Images That Changed the World

Over the last week, BBC Radio 4 have broadcast Images That Changed the World, a series in which Dr Mark Lythgoe explored the development of medical imaging techniques and their wider cultural influences.

The five episodes explored X-Rays, Brain Scanning, Ultrasound, Microscopy and the Double Helix, and featured contributions from scientists, authors and historians.

Friday's episode included commentary from Helen Wakely, Archivist, Wellcome Library on the images shown here: two early sketches of the DNA Double Helix, from the papers of Francis Crick held by the Wellcome.

All the episodes are still available to listen to in the UK through the BBC's iPlayer, and Dr Lythgoe can also be heard discussing the discovery and impact of X-Rays in this BBC audio slideshow.

Sir James Watt 1914-2009

The Wellcome Library canvasses its registered users from time to time to find out their desiderata, and over the past few years one reply has come back with a tick in the box marked "AGE: 90 OR OVER". Although the replies are anonymised, the nonagenarian respondent was Surgeon Vice-Admiral Sir James Watt. Sir James died on 28 December 2009, aged 95, having paid his last research visit to the Wellcome Library in April 2009.

His obituary in the Times (London) sets out his career and his vast range of interests, though not his stewardship of the Medical Society of London, which was described in a further note by Dr Roy Davies. It was during Sir James's presidency of the Society that historic books from the Medical Society of London library were made available for purchase for the Wellcome Library, with support from the Friends of the National Libraries and other well-wishers.

Sir James Watt was much in demand as a lecturer in every continent, and used to order masses of slides from the Wellcome Library for the purpose. At one point in the 1980s Kodak changed their slide carousels in the USA and Canada to ones with slots for thin mounts (more slides could be fitted in that way), but continued to sell carousels with thick slots in the UK. Sir James arrived for a lecture tour in the USA with hundreds of slides prepared by the Wellcome Library, only to find in the first run-through that they would not fit in the only available thin-slot carousels.
He went out and bought some thin mounts and, using his surgical skills and stamina, spent most of the night remounting the slides. Someone who attended the lecture the following day said afterwards what an impressive performance it had been, with no idea of what the lecturer had had to go through to carry it off successfully.

Portrait of Sir James Watt from obituary by Alan Green and Tim Williams published by the Travelling Surgical Society of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Slide carousel by rosefirerising

Behind the Scenes: Digital Services

This is the first in a series of posts aimed at revealing the cogs and wheels that make up the Wellcome Library. These are the departments and teams that provide the services our readers are so familiar with.

Now, we find ourselves on the first floor of the Wellcome Collection building with Digital Services. This department brings together several roles and resources in the Library centred around the technical delivery of websites, catalogues, digitisation projects, digital imaging services, an open access repository for research outputs, and digital curation.

The Imaging Department will be the focus of a future blog post. Here, we concentrate on the rest of Digital Services. There are 9 members of staff (outside Photography) who work in the following areas:

Systems support services (LSS). This team works to keep the Library catalogues and website in top condition to serve the high expectations of the Library users. As well as leading a programme of projects to upgrade and streamline services, the team helps manage access to electronic resources, including databases, electronic journals and digital collections. In addition LSS provide first line support for all IT systems and services used throughout the Library both by Library users and staff.

Open Access: Digital Services is also responsible for taking forward the Trust's open access policy. Specifically, this takes the form of managing the contract to run UK PubMed Central (the UK's largest free online life sciences resource), working with publishers to help them develop policies that comply with the Trust's OA mandate, and planning the ongoing development of the UKPMC service. With regard to this latter activity, plans are afoot to expand this resource into a single, Europe-wide, open access repository for lifesciences research.

Digitisation Projects: The Digitisation Project Manager oversees the Library's Digitisation Program, working with two Content and Metadata Officers to aid the Library in the development of digitisation projects, digital storage and delivery of digital content. The department is currently involved in developing a large scale digitisation program that will see the digitisation of much larger collections of material around a series of strategic themes. The first of these is "Modern Genetics and its Foundations;" under this theme half a million page images of archival collections will be digitised over the next 2 years.

Digital Curation: The Wellcome Library accepts born digital archival material as part of its collecting strategy. Digital Curation is the long term management of all the Library's digital assets, ensuring that they remain viable, authentic and available to users of the Library. Responsibility for managing the Library's Digital Asset Management system is divided between the Library Systems Administrator and the Digital Curator.

The biggest challenge for the department is determining how to deliver on The Library's ambition to provide online access to a large number of digitised collections, including books, archival material, artworks and audio visual materials.

Understanding the components of a digital library system that can bring together both the physical collections and the digitised content in a flexible, engaging, and powerful way is no small feat. A Feasibility Study is underway to model this system, and create a proof-of-concept to test ideas around how catalogues, page-turners, storage layers and full-text indexing - for example - will interoperate.

