History of Medicine Course at the Society of Apothecaries

Details are now available of a 3-day introductory course in the History of Medicine, to be held at the Society of Apothecaries, London, on 1st-3rd February 2012.

The programme will cover Ancient, Classical, Eastern and Western medicine and the development of modern medicine from its early roots through to the present world. Speakers will include the Head of Wellcome Library, Dr Simon Chaplin.

More details are available from the Society of Apothecaries website, including the course programme (PDF) and booking details.

Image: Five surgeons participating in the amputation of a man's leg while another oversees them. Coloured aquatint by T. Rowlandson, 1793. (Wellcome Library no. 11636i).

Item of the Month, November 2011: Certificate of attendance at William Hunter's lectures

One of the pivotal figures in eighteenth century medicine, William Hunter (born on May 23rd 1718 at Long Calderwood, Kilbride, Scotland) was an eminent doctor, surgeon, obstetrician and teacher of anatomy. Educated in Glasgow and Edinburgh, he arrived in London in 1741 and by 1746 had begun to give lectures on anatomy and dissection in Covent Garden. By 1756, Hunter’s esteem had risen to the extent that he became a licentiate of the Royal College of Physicians.

Hunter regularly published essays and other works and became one of the outstanding physicians of the day, being appointed as physician extraordinary to Queen Charlotte in 1762. He had a school of anatomy built in 1770 in Great Windmill Street, London with an amphitheatre and what became an internationally famous collection. He died in March 1783 of a stroke following a long battle with that most recognisable of 18th Century diseases, gout. Whilst key to understanding the growth of the ‘man-midwife’ during this period, William Hunter’s career arguably now stands in the shadows of his younger brother, John.

The Wellcome Library acquired this certificate in May 2011. It dates from the Spring of 1755 when Hunter was still lecturing in Covent Garden and confirms that one Richard Colmer (surgeon) had satisfactorily completed anatomy and surgery courses under Hunter’s tutelage. The certificate, signed by Hunter, is headed by an engraved portrait of a bust of William Harvey, M.D., classical pillars to either side.

William Harvey was in born in Folkestone, Kent in 1578, educated at Canterbury, Cambridge University and Padua before joining the College of Physicians in 1604 and working at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, being appointed as physician extraordinary to James I in 1618 then physician in ordinary to King Charles in 1631. As many readers of this blog will no doubt be aware, his 1628 publication, Exercitatio anatomica de motu cordis et sanguinis in animalibus presented his discovery of the workings of the heart and the circulation of the blood.

As suggested by the use of his image on this certificate, Hunter was a clear admirer of Harvey. We know that Hunter purchased and read keenly a number of works from Harvey's own Library. Hunter also authored a manuscript – now held in the collections of University of Glasgow – which illustrates this interest: Historical Anecdotes of Dr. William Harvey by Wm. Hunter, collected from family papers, etc., communicated to me by Councillor Eliab Harvey of Lincoln's Inn-fields, from the College book, from his own writings, from writers, from the Records in St. Bartholomew's etc [1].

This certificate now joins the other material held by the Wellcome Library on William Hunter, which includes his classic work of obstetrics, The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus Exhibited in Figures to other certificates of attendance and student notes made at his lectures. Indeed, our MS.2965 – which consists of notes made by William Brougham Monkhouse (later surgeon to H.M.S. Endeavour, 1768-1770 on Captain Cook's First Voyage) - dates from the same period as Colmer’s certificate of attendance at Covent Garden.

Whilst establishing a connection between Colmer and Monkhouse is outwith the purposes of this blog, let’s instead consider the connections between Hunter and Harvey and one man of medicine paying homage to another.

[1] See K Bryn Thomas, 'William Hunter on William Harvey', Medical History, 1965 July; 9(3): 279–286

Author: Stephen Lowther

Music of the blind

Blind musicians in Paris. Detail of lithograph by Martin Sylvestre Baptiste, 1828. Wellcome Library no. 16519i

An article by Ingrid Sykes in the latest issue of Medical History considers the blind in Paris from an unusual angle: their sound. One might think that the blind would sound the same as the sighted, but no, not in Paris in the years before and after the French Revolution. [1]

There was in Paris a mediaeval institution called the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, founded by King Louis IX in the thirteenth century. The Hospice was a self-governing community of 300 (quinze-vingts, or 15 x 20) blind and partially sighted men and women, their spouses and their children. The hospice's autonomy and antiquity, its often truculent and anarchic spirit, the fact that it was founded by a king and protected by a cardinal (the Grand Almoner, Cardinal de Rohan), all brought it into conflict with the new spirit of improvement and control in the French Enlightenment.

The character of the Hospice was expressed in its sound. The musicians of the Quinze-Vingts could be heard in Paris on the streets, at fairs, and at an all-night café. Fiddlers, woodwind performers and vocalists produced a raucous popular sound in which successive members would perform as soloists followed by a chorus in which all performers would join. The results were variously described as "depraved", "threatening", and even as "une scène si déshonorante pour l'espèce humaine" (a scene dishonourable to the human race). The politer sort would give them some small change in order to make them go away. The print above shows one of the Quinze-Vingts bands in their outlandish costume about to have a brawl on the street with a rival amputee musician.

Left, Valentin Haüy,with, far left, his brother, the crystallographer René-Just Haüy. Engraving by the brothers Boilly, Jules and Alphonse; Wellcome Library no. 545537i

A performance by a Quinze-Vingts band made a deep, though not favourable, impression on the reformer Valentin Haüy (1745-1822). It was after hearing a performance of the Quinze-Vingts, described by him as "cette atrocité", that Valentin Haüy decided to found a new institution for the blind, organized along more up-to-date lines. [2] This was the Institut des Jeunes Aveugles (Institute for Blind Youth), a typical Enlightenment institution. Secular, educational, managed by the sighted, run by the state and not by the church, the new organization's nature was signalled by its name: not a mediaeval Hospice but a structured Institut.

Aquatint with etching by Marlé, 1805. Wellcome Library no. 545557i

The character of the Institut was also signalled by its musical performances. Instead of the popular music of the Quinze-Vingts, the blind would be trained in the harmonic system of the composer Rameau: the new system was based on Cartesian mathematics and was published in a book ominously entitled Code de musique pratique (1761).

The Hospice had always existed and was there by Royal fiat. The Institut was an innovation