set to suit the timetable of the family home (or school, children's home, holiday camp etc.). Six separate inserts fit into slots in the table: their bases bear the lettering "United States scrambled eggs", "United States whole grain cereal", "United States milk", "United States fruit", "United States butter", and "United States toast".

Wellcome Library no. 679461i

So if you feel like some "United States scrambled eggs" at 3.50 pm, just set the clock accordingly and you'll be Okey-dokey. Have a nice day!

[1] E.g. Jack S. Blocker, Jr., American temperance movements, Boston 1989, and Rachel E. Bohlmann, Drunken husbands, drunken state: the Woman's Christian Temperance Union's challenge to American families and public communities in Chicago, 1874-1920, Doctoral thesis--University of Iowa, Ann Arbor 2001

Darwin's Inheritance

This week's Wellcome Library Insight session, is a joint event held with Wellcome Collection.

Darwin's Inheritance will draw on a range of objects, archives and illustrative materials, in order to contextualise the life and work of Charles Darwin and investigate the legacy of his discoveries in the 20th century.

The event will be held this Thursday afternoon (19th November), from 3-4.30pm. Whilst there is no need to book, spaces will be limited.

Wellcome Library Workshops

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshops are:

Making the most of my library:
the Wellcome Library catalogue and how to personalise it
Learn the most effective way of searching the Wellcome Library catalogue and the best strategies for finding the resources you need. Dscover what you can do with your Library Account, and what it can do for you.
Tuesday 17 November, 2-3pm

Science in the news: keeping track of stories in the media
For anyone interested in science in the news and media, this workshop will introduce you to science news sources in the library and on the internet, and to tools such as RSS feeds, for keeping track of the news.
Thursday 19 November, 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

Sir Thomas Lewis

The catalogue of the papers of Sir Thomas Lewis held by the Wellcome Library is now available to view online. The collection includes much on his wartime work at military heart hospitals in Colchester and Hampstead, and with the Ministry of Pensions, where he worked on a condition he termed “effort syndrome”. This work enabled many soldiers who would previously have had to be pensioned off to return to active duty. He was knighted for this work in 1921. Another strength of the collection is the amount of correspondence with international colleagues. Lewis was renowned throughout the world, being particularly well respected in the United States where he undertook three lecture tours.

A pioneering cardiologist who coined the term “clinical science” to describe his approach of applying experimental methods to clinical problems, Sir Thomas Lewis has links to many of the archival collections held by the Wellcome Library. Whilst still a student, he was elected to the Physiological Society before being awarded the first Beit Memorial Fellowship in 1910. He worked as house physician to Sir Thomas Barlow, and alongside Sir James Mackenzie. He was an acknowledged inspiration to Sir George Pickering, Sir John McMichael and Sir Henry Dale, amongst many others. In 1941 he was awarded the Royal Society’s most prestigious accolade, the Copley Medal. Other recipients of the Copley Medal have included Charles Darwin, Francis Crick, and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.

The Carbolic Smoke Ball

Pictured left is an advertisement for the Carbolic Smoke Ball, which on first impression appears a standard piece of late-Victorian medical ephemera, with little relevance to how we live our lives today.

However, this week’s episode of The Cases that Changed the World on BBC Radio 4 describes the groundbreaking legal case which resulted when the Carbolic Smoke Ball Company’s claims for the efficacy of their product were challenged in court; a case which established important principles about truth in advertising and – arguably – led to the birth of modern consumer protection.

The episode is available for listeners in the UK through the BBC’s iPlayer. A detailed description of the case is available on the BBC News website, where the Carbolic Smoke Ball story is described as: “...an odd tale set against the backdrop of the swirling mists and fog of Victorian London, a terrifying Russian flu pandemic, and a forest of unregulated quack medicines offering cures for just about everything”.

Armistice Day

To mark Armistice Day, we have chosen one item from the Wellcome Library’s diverse collections pertaining to military medicine: the diary of Captain Martin Wentworth Littlewood, Royal Army Medical Corps, British Expeditionary Force (B.E.F.).

Littlewood’s diary (MSS.8025-8026) relates his experiences from his embarkation to join the British Expeditionary Force in France in January 1917, through the battles of Arras and 3rd Ypres, the German offensive of Spring 1918 and the final advance leading to the Armistice. The diary continues to Littlewood's demobilisation in March 1919.