Rudolf Hess and the psychiatrists

Rudolf Hess’s state of mind from the date of his landing in Scotland in 1941, throughout the years of his imprisonment in England, and during his trial in Nuremberg, has been the subject of speculation by historians, fiction writers and conspiracy theorists ever since. Prior to his trial Hess was examined by a commission of psychiatric experts from the United States, Great Britain, Russia, and France. The report of the British delegation, which included Lord Moran, concluded that he was ‘unstable’ and exhibited the characteristics of a ‘psychopathic personality’ but that he was not ‘insane in the strictest sense’ and he was subsequently deemed fit to stand trial. Moran’s own file relating to the matter is held by the Wellcome Library. It contains correspondence, clinical notes on Hess by J.R. Rees and Moran’s own notes (Ref: PP/CMW/G.3/2).

Psychiatrists have since used this kind of material, gathered at the time, to come to their own conclusions. William Sargant’s interest in Hess is borne out by his possession of an English translation of an account by Hess of his imprisonment in England, including his physical and mental health and medical treatment. This document forms part of a recently-catalogued accession to the Sargant papers held in the Library (Ref: PP/WWS/A/22). Sargant gave his opinion in a review in the BMJ in 1962 of James Leasor’s Rudolf Hess, The Uninvited Envoy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1962). He believed that ‘Hess was obviously psychiatrically ill at his trial’ and that Leasor had relied rather heavily on official sources when concluding that Hess was sane during his imprisonment. For Sargant

It shows how the facts of history can so often be misjudged for posterity. Fortunately there are ample clinical descriptions ...of Hess’s many and complicated delusional systems, and of his hallucinations and other psychiatric abnormalities, so that future medical men will have a lot of factual data available to judge for themselves.^[1]

The two files of stray papers that form the additional Sargant accession were found amongst the papers of Ann Dally (Ref: PP/DAL), who was at one point working on a biography of Sargant, and transferred the original collection of his papers to the Library in 1995. In addition to the Hess document, they include small amounts of correspondence, published and unpublished writings and presscuttings. They date from the 1930s to the 1970s and cover a wide range of Sargant’s interests. Examples include texts for two lectures given in the 1940s, one on ‘modern treatments in psychiatry’ written for a postgraduate course at the West End Hospital for Nervous Disorders and one given in the United States on ‘physical treatment in psychiatry from a Pavlovian viewpoint’, Eliot Slater’s vote of thanks after a lecture given by Sargant in 1968 and reviews of Sargant’s autobiography, The Unquiet Mind.<sup>[2]

[1]</sup> William Sargant, ‘Hess’s mental state’, BMJ (20 October 1962), p.1036.
^[2] William Sargant, The Unquiet Mind (London: Heinemann, 1967).

Author: Jennifer Haynes

Epidemiology and Infection journal now online

Epidemiology and Infection journal backfiles are now freely available online in the PubMed Central archive. This journal runs from 1901 to 1996 (up to 1986 it was titled The Journal of Hygiene). The Wellcome Trust worked in collaboration with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) to digitise this journal back-run as part of a series of journals recently made available online, including the British Medical Journal, Medical History and many more. All of these titles are mirrored to UK PubMed Central.

Epidemiology and Infection contains classic research articles including the 1902 paper "Recent Researches concerning the Etiology, Propagation, and Prevention of Yellow Fever, by the United States Army Commission" by Walter Reed proving that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes; the 1928 paper "Bacteriological and Clinical Study of One Hundred Cases of Scarlet Fever" by Gunn and Griffith demonstrating the significance of pneumococcal types; and a series of reports on plague investigations in early 20th century India including the 1907 report The diagnosis of natural rat plague.

Robert Burton and 'Blue Monday'

As the Monday that begins the last full week in January, today has been accredited as "the most depressing day of the year". If this is the case, this year, so called 'Blue Monday' falls upon a rather fitting anniversary, as on the 25th January 1640, Robert Burton, author of The Anatomy of Melancholy died.

A lifelong sufferer from depression, Burton's work can be seen as an attempt to write himself out of illness. But this is not merely a first-person account of sickness: Burton's Anatomy attempts to include every conceivable account of melancholy that was available to him. However, this is just the starting point: as from melancholy, Burton examines almost every topic imaginable: the Anatomy then, becoming an enormous compendium of medicine, philosophy, wit and legend – arguably a summation of human learning up to that date.

From its first publication in 1621, Burton expanded the Anatomy through five further editions before a posthumous edition came off the presses in 1652. Its influence on the next century of English Literature is clear and its properties were hailed by Samuel Johnson, who said reading the Anatomy provided solace during the darker moments of his own depression.

The Wellcome Library holds a number of copies of the Anatomy (including a first edition and three others copies published in the 17th Century) as well as secondary works discussing the context and importance of the book. Shown is the copy from our collections which was once owned by John Webster (1610-1682), the seventeenth century clergyman and physician.

Wellcome Library readers can also access different editions of the Anatomy through Early English Books Online (EEBO), a remote access resource freely available to Library readers. Ideal reading material for 'Blue Monday' and - for some modern critics - every other day of the year.

Henri Tajfel Papers – Now Available to Consult!

The papers of Henri Tajfel (1919-1982), the Bristol University Professor of Social Psychology and eminent social psychologist, following the completion of the cataloguing process, have today become accessible at the Wellcome Library. An extensive obituary for Tajfel appeared in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 1, 87-89 (1982). He also has an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and an extensive Wikipedia biography where he is credited as the principal co-developer of Social Identity Theory. This theory, developed by Tajfel and Turner, suggests that people categorize themselves into groups which Tajfel and Turner called “in-groups”, and categorize everyone else into other groups, called “out-groups”. This categorization helps to promote a sense of identity but this leads to unfavourable comparisons between the in-group and the out-group and the enforcement of boundaries between the groups which can result in conflict in various guises.

The Tajfel papers at the Wellcome Library do not cover the development of Social Identity Theory to any great extent and anyone wishing to discover more about this and related theories would be better advised to read one of the following books:

• Tajfel, H. (Ed.). (1978). Differentiation Between Social Groups: Studies in the Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. London: Academic Press.
• Tajfel, H. & Turner, J. C. (1979). "An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict". In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Monterey, CA: Brooks-Cole .
• Tajfel, H. (1981). Human Groups and Social Categories. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
• Tajfel, H. & Turner, J. C. (1986). "The Social Identity Theory of Inter-group Behavior". In S. Worchel & L. W. Austin (Eds.), Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Chicago: Nelson-Hall

However, what the Henri Tajfel papers do cover is his extensive involvement with numerous social psychological societies, journals and books, particularly the Academic Press series of books which Tajfel edited, the European Monographs in Social Psychology. Tajfel’s files cover his lecture notes from the early 1960’s and are full of papers submitted for publication in various journals and books and presented at the many conferences/seminars which he attended in the 1960’s, 1970’s and 1980’s. There is also extensive correspondence concerning books, journal articles and letters both published and unpublished by other social psychologists of the time.

To date, Henri Tajfel has not benefited from a full biography covering his life and works. For those interested in his place in the history of social psychology theory, his legacy has been discussed in numerous books and journals in the almost 30 years since his death and one place to start is by referring to John C. Turner’s, “Henri Tajfel: An introduction”, which appears in W. P. Robinson (Ed.) Social groups and identities: Developing the legacy of Henri Tajfel. Oxford: Butterworth Heinemann (1996). Professor John Turner began as a research associate working for Tajfel at Bristol University and they worked together over many years.

Rather than repeat what has been said about Tajfel in these many sources, I thought it would be illuminating to see what Tajfel chose to write as his own biography in 1981, the year before his death. The following biography, written by Tajfel, is taken from the Cambridge University Press “Advance Information Sheet” produced in April 1981 for the book “Human Groups and Social Categories”.

“Professor of Social Psychology, University of Bristol. Born 22 June 1919 in Poland. Educated in several European countries. Prisoner-of-war in Germany June 1940 - May 1945. In the first few years after the war, working in various European countries for international organisations concerned with the rehabilitation of children and adults, victims of war. First degree and Ph.D. in Psychology, University of London. 1954-56, Assistant, University of Durham. 1956-67 in Oxford, University Lecturer in Social Psychology and Fellow of Linacre College. 1967, Professor of Social Psychology, University of Bristol. Longer-term visiting appointments at Harvard University; University of Western Ontario; Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences, Stanford, California; University of Leiden; Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris; The Van Leer Foundation, Jerusalem; University of Bologna. Short visits to a number of universities in Europe and North America including Katz-Newcomb Lecturer, University of Michigan and Special Lecturer, University of Helsinki. Fellow of the British Psychological Society. Past President of the European Association of Social Psychology. Past Chairman of the Social Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. First Annual Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize, S.P.S.S.I.. Co-author and editor of several books in social psychology and publications in a variety of psychological journals in Britain, U.S.A., Canada, France, Italy, Germany, etc. Editor of the European Monographs in Social Psychology, Academic Press, London.”

What is clear from the 64 boxes of Tajfel papers, part of the deposit of the papers of the British Psychological Society at the Wellcome Library, is how hard Henri Tajfel worked, how many organisations he belonged to, how many books and journals he contributed to, how many conferences and symposia he attended, and how many people with whom he corresponded both agreeing and disagreeing with points made in private and in public. His prodigious output did not stop with issues of social psychology and where he felt newspapers or even the school curriculum was biased against matters dear to his heart such as the coverage of Israel, he would take up his pen and begin a lengthy correspondence. Henri Tajfel died at the relatively young age of 62, and given the amount of work that he had demonstrated that he could tackle and that he was still planning to get through in early 1982, it can only be imagined how much more he would have been able to contribute to the field of social psychology had he lived for just a few years longer.

The catalogue of the Tajfel papers can be consulted on the Wellcome Library's archives and manuscripts database, under the reference PSY/TAJ. The papers of the British Psychological Society will be released gradually as they are made ready for consultation. An earlier blog post has already described the papers of Charlotte Wolff, from the same source.

Author: Jon Cable

Case Notes: Aspirin

This week's edition of Case Notes on Radio 4, is devoted to Aspirin: offering the story of its rise as a pharmaceutical product at the end of the nineteenth century and issues regarding its present day use.

It features an interview with Tilli Tansey, Professor of History of Modern Medical Sciences at University College London (UCL), recorded in the Wellcome Library. Prof Tansey and the show's presenter, Dr Mark Porter, discuss the history of the drug and its manufacture by pharmaceutical companies, including Burroughs Wellcome & Co - the business co-founded by Sir Henry Wellcome.

For UK listeners, the episode is available through the BBC's iPlayer for the rest of the week.

Hebrew Manuscripts Week

Developed in association with the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, the Wellcome Library is hosting a week-long study course based around our Hebrew manuscripts.

Date: 15–19 February 2010

Course tutor: Prof Semen Yakerson, Institute of Oriental Manuscripts,
Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg

Venue: Gibbs Building, Wellcome Trust, 215 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE

Timetable:
Monday 15th – Friday 19th February, 14.00–18.00
Practical sessions in reading Hebrew manuscripts

Handouts and learning packs will be provided, and a certificate of attendance will be issued upon successful completion of the course.

Participants should have completed at least three years of Hebrew studies; final-year undergraduates, postgraduates and others with a good knowledge of Hebrew will be welcome.

The course is free, but pre-registration is essential and numbers are limited to 15.

For further information, please contact Dr Nikolaj Serikoff, Wellcome Library: n.serikoff@wellcome.ac.uk

To book a place, please contact Tracy Tillotson, Wellcome Library: t.tillotson@wellcome.ac.uk

'Theories and Methods: Literature, Science and Medicine'

The Wellcome Library is a participant in an Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) doctoral training programme 'Theories and Methods: Literature, Science and Medicine', which is running from 2009-2011.

The second event in this programme will take place from 25-27th March at the Wellcome Library, King's College, London, and the Royal College of Surgeons.

There will be 20 places for this event awarded to doctoral students, with also bursaries for accommodation and travel. Applications for this event must be submitted by Monday 1st February.

More details on the Literature, Science and Medicine programme are available from their website, including more detailed information on the Wellcome, Kings College and Royal College of Surgeons event.

Also of interest is LitSciMed’s flourishing social space, which includes details on the first event of the programme, held at St Deniol’s Library in January, along with discussion topics accompanying the training programme, plus blog postings, films of lectures, audio recordings and other learning resources for students working on topics that combine literature, science and medicine.

Wellcome initiates JPEG 2000 working group

The Wellcome Library will use JPEG 2000 as a long-term digitisation format, as announced in 2009. Due to the current lack of a forum for discussion in the UK around the use of JPEG 2000, we have created a UK-based JPEG 2000 Implementation Working Group (JP2K-UK).

The first meeting was held in December 2009 at the Wellcome Trust in London, and included attendees from universities, national institutions, other not-for-profit organisations and commercial companies. The aim of the meeting was to gather information about the level of knowledge among the attendees and to start addressing gaps in that knowledge. The meeting was also asked to consider how its members could share information, collaborate on tests or research studies, and share what they know about JPEG 2000 to the wider community.

The discussion was divided among four main areas:

1. Format and features
2. Compression
3. IPR issues
4. Tools

Attendees brought their considerable experience and knowledge of JPEG 2000 to the meeting. There was a high level of understanding around the aspects of JPEG 2000 that make it stand out as a useful file format: intelligent compression technology providing for smaller file sizes with minimal loss of quality being the foremost of these. Especially in that this leads to significantly lower digital storage requirements. However, a number of areas were raised that are less clear, such as IPR, colour management, confusing encoding options, and the apparent lack of tools that can be used to make full use of JPEG 2000 features.

Many of those present have carried out tests and comissioned reports to determine the right format, compression levels and encoded features, while others were in the process of doing similar work. Some were not yet attempting to use JPEG 2000, or were not entirely convinced of its feasibility as a digitisation format.

The overall message gained from the group members was that while JPEG 2000 is a serious contender as a long-term digitisation format - and many present were committed to using JPEG 2000 - there is an urgent need to raise awareness of the format and its implementation among practitioners. This group will continue to work together to share information, dispel myths, and lobby for greater support for JPEG 2000. Hopefully, in the not too distant future the group can share its documents with a wider audience.

As a start, a Wiki has been set up to collect relevent online sources for JPEG 2000.

Wellcome Library Insight – Madness

This week's free Wellcome Library Insight session - on Thursday 21st - explores the theme of 'Madness'.

Our Insight sessions offer visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. Sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

The session starts at 3.00pm and there is no need to book. For more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Wellcome Library Workshops

This week’s free Wellcome Library workshop is:

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.
Thursday 21st January, 2-3pm

Our programme of free workshops offers 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

The best things in life

What would you consider to be the most valuable objects in your home? Your laptop? Photo albums? Favourite clothes? Probably not the contents of your bathroom cabinet. But for Elizabeth Freke, living in Norfolk at the turn of the 17th century, the ‘best things’ in her house included her large stockpile of homemade medicinal drugs.

You can find out why, and learn about the range of healthcare options available to people in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, in Elaine Leong’s article ‘Sickness, salves and skillets’ in the January 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine (also available to listen to as a podcast interview).

To explore recipes and remedies further, go to Warwick University’s new Recipes, Remedies, Receipts website for contextual articles and links to online resources (including the Wellcome Library’s fine collection of 16th-19th century recipe manuscripts), plus the chance to share information on your own pre-modern recipe collection, if you are lucky enough to own one! The website is continually being updated, so keep checking back for new articles, links and events.

The Future is Now!

We are living in a digital age, where almost all business and communication is conducted electronically. However, very few people give any thought to how they will access this digital data in the long term. Electronic information is surprisingly fragile! Compare MS.5755/1 a fragment of papyrus created in the 3rd century BC, and still readable, with the difficulties accessing the information gathered for the BBC’s 1986 Domesday Project.

If The Wellcome Library is to continue to be “outstanding as an historical, evidential and cultural resource of national and international importance in the field of the history of medicine” (MLA, 2005), we must tackle the problem of curating digital material now.

The following presentation, given at the Cambridge Libraries Conference on the 8th January 2010, provides an overview of the work undertaken by the Wellcome Library in this area so far. Click on fullscreen to scroll through the slides.

Digital Curation at the Wellcome Library

Addicted artists and the corridors of power: archive material opened January 2010

Sherlock Holmes took his bottle from the corner of the mantel-piece, and his hypodermic syringe from its neat morocco case. With his long, white, nervous fingers he adjusted the delicate needle, and rolled back his left shirt-cuff. For some little time his eyes rested thoughtfully upon the sinewy forearm and wrist, all dotted and scarred with innumerable puncture marks. Finally, he thrust the sharp point home, pressed down the tiny piston, and sank back…
(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Sign of Four: opening words)

Every year, at the start of January, the Wellcome Library opens various archive items to the public that have been closed under the Data Protection Act until this point. As usual, this year’s collection of expired closures is widely varied, the subjects spanning madness, animal experimentation, the skin pigmentation disorder Argyria, and the discussions of Allied leaders during World War II. The items’ formats include patient records, personal diary notes, fellowship applications and organisational subject files. But what do any of these have to do with the opening words of The Sign of Four, possibly the best-known depiction of drug use in English literature until Trainspotting came along?

Among the items opened are several from the Manor House asylum, a private mental hospital located in Chiswick House, south-west London, some of whose papers are held at the Wellcome Library. MS.6224 comprises a volume of case notes for male patients in the years 1906-1925. The very first case provides our link. The patient, Charles Henry Malcolm Kerr, is an artist aged 48 who arrived at Chiswick in 1906. The doctor examining him on admission takes up the story:

"He is described as being normally rather reserved, and has done some good work painting, his portraits having been accepted by the Academy…. Broke down last spring and became irritable & excitable. Taken by Dr Lord to his "home" at Hampstead, then began to smash things, & threaten, and evidently in a condition of absolute insane excitement, was certified & sent to the Priory."

From the Priory Kerr was transferred to Chiswick. What his problems were may perhaps be indicated by the following undated note inserted between the pages of the newly-opened casebook:

"Dear Dr Tuke,
I wish I c[oul]d have some more brandy: it is like being in prison to be deprived like this of ordinary necessities.
C.K.
Also if you c[oul]d lend me a hypodermic syringe I s[houl]d be very much obliged."

Another note sheds light on the syringe:

"Dear Dr Tuke
Last night, the morphia bottle was not found in my room: so Mr [illegible] refused to give me a dose at all: this, I regard as the most monstrous piece of insolence in a paid [illegible] I have ever heard of: but not by any means the only bit of impertinence I have been subject to.
The morphia you have given me has had no effect at all. Mr Savage said definitely that I was to have it in doses strong enough to have some effect. I have told you over and over again that I have to take morphia in larger doses than people who are not accustomed to it: but you never attend to anything I say.
C.K"

Finally, another undated note suggests possible withdrawal symptoms:

"Sir
For heaven's sake send me some brandy or something, I never felt so ill in my life. If I had been at my own home I c[oul]d have put myself right hours ago.
C.K"

But the link to Sherlock Holmes? Although the doctor making notes on Kerr’s admission concentrates on his portrait work, Kerr was also a book illustrator of some note, providing pictures for works by Rider Haggard, Robert Louis Stevenson – and Conan Doyle. In fact, when The Sign of Four, with its vivid opening depicting intravenous drug use, was published in 1890, it was with illustrations by Charles H.M. Kerr.

Holmes’s drug of choice is said to be cocaine rather than the morphia Kerr uses, but Doyle does make a reference to “the drowsiness of the drug” when talking of cocaine use in a way that suggests this is one of his notorious errors of detail and that, at least sometimes, Holmes should be seen as taking morphia. Does art imitate life in this case, or life imitate art? Did the illustrator work on a text describing a dependency he knew only too well, or only later fall victim to the same addiction? The case-notes await work that would flesh this out.

What is only too clear is that the two addicts had different fates: Holmes, famously, is weaned off his drug-use by Watson, but Kerr has a less happy end. On September 8th 1906 he leaves the Manor House for his wife’s care, noted as "Discharged ‘Relieved’", but a note below this comments "Died at Burgess Hill, December 1907", a little over a year later.

Elsewhere in the papers newly open, we find a notebook by Winston Churchill’s physician Lord Moran, containing observations on many topics including Churchill’s character and oratory, and the meetings of Allied leaders. In February 1945 he accompanies Churchill to the meeting of Allied leaders at Yalta and comments on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s poor health:

There was a good deal of talk last night about the afternoon Conference at the President's house. Everyone thought he had gone to bits physically and there was much speculation ab[ou]t the cause. It was at [illegible] that I first realized there was something wrong and that he was losing weight. Now anyone can see that he is a very sick man. It is not only his physical deterioration that they notice. He intervened in the discussion very little, his mouth dropped and he seemed to have little grip on things. He has al[wa]ys been short of knowledge about the subject under discussion but his shrewdness as covered this up to the present. Now, they say, the shrewdness is gone and there is nothing left.
Stalin doesn't seem to be taking advantage of the new situation…
Cadogan [Sir Alexander George Montagu Cadogan (1884-1968), permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office] told me he did not think Stalin liked the PM's theatrical style. He had noticed him looking at Winston when he was making gestures with tears in his eyes. I wonder if this only means Cadogan himself doesn't like this particular style of oratory…"
(PP/CMW/K.4/2)

This is one of only three items from the Moran papers to be opened this year, but these few are the prelude of a long series to come: January 2011 will see twenty-one items from that collection newly opened. Fascinating revelations can be expected.

From addicted artists to the corridors of power: the full varied list of items newly opened is given below. Readers are warmly invited to visit the Library and enjoy the sensation of being among the first people to read these papers for decades.

MS.6224 Manor House asylum: case notes, male patients (surnames A-K only), 1906-1925
MS.6226 Manor House asylum: case notes, female patients (surnames L-Z only), 1906-1925
MS.6334 Ticehurst House hospital: patient Certificates and Notices: Admission dates 1905-1909.
MSS.6347-6348 Ticehurst House hospital: Margaret Georgina Finch patient file (2 parts)
MS.6788 Ticehurst House hospital: Photograph Album
PP/CMW/D.6/1/1 Lord Moran papers: notes on London teaching hospitals and metropolitan regions
PP/CMW/D.6/1/3 Lord Moran papers: notes on teaching hospitals in the provinces
PP/CMW/K.4/2 Lord Moran papers: notebook containing miscellaneous observations on Winston Churchill character, oratory, meeting Stalin, Teheran, 1943
PP/HUN/C/1/7 Donald Hunter papers: Argyria
PP/RAS/D.41/3 Hugo Rast papers: patient file, Wladimir Wolkoff
SA/BMF/A.2/95-98, 100, 106 Beit Memorial Fellowship records. Files on: Eagles, George Hardy; Needham, Dorothy May; Chamberlain, Ernest Noble; Allott, Eric Newmarch; Denny-Brown, Derek Ernest; Irvine, James Tutin
SA/BRA/C.1/3/1 Brain Research Association papers: response to the 1979 Protection of Animals (Scientific Purposes) Bill and the 1979 Laboratory Animals Protection Bill (Includes papers from the Committee for the Reform of Animal Experimentation, The Physiological Society, the Research Defence Society, The Royal Society, and the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare)
SA/MAC/G.1/1 Mental Aftercare Association records: Registers
SA/MAC/G.2/5 Mental Aftercare Association records: Case Agenda Books
SA/RDS/J/12/3-9 Research Defence Society: files relating to the 1979 Protection of Animals (Scientific Purposes) Bill
SA/RDS/J/17 Research Defence Society: correspondence, 1980

All are described in the Archives and Manuscripts catalogue: simply search on the reference given at the start of each entry.

Illustrations: the upper illustration shows the first page of The Sign of Four. The lower shows Lord Moran aboard a ship.

Free Workshops at the Wellcome Library

The new Spring programme of free Wellcome Library workshops begins on 21st January.

The workshops provide training on research and resources in the Library, and are aimed at the general public.

In addition to many old favourites, we are presenting several new workshops this year:

Finding Visual Resources in the Wellcome Library
The Library Collections offer a wealth of visual resources: prints, paintings, photographs, film, exhibition catalogues and books. This workshop offers a practical introduction and some suggestions and tips on how to locate them.

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.

Plants and Medicine
An introduction to contemporary and historical resources relating to plants and medicine in the Library Collections and electronic resources.

All workshops are free and available to library members (library membership is free and open to all).

To book a place, please use the online booking facility on the library website.

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Free at last! Wellcome Library Items of the month January 2010

"Wine of the Incas. ... Coca of Peru. For convalescents."
Lithograph after A.M. Mucha. Wellcome Library no. 658317i.

As fireworks, church-bells and champagne corks sounded the passage of 2009 into 2010, library users were receiving a benefit that was in most cases far from their thoughts. Under UK law, the copyrights of authors – including writers, artists and film directors – last until the seventieth year after their deaths, and then expire on the stroke of midnight on 31 December. Therefore, other things being equal, the copyrights of those who died in 1939 terminated at midnight on 31 December 2009, irrespective of the dates at which their individual works were published. At last the literary, artistic and dramatic works of these authors have entered into the "public domain" in the UK and can now be freely reproduced without let or hindrance on grounds of copyright protection. That includes reproducing them on the web and as digital images in the Wellcome Library catalogue. So what have we gained? Here are three examples from the Wellcome Library.

The works of the Czech designer Alfons Maria Mucha (1860-1939) became familiar to many in the 1970s from the widespread reproductions of his Art Nouveau-style posters. At that time the poster publishers were (or at least should have been) seeking permission from, and paying fees to, the Mucha estate (now the Mucha Trust). Such permission is no longer needed.

An example of a work by Mucha which can now be freely reproduced is the print above advertising coca wine. The subject is purportedly a goddess of the Inca people refusing coca to the indigenous people of Peru in order to reserve it for the European consumers of coca wine (i.e. the viewers of Mucha's print). Present-day viewers may be embarrassed at being invited to endorse a message which is today represented as the robbing of indigenous peoples of their rights to their native flora and fauna by enterprising European and American imperialists. Political issues apart, the print contains much foliate decoration in Art Nouveau style, including coca leaves in the goddess's ear-rings.

Another work by Mucha in the Wellcome Library is this poster of Sarah Bernhardt, the popular tragedienne. She was important in Mucha's career, for it was his portrayal of her in the role of Gismonda, in a play by Victorien Sardou, that launched his career as a poster artist. The Wellcome poster of La Bernhardt shows her in another play by Sardou, this time in the role of Tosca – the play on which the now well-known opera by Puccini was based. It was this role that caused Bernhardt to lose a leg and to perform thereafter with one leg. In the final act Tosca jumps off the parapet of the Castel Sant' Angelo in Rome: in 1905, while simulating Tosca's death-leap in Rio de Janeiro, Bernhardt injured her right knee. As a result of complications, in 1915 the whole right leg was amputated.

Right: Wellcome Library no. 24267i

Less well-known than Mucha is Robert Bryden (1865-1939). In 1899, as part of the retrospect that accompanies the last year of any century, he published a series of portraits entitled Some wood cuts of men of letters of the 19th century (London: J.M. Dent, 1899). Two of the woodcuts in the Wellcome Library are shown here.

Ibsen. Wellcome Library no. 47138i

One (above) is of Hendrik Ibsen (1828-1906), the Norwegian pharmacy assistant who became world-famous as a playwright for introducing into the theatre depressing themes from modern life such as syphilis (in A doll's house, 1879, and Ghosts, 1881) and pollution of the urban water supply (in An enemy of the people, 1882).

Left: William Watson. Wellcome Library no. 644525i

The other shows William (later Sir William) Watson (1858-1935), a prolific poet and opponent of esoteric obscurantism in the Modern Movement. The Oxford dictionary of national biography states that "Watson chose the sonnet as a means of upbraiding Britain for its unjust actions in the Sudan and for its weak, indecisive response to Russia's hostile moves in Afghanistan". Watson was knighted in 1917 after publishing poems praising Lloyd George's conduct of the Great War. [1]

Who owned Bryden's copyrights before they expired is not at all obvious. Without such knowledge, his striking portraits were effectively "orphan works", a status which tends to deter reproduction and dissemination. Others in the series include the writers Leo Tolstoy, Walt Whitman, and John Ruskin – celebrities for whose portraits there is a demand. Now that Bryden's copyrights have expired, we can expect to see his work reproduced more frequently. For one thing, Google Books can now digitise the Dent edition without running into the problems which they have been encountering recently as a result of their contempt for authors' copyrights. [2]

Finally, an artist who is far from obscure: Louis Wain (1860-1939), cat-lover, painter of cats, and an exact contemporary of Mucha.

Gouache by Louis Wain. Wellcome Library no. 29844i

Wain was one of the best known artists of Edwardian England, and had he appointed an agency to manage his copyrights it could have gathered enough funds over the last seventy years to endow a substantial cats' home. However, when Wain died in 1939 he had spent years in psychiatric hospitals and seems not have had any heirs: as a result his works have been widely reproduced in books, magazine articles, and humorous prints, without reference to any claimant to the copyrights, and without payment. Now at last they can be reproduced legally. On the right is one of the cat-portraits which he executed in hospital: he has labelled it "Early Greek", presumably meaning that the grotesque style of ornament and lurid colours represented Wain's perception of the Minoan and Mycenaean wall paintings that were being published by Sir Arthur Evans and others from 1910 to the 1930s.

Right: Gouache by Louis Wain. Wellcome Library no. 38888i

These three artists were born within five years of each other, and despite their different lives, there seems to be a certain similarity between their works. They are very particular about filling the sheet. Mucha eliminated voids with Art Nouveau arabesques, or in the coca print "peruesques"; Bryden in his hieratic portraits reversed the usual custom by filling his backgrounds with black lines and foregrounding conspicuous swathes of white; while Wain demonstrates the obsessive style of insane artists who do not wish to leave a single part of the sheet left over (compare works by the Swiss psychotic Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930) or Richard Dadd's "Fairy feller's masterstroke"). Anything to do with the influx into Europe of Japanese prints? Their commonality is only observable because of the historical distance that we have now gained from them, though this argument has its limitations: can we also observe such a commmonality between Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) and William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), whose copyrights have also expired this year? At all events we should now be able to study the works of all of them much more easily now that they are copyright-free.

Caveat: Authors and publishers have other rights apart from copyrights. The author of this article is not a lawyer and nothing in it constitutes legal advice.

[1] James G. Nelson, 'Watson, Sir (John) William (1858–1935)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [available by subscription at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36774 , accessed 4 Jan 2010]

[2] 'Fine for Google over French books', BBC News 18 December 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8420876.stm

Samuel Pepys and his "old pain"

On a day when new diaries are opened and entries for the year ahead begun, it's fitting to post about one of the most famous diarists of all time.

Samuel Pepys's diary is popularly remembered for its clear evocations of the major events of the 1660s: of the Great Plague of 1665, the Great Fire of London in 1666 and the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667. But Pepys was as much a diarist of the everyday and the personal, and it's his self-examination that is - for the seventeenth century - so radical and new. And its there from the first entry in his diary, entered for 350 years ago today, the 1st January 1660. It begins:

"Blessed be God, at the end of the last year I was in very good health, without any sense of my old pain, but upon taking of cold".

This "old pain" was caused by stones in Pepys's urinary tract, and had been inducing great pain from an early age. In 1657, Pepys took the hazardous decision to undertake surgery: on 26 March 1658, he was operated on by Thomas Hollier of St Thomas's and St Bart's. It was a success and for several years afterwards, Pepys marked the event with an anniversary dinner (which, of course, he recorded in his diary). Pepys even preserved the removed stone - which was over 2 inches in diameter - in a specially constructed case.

This engraving, from A treatise of lithotomy: or, of the extraction of the stone out of the bladder (1683), shows a patient in preparation for a similar operation.

Pepys's diary then, begins with allusions to his health, and it appears his wellbeing was behind his decision to stop writing the diary in 1669, when Pepys believed his eyesight was failing (although troubling him to his death in 1703, his eyesight did not greatly decline after he stopped writing the diary).

Pepys's diary was written in shorthand and was - like many diaries - a personal record, its existence being unknown to those closest to him. However, given that the six volumes of his diary were catalogued in his library with all of his other books, this suggests that Pepys knew that his diary would be discovered by future generations. And, the diary is very easy to discover (and to search, and even to annotate) through an interactive online version (by which you can even follow Samuel Pepys on Twitter). Pepys and his diary is also the inspiration for one of the rooms in the latest Wellcome Collection exhibition, Identity: Eight Rooms, Nine Lives.

350 years after it was begun, Pepys's diary still holds the attention of modern readers, offering not only eye-witness accounts of some of the most famous events in British history but also showing Pepys's ability - to quote his most recent biographer - to "look at himself with as much curiosity as he looked at the exterior world, weighing himself and the world equally in the balance". [1]

We are forever grateful that Pepys examined his life in such detail, and that he saw fit for his diary to survive. But if it wasn't for the actions of Thomas Hollier in 1658 in reducing Pepys's "old pain", we do wonder if Pepys's diary would ever have been written at all.

[1] Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (Viking, 2002), p.xxxv