The Grand Old Man

By any measure, William Ewart Gladstone was one of the major figures of the Victorian age. Born on this day 200 years ago, he served as Prime Minister during four separate terms of office, and was as fascinating and controversial a figure as any of his predecessors or successors.

To mark the anniversary of his birth, the image shown is of a print from the Library's collections which links Gladstone to Henry Wellcome. It's a facsimile of a letter of thanks, sent by Gladstone to Burroughs Wellcome & Co in 1893, on receipt of one of the company's famous medicine chests.

Burroughs Wellcome & Co realised the importance of having their products associated with the great and the good. In this instance, their products are endorsed by the Prime Minister of the day. The company's medicine chests were also given to at least one US President (Teddy Roosevelt) and two British monarchs (Edward VII and George V): it all aided the image of Burroughs Wellcome & Co as a company of respectability and distinction.

But even in Gladstone's eighty-fourth year, this letter offers signs of his famous endurance, printed as it is, on sycamore wood "felled by Mr Gladstone". An advertisement then, not just for the establisment virtues of Burroughs Wellcome & Co, but for the health and fitness of the "Grand Old Man" as well.

From Brandreth's Pills to the Black Death

Over the festive season, two documentaries were broadcast which drew upon the resources of the Wellcome Library.

On BBC Radio 4, Brandreth's Pills told the story of Benjamin Brandreth, a pioneering patent remedy salesman of the nineteenth century.

Brandreth's Vegetable Pills earned their creator a fortune, and the documentary investigated Brandreth's ground-breaking marketing techniques. It also featured William Schupbach, Curator, Paintings, Prints and Drawings, Wellcome Library, discussing the testimonials included in Brandreth's publication The Doctrine of Purgation.

The concluding part of Man on Earth, Channel 4's series on how changes in climate have affected humans throughout history, aired on 28th December. To illustrate the effects of the Black Death on the population of Europe, presenter Tony Robinson was filmed in the Library's Reading Room, quoting from relevant works in our collection. The episode is available from the Channel 4 website.

Merry Christmas!

The Wellcome Library closes today for the festive period and re-opens at 10am on 4 January 2010.

We would just like to take this opportunity to wish all Library readers and followers of this Blog, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

And as a special Christmas treat, here is a suitably festive montage from the Wellcome Film project.

See you in 2010!

New Copy Services area

The Library yesterday launched its newly refurbished Copy Services area. Gone are the photocopiers and in their place are two self-service book scanners which enable you to save your scans as well as print them.

The new scanners complement the scanner already available in the Library's Rare Materials Reading Room.

For our rare and fragile materials, we have a range of other services, so if an item cannot be safely copied using the self-service scanners, we can advise on an appropriate alternative.

Further information about prices and our other imaging services can be found on the Library website .

Obesity and personality

Collotype after photographs by E. Muybridge. Wellcome Library no. 27769i

Long before and long after the photographer Eadweard Muybridge shot and killed his wife's lover Major Larkyns in San Francisco in 1874, he has never been far from controversy. The picture above (click on image to enlarge) is one of the 781 collotypes in Muybridge's series Animal locomotion (1887), and the Wellcome Library's description of it has attracted comments from Charlotte Cooper on her blog Obesity timebomb, as well as from others commenting on her posting.

The Wellcome Library catalogue record for this picture (Muybridge's plate no. 268) described the subject as "A gargantuan woman getting up off the ground". Having considered the comments, I have removed the word "gargantuan" from the catalogue record (sorry, wriggles, you approved of it!). Gargantua was the name of a (male) giant in a 16th-century book by François Rabelais. If "gargantuan" was meant to mean "gigantic", I'd rather use the word "gigantic", but we don't know that this woman was particularly tall, and why drag in Rabelais anyway? I've changed "gargantuan" to "obese", though some will not consider that an improvement: why mention her size at all?