His diary entries for November 10th and 11th 1918 offer a snapshot of one soldier’s concern for his fellow men and his celebration on the cessation of the war:

November 10th - To COURTRAI with BLANDFORD. At 9.30pm we heard that the Armistice had been signed. Dancing in village street. Band. Searchlights. Night flying by a plane and many Verey lights. Solemnly raised the blinds and enjoyed the sensation of naked lights. But what of the men lying round the Menin Road?

November 11th - A bomb shortly after going to bed, and we learned that the Armistice only began at 11am. Left by car at AUTRYVE and lunched with 36th Division Sappers.

Gave up idea of Paris leave and took car to 96th at ESCUILLES. Thence by car to FLOBECQ.

Glorious billet at mother of the Mayor. Gifts of old burgundy and fruit, bouquets etc etc

Rock 'n' Roll Suicide?

“Don’t wanna stay alive when you’re 25” wrote the young David Bowie (now 62). The history of popular music is littered with tales of self-destruction - Del Shannon, Johnny Thunders, Joe Meek, Keith Moon and even Sister Luc-Gabrielle (the Singing Nun) to name just a tiny fraction. Music and intense emotions seem to go together like ill-matched lovers, often leaving haunting melodic memories for us all.

Among the more obscure treasures in the library are intriguing tales of Country Music and suicide (think: divorce, drink and guns as themes) and the story of Gloomy Sunday. This is a Hungarian tune banned by the BBC in 1937 because of its reputed link with at least 18 deaths. It features a ghost attending his own funeral. The programme mentions, among others, the demise of Billy MacKenzie, singer with the Associates, who recorded the number prior to his tragic end in 1997.

Fans of Joy Division may like to note the library has a copy of Control the 2007 biopic of Ian Curtis whose battles with depression and epilepsy contributed to his suicide at the age of 23 when the band was at its height.

On a lighter note, you can also enjoy Richard Doll’s musical selection on Desert island discs.

Wellcome Film officially launched

Readers of this blog, subscribers to our Wellcome Film YouTube channel, and those who regularly use our film collection will know that digital video has been available online for several months now, with more titles added on a regular basis as the Wellcome Film project moves forward. This week we took a moment to celebrate 2 years of work on this project by holding an official Launch party at the Wellcome Library on 2 November 2009. The official press release is on the Wellcome Trust website.

Around 90 people attended, with a champagne reception to kick off. Richard Aspin, Head of Research and Scholarship at the Wellcome Library, introduced the project and the collection, saying that "Wellcome Film is the one of the most important digitisation project to date in our ambition to transform the user experience of The Wellcome Library."

Following Richard, our keynote speaker Jordan Baseman talked about his film project Nature's Great Experiment, a thought-provoking documentary on behaviour and genetics of twins. The film explores themes researched by Professor Terrie Moffitt and the Twin Studies Research Team at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. Jordan's project was partly funded by the Wellcome Trust. Jordan discussed one particular film that he discovered in the Library's Moving Image and Sound Collection, The Management of Twins in Pregnancy and Labour (1958), produced by the Wellcome Trust and filmed at University College Hospital, London. The film proved to be a catalyst for his project, providing much-needed inspiration to bring his ideas together. Before showing a short clip from his project, Jordan described the 1958 film during his speech as

"...an extraordinary document that at its heart focuses on the delivery of two sets of twins. It is a stunningly beautiful, profound and slightly disturbing document. It is disturbing because of the passivity of the mothers, but also because of the location and presence of the camera. The camera is not passive. It is an active instrument that records these momentous events from a privileged vantage point. The twins are literally delivered to camera: displayed for us to see."

Angela Saward, Curator of the Moving Images and Sound Collection at the Library, rounded off the evening by thanking the long list of people and organisations involved in the project - in particular the Project Advisory Board, JISC Collections who part funded this project, and Lucy Smee, who spent 17 months cataloguing, quality checking, and segmenting almost every single title. Angela then showed a film trailer created for the project by JCA tv, the facilities house that provided telecine, video recording, encoding and transcription services (see below).

New Product Trials

The Library has set up trials for the following products:

American Antiquarian Society (AAS) Historical Periodicals Collections

"The AAS Historical Periodicals Collection: 1691-1820 presents 550 titles dating from 1693 through 1820. The collection represents over two centuries of print culture, ranging from early works imported by the colonists to later titles published on American soil on the eve of the Revolution and during the early republic. Series 1 is first of the five series created from periodical holdings belonging to one of the premier repositories in the United States, the American Antiquarian Society. The entire AAS collection features about 6,500 titles from the seventeenth through the late nineteenth century. The subject matter covered in Series 1 is broad in scope and covers all aspects of American society during this time period."

Humanities International Complete

"Humanities International Complete provides full text of hundreds of journals, books and other published sources from around the world.This database includes all data from Humanities International Index (more than 2,100 journals and 2.47 million records) plus unique full text content, much of which is not found in other databases. The database includes full text for more than 890 journals. "

You can access them via the catalogue record (username 'wellcome' and password 'trial'). The trial runs until the end of November. We are very keen to have your feedback and there is a link to the feedback form on the catalogue entries.

Darwin's Inheritance

Tomorrow's Wellcome Library Insight session, is a joint event held with Wellcome Collection.

Darwin's Inheritance will draw on a range of objects, archives and illustrative materials, in order to contextualise the life and work of Charles Darwin and investigate the legacy of his discoveries in the 20th century.

The event will start at 3pm, and although there is no need to book, spaces will be limited.

Norman Levitt: science warrior

Norman Levitt, Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University died on 24th October 2009. He was probably best known for championing the role of science in society. With fellow scientist Paul Gross, he wrote Higher Superstition, in which he challenged the post-modern activities of humanities and social science academics who practised literary criticism of scientific texts and deconstructed scientific theories with little understanding of the science in question.

The book was cited as a major influence by Alan Sokal, physics professor at New York University, who perpetrated the notorious Sokal Hoax. In 1996, Sokal submitted a paper to the cultural studies journal Social Text, as an experiment to see if it would be published. The paper, entitled "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, which at that time had no peer review process. The paper argued that quantum gravity was a social and linguistic construct. On the day of publication Sokal announced the paper to be a hoax, "structured around the silliest quotations [he] could find about mathematics and physics". Sokal revisited the affair in his own book, Beyond the Hoax.

Higher Superstition and the Sokal Hoax precipitated the so called Science Wars, a series of intellectual debates in the 1990s about the nature of science. Some of those practicing science and technology studies and cultural studies questioned the objectivity of science, employing a variety of post-modern critiques on scientific knowledge and methods. While, some in the scientific community argued that there was such a thing as objective scientific knowledge and criticized the lack of scientific understanding in these critiques.

You can discover more about both sides of the science wars debates in many books to be found at classmarks HJ (the nature of science) and HK (science in society) in the Science and Society Collection in the Wellcome Library.

Levitt went on to write Prometheus Bedeviled: science and the contradictions of contemporary culture, in which he discussed the role of science in politics and policy, a topic that continues to be relevant today.

Image above: Rowena Dugdale, Science Good or Bad?

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Find your way back in time

The Wellcome Library has collected web based material for inclusion in the UK Web Archive since its beginning in 2005. Three new search features on the UK Web Archive site make it easier to go back and see how websites looked in the past or to use the archive for research. The archive is free to view and has already collected over 4,000 selected websites since it was set up in mid-2005.

It's now possible to search the archive for the URL of a website, to search for its 'Title' or to search for a key word. URLs and titles are pretty self explanatory. Try searching for the title, Wellcome Trust, to see how many of our own websites have been archived since 2005. Or you can search for library.wellcome.ac.uk to find archived copies of the Library website. The i icon between the search boxes provides some search help.

Full text searching allows users to really dig deep into the archive. Any word can be used, from Aardvark to Zombie (both return plenty of hits) or numbers such as 2012. Full text searching allows users to find words and phrases within individual pages of archived websites. Results are returned as links to pages within the UK Web Archive.

It is still possible to browse the archive by either 'Subject', alphabetically by the first letter of the title or one of the 'Collections' of websites arranged on a theme.

These search features are new and we welcome your feedback and comments. You can do so through the UK Web Archive's 'Contact' page

Author: Dave Thompson

Wellcome Library Workshop

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshop is:

Wellcome Images
Discover how to search the from Wellcome Images collection: a database of 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.

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 from the library website.

Author: Lalita Kaplish