One purpose of describing her in terms of her gender and body-mass is to distinguish this plate from the 780 others in the series. The photographs were designed to show how different creatures conduct themselves in locomotion (broadly defined), and someone who has a lot of body-mass to carry will have somewhat different locomotor processes –- or in plain English, they will move differently -- from someone with small body mass. (Even more so with this particular plate, which shows the woman getting up off the ground: there is another one of her walking). As we shall see, her size was a factor in Muybridge's selecting her as a model.

Charlotte says in her blog:
She's described as 'gargantuan' in the catalogue, and one of the accompanying keywords is 'huge'. Again, I wonder who she is, what it was like for her to be photographed naked. I'm searching for the scraps of her humanity that have been obliterated by the way she has been classified by whoever catalogued these photographs of her. I'm appalled, though not surprised, by her Othering in the eyes of the anonymous picture librarian who labelled her, and that this way of seeing her is constructed here as neutral, scholarly, scientific fact."

and one of the comments makes a similar point:
"The last picture made me feel quite sad, because she'll forever be known as 'Search: "fat." ' Rather than whoever she really was."

Wouldn't we all like to know her story! However, the comments reveal the extent to which the catalogue is not self-explanatory. The fields in the catalogue record are of three different types. Some, e.g. "Title", are merely transcriptions of words on the document. An example here would be the title of Alexander Ross's 1646 publication (in reply to one by John Wilkins),

"The new planet no planet: or, the earth no wandring star: except in the wandring heads of Galileans. Here out of the principles of divinity, philosophy, astronomy, reason and sense, the earth's immobility is asserted; the true sense of Scripture in the point, cleared; the Fathers and philosophers vindicated; divers theologicall and philosophicall points handled, and Copernicus his opinion as erroneous, ridiculous and impious, fully refuted. In answer to a discourse, that the earth may be a planet."

By merely transcribing this title, and labelling it as "Title", the cataloguer can easily convey the author's view that the earth is immobile without appearing to endorse it.

A second type contains assertions of fact in so far as they can be established empirically, such as the size of a book or engraving, who wrote or created it, when it came into being etc. Even fields of this type contain interpretations, or even in some cases distortions of the facts to suit the conventions of the database. For instance wrong life-dates may knowingly be given for a person because those dates are established in the international name authority-files that are maintained for the benefit of all libraries and their users: any library can put different dates in its catalogue, but at the risk of having the computer interpret the second form as the dates of a different person (though ways of preventing that could, and probably will eventually, be introduced into library databases).

In the third type of field, the cataloguer describes the work in his or her own words. These fields (labelled e.g. "Description" or "Notes") are particularly needed for non-verbal documents such as pictures or moving films. The current in-house Wellcome Library guidelines for these fields are as follows:

"Descriptions are written in British English established at the time of their creation. The data should be intelligible to the majority of Wellcome Library users who can read British English. Language should be brief, anonymous in character, not knowingly partisan, and simple in vocabulary (normally limited to words in the Concise Oxford English Dictionary except where the use of technical terms is unavoidable e.g. écorché)."

There are several problems here. First, the reader of the catalogue is not told which of these three types of data occur in which fields of the record (though one can sometimes guess). There needs to be a "What is this?" link for each field to explain what is going on. The second problem particularly affects the third type of data. Should the language be non-partisan as between (for example) racist and non-racist viewpoints?

"Jews receiving stolen goods." Mezzotint, 1777.
Wellcome Library no. 33088i

In a desperate attempt to be neutral, a Wellcome Library cataloguer described the subject of this mezzotint (above, click on image to enlarge) as "A large man presides over a table as other people lay goods on it for him to look at". The people who made the mezzotint in 1777 intended to show crooked Jewish second-hand dealers trying to swindle a robber out of the value of his hard-won stolen goods [1] but any cataloguer who blithely described it in that way without any historical distancing might be in hot water. If some now deprecated viewpoint is relayed by the cataloguer, how will the reader of the catalogue know when the cataloguer is merely reporting a third party viewpoint and when he or she is speaking in his or her own words? The print is currently described by the Wellcome Library with the aid of the British Museum [2] as "A highwayman tries to sell stolen articles to a group of Jewish receivers", which does not suppress the Jewishness of the recipients though it still suggests a residue of guilt about antisemitism by putting the blame on the single vendor rather than on the Jewish gang of fences. Likewise, if an artist has a particular reason to portray a person with a large body mass, the cataloguer has to find some way of describing the work without wilfully suppressing or distorting the artist's intentions.

If one looks at fields of the third kind, even cataloguers who scrupulously follow the guidelines could not represent obesity, or crimes committed by Jews, as "scholarly, scientific fact", as Charlotte suggests, or claim that they are constructed without input from social and historical determinants. That very stuff out of which the data is constructed, "British English" and the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, are social constructs, as are the edifices built from them such as descriptions involving "obesity", "crimes", and "Jews". Far from aiming at scientific fact, the cataloguer will want to enter to some degree into Muybridge's mind and inveigle his intentions. So let's look at how Muybridge himself described his models. He did so in Animal locomotion ... prospectus and catalogue of plates, Philadelphia 1887, which is available online.

Men are generally described in terms of their professions and ages. One is "an ex-athlete, aged about sixty", another is is "a well-drilled member of the State Militia" and a third, identifiable as the painter Thomas Eakins, is "a well-known instructor in art". Each model has a number: for men the numbers are given in bold type, whereas women have numbers in a lighter typeface (presumably as being more dainty). The women are described as follows (in full):

"The female models were chosen from all classes of society.
Number 1, is a widow, aged thirty-five, somewhat slender and above the medium height ; 3, is married, and heavily built ; 4 to 13, inclusive, 15 and 19, are unmarried, of ages varying from seventeen to twenty-four; of these, 11 is slender ; the others of medium height and build ; 14, 16, and 93, are married ; 20, is unmarried, and weighs three hundred and forty pounds.
The endeavor has been in all instances to select models who fairly illustrate how - in a more or less graceful or perfect manner - the movements appertaining to every-day life are performed."

20 is of course the ex-"gargantuan" woman. So physical build is usually given, and I interpret marital status for women as equivalent to profession for the men and/or perhaps an age indicator where an age in years is not given. Names and other personal details are not given for either gender, presumably in part to protect the models, in part because the names are not relevant to animal locomotion, and in part because they would particularize the physiological lesson when the aim was to generalize it. At all events, the obesity of the woman was clearly important to Muybridge, and the cataloguer should try to represent that fact – in a way which will not give unnecessary offence.

Incidentally the keyword terms "search: fat" and "huge" which are quoted in one of the comments on the blog are not in the Wellcome Library catalogue but in one of several databases which take data from the Wellcome Library catalogue and repurpose it, in this case the Wellcome Images website. Changes in the Wellcome Library catalogue data do not currently trigger the same changes in the downstream websites, so you might continue to find terms in the latter which have been removed from the former, and vice versa.

Thanks to those who commented: if convenient you can also use the new feedback form "Comments or corrections for this record?" which appears in the Wellcome Library catalogue at the end of every record, as in this example.

Meanwhile in the New Year Brits can look forward to the Muybridge exhibition which has been organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.: it will travel to Tate Britain in London, 8 September 2010-16 January 2011, and will then be shown at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art from February 26 through June 7, 2011. Eadweard Muybridge, there's no getting away from him, but who would want to – apart from Major Larkyns?

[1] Constance Harris, The way Jews lived: five hundred years of printed words and images, Jefferson, N.C. 2008, p. 122

[2] British Museum, Catalogue of political and personal satires, vol. v, London 1935, no. 5468

A Christmas Quiz

The Christmas issue of New Scientist features a quiz created by Wellcome Library staff.

We were asked to chose items from our Image Library and also to create false descriptions for them. Can you tell the real descriptions from the fake? (For example, is what you see above an ether dispenser, an enema syringe, a room fragrancer or an air pollution measurer?).

The quiz is available through the New Scientist website (although the answers can also be found - after a little searching - on Wellcome Images).

Exploring Wellcome Collection: A History of the Human Body in Europe

A short course in the history of medicine led by Dr An Vleugels, Birkbeck College, University of London, starts in January.

'Exploring Wellcome Collection: A History of the Human Body in Europe' draws on the rich holdings of Wellcome Collection, both in the Library and the galleries, to trace how ideas about the human body have altered over time.

Full details can be found on the Birkbeck website.

Feliĉan datrevenon!

To the majority of this blog's readers, the heading to this post will be opaque. If history had worked out differently, however, the phrase could have been as well known as "Happy Birthday"; for this is what it means. Many people may find something familiar about it but be unable to place the language. It is, in fact, Esperanto - the most widely used of the various artificial international languages to be constructed – and today, December 15th 2009, is the 150th birthday of Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, the language's inventor.

Zamenhof was born in Białystock, Poland, and grew up in a multilingual environment: Russian, or rather the variant of it now distinguished as Belarussian, was his first language, but he also used Polish and Yiddish within his family and learned German, English, Latin, Greek, French, Hebrew… the list goes on. (Even his name is subject to translation issues: he is alternatively known as Eliezer Levi Samenhof.) Growing up surrounded by different, sometimes quarrelling nationalities, Zamenhof set out to devise a neutral means of communication that would, he hoped, foster perfect understanding between communities and reduce conflicts accordingly. In 1887, whilst he was practising as an ophthalmologist, he published Lingvo internacia. Antaŭparolo kaj plena lernolibro (International Language. Foreword And Complete Textbook), using as his pseudonym "Doktoro Esperanto," or "Doctor Hopeful". The language attracted considerable attention over the next decades, the first international congress of Esperantists being held in 1905, and in 1910 Zamenhof was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

As a medical man in his day job, Zamenhof himself obviously falls within the Wellcome Library's interests and the library catalogue reveals biographical and historical studies of the man and his work. More surprising, perhaps, are the other ways in which Esperanto occurs in our holdings. For those in search of a more challenging, less anodyne Esperanto vocabulary than one gets from the header to this article, there is a leaflet on birth control in the language, within the papers of the Family Planning Association. The association with birth control continues in a publication to be found in the papers of the family planning pioneer Eileen Palmer: C V Drysdale's Diagrams of International Vital Statistics with description in English and Esperanto, together with a Table of Correlation Coefficients between Birth and Death-Rates (1912). The association of the new language with early twentieth-century advanced thought is obvious. It was not merely the preserve of idealists, however: hard-headed businessmen were also looking at it. Within the Wellcome Foundation's own archive is a file that indicates Wellcome's drugs company was, in 1909, working out the legal frameworks that would govern the use of Wellcome trademarks in Esperanto.

Sadly, as we know, Esperanto did not end conflict between nations and it was in the middle of the greatest conflict the world had yet known that Zamenhof died, in 1917. His language lives on to this day: until recently, classes were hosted some fifty yards from the Wellcome Library. Within the Library, traces of his great project occur in many different areas of our holdings. Other, earlier schemes to break down barriers to communication, such as John Wilkins' seventeenth century universal language, are also documented. Readers are invited to pick over these heroic failures and muse on how different the world might have been. Bonŝancon!<sup>1

1</sup>Good luck!

Nostradamus

The date is disputed – some sources say it’s the 21st December – but other evidence points to the fact that today in 1503, Michel de Nostradame (or Nostradamus, to give the familiar Latinised version of his name) was born in Saint-Remy-de-Provence in France.

Although remembered now for his prophecies, Nostradamus found early renown through his work as an apothecary, and indeed, for his remedies to ward off the plague. It wasn’t until the 1550s, when settled in Salon-de-Provence, that Nostradamus began publishing the predictions by which he is still remembered.

The Wellcome Library holds a number of works relating to Nostradamus, including early editions of his Les Propheties (The Prophecies) and also a number of engravings and paintings (such as the example shown above).

Modern interpretations of Nostradamus’s work usually claim to show how his prophecies have forecasted recent (usually cataclysmic) events. Without entering the debate on the legitimacies of these claims, our prediction is that such reinterpretations of Nostradamus’s works will continue for the forseeable (and unforseeable) future...

Moving Image and Sound Collection profiled

We have blogged throughout this year about Wellcome Film, our project to digitise over 450 titles from our Moving Image and Sound Collection (MISC). However, an article in the latest edition of Wellcome History, offers a wider profile of MISC.

As the article notes, MISC illustrates the growth of film as a communication tool in the medical sciences and furthermore, is "an essential starting-point for any researcher, educator, student or browser interested in witnessing the evolution of medicine and health over the last 100 years".

The article is on page 20 of the Winter 2009 edition of Wellcome History, which is freely available from the Wellcome Trust's website.

Arabic manuscript project - information online

The Wellcome Arabic manuscript project has a new webpage providing information on the project aims, project partners, standards, technology development, and more. This page will be updated regularly to show progress and make relevant documents available. The project plan is already available to view.

Image: WMS Arabic 461, f.1a

Wellcome Library Workshops

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshops are:

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.
Tuesday 8th December, 2-3pm

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. Discover what you can do with your Library Account, and what it can do for you.
Thursday 10th 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 through the library website.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Parish notices

Wellcome Library no. 669602i

This painting of a parish council meeting is a remarkable document, and perhaps not as well known as it deserves to be (click on the image to see the picture in all its amazing detail). That may be due partly to the fact that the original painting is apparently still in private hands, not in a public gallery, and partly to the outlying place from which it comes. It is the work of Carl Ludwig Jessen (1833-1917), also called Jessen-Deetzbüll after his birthplace. He lived in North Friesland, the north-western region of Schleswig-Holstein, which at the time of his birth was in Denmark but in his lifetime passed to Germany.

Jessen was essentially self-taught, though after he had already started on a career as a painter he studied at the Copenhagen Academy and later won a scholarship to study in Paris and Rome. His early self-portrait in the Kunsthalle at Kiel, painted nearly fifty years before the parish council painting, included an écorché to emphasize his academic credentials, but his real forte in later years was in painting scenes from his homeland.

Right: Self-portrait of Karl Ludwig Jessen, 1857. Kiel Kunsthalle

Paintings like the one of the parish meeting were created with the aid of innumerable record-drawings of characteristic North-Frisian costumes, furniture, house-construction, and utensils, and with the aid of an imagination powerful enough to hold in the painter's mind the unified scene of the actors immersed in their business. Such questions as whether to grant parish funds to help a needy applicant, where to construct roads, fences or hedges, how to deal with epidemics and nuisances, how much to pay the parish constable, and how to deal with requests from county or state government, needed, and in many places still need, a decision of the parish, commune or Gemeinde. Jessen presents this almost timeless process with a clarity and precision that transport the viewer straight into the meeting-room. [1]

In Jessen's portrayal, dated 1905, four of the nine councillors have tobacco pipes: we see the beginnings of a smoke-filled room. The chairman reads out a letter, and each of the councillors behaves in a different way. One who is hard of hearing strains to catch his words. Some look and listen while others concentrate by listening without looking. Some are more phlegmatic than others, and one of them is vaguely conscious that his dog is getting bored. On the right, the only woman present brings in the refreshments.

The image shown here is a large four-colour print of the painting, published in Berlin probably not long after the picture was painted. Small wonder that framed copies of this print occupy an honoured place on the walls of countless North-Frisian houses. [2]

This image is one of over 1,000 images that have been added to the Wellcome Library catalogue in November 2009. Some users of the Wellcome Library catalogue have remarked on their disappointment at finding a catalogue record for a picture but no image of it. Often that is due to copyright restrictions: if the artist, designer or photographer died less than 70 years ago, i.e. after 1939, the Wellcome Library cannot legally copy his or her work without seeking permission, and even less put it on the web. Works by copyright-holders who died more than seventy years ago (such as Carl Ludwig Jessen) are effectively in the public domain: images of these are being added to the Wellcome Library catalogue incrementally.

The recent load added images to 991 catalogue records for pictures and 167 records for printed books and printed broadsides. The picture-records include 510 AIDS posters, for which copyright permission has kindly been given by designers, charities and public bodies. Some of the latter may even have had to put it on the agenda of their meetings – though these days not in smoke-filled rooms.

[1] Carsten Boysen, 'Carl Ludwig Jessens "Gemijnderädj"', Nordfriesland (Bredstedt: Nordfriisk Instituut), no. 52. 1980, p. 157

[2] Konrad Grunsky-Peper, Klaus Lengsfeld and Ernst Schlee, Gemaltes Nordfriesland: Carl Ludwig Jessen und seine Bilder, Husum: Husum-Druck, 1983, p. 12

Opening of the Wellcome Historical Medical Library

As we often celebrate anniversaries on this Blog, it seems only fitting that we draw your attention to a short article from the British Medical Journal, 10th December 1949 (and freely available through PubMedCentral).

The piece reports on the formal opening of the Wellcome Historical Medical Library, at 183 Euston Road, London, at a luncheon given by the Directors of the Wellcome Foundation, on 2nd December 1949. It offers a brief overview of the Library’s collections, noting their diversity (“alchemy, occultism, veterinary medicine and folklore...”) and their scale (“200,000 books, pamphlets, and journals, 5,000 manuscripts, and 100,000 autograph letters”). The image accompanying the article - also shown above - shows how much the Library's Reading Room has changed since 1949.

As the luncheon took place on the 2nd, all available evidence suggests the Wellcome Library opened to the public the next day, the 3rd, 60 years ago today.

So - Happy Birthday to us!

(For more details on the development of the Library – both before 1949 and after – a brief history is available on our website).

Library posters featured on BBC homepage

The BBC have highlighted the Wellcome Library AIDS poster collection to mark World AIDS Day today. They have produced a slideshow showcasing a variety of posters from the collection, which numbers nearly 3,000 and represents 99 countries and 75 languages. The posters have been fully digitised, and many of them are now freely available online. The Librarian who manages this collection, William Schupbach, and Julia Nurse, who has catalogued the posters over the past 18 months, provide a narrative explaining the significance of the posters.

World AIDS Day is sponsored by the National AIDS Trust, and serves to raise awareness through a series of campaigns and events on 1 December, annually. This year's highlights include the Respect & Protect campaign, information on preventing, testing for and living with HIV, and a range of personal stories from people who have been affected by AIDS or HIV.

Identity Exposed

How do you spot a liar? What features do aggressive hockey players have in common? Calling all seekers of the shady secrets of face-reading, this is your chance to delve into a centuries old world of knowledge known to its practitioners as Physiognomy.

See its powerful influence across many cultures and wonder at the free 'teeth and ears' guide. Your host for this adventure in human character is awaiting you at the Wellcome Library. Just turn up on Thursday 3rd December in time for a 3.00pm start for Fascinating Faces, the talk lasts for an hour in the viewing room. You may never look at people the same way again...

Item of the month – December 2009

As the season of good cheer inexorably draws nearer, it is customary to be bombarded with ‘essential’ lists of what to wear, buy or cook. If you fancy jumping off the consumerist bandwagon but would still appreciate a little festive guidance, why not print out and keep our Top 10 Tips for Surviving Christmas - 17th century-style.

1. How to reduce Subtraction of Money? Difficult in the short term, try making a New Year’s resolution and in the meantime if necessary resort to a syrup for melancholy

2. Surprise visitors with your idiosyncratic mince pie designs

3. If the mince pie pressure gets to you, try a spoonful of Lady Allen’s cordiall water (comforting and good for passions of the heart)

4. Or alternatively a bracing glass or two of cowslip wine

5. Hangover cure ‘for one that is paralettick’ – self-explanatory

6. Rejuvenate complexions dulled by too many mince pies and wine with a frog sperm and mercury face wash (‘Another water for the face’ on p.110)

7. House a mess? Your in-laws will be able to eat Christmas dinner off the floor after a wipe down with Mrs Mason’s spermaceti and camphor soft soap

8. But just in case, stock up with a good purge for any gastric problems

9. How to cook a husband - in case you leave it too late to order the turkey and have to make do with what's to hand

10. And for when it all inevitably gets too much… laudanum

For further top tips, try browsing the digital versions of the library’s 17th century domestic recipe manuscripts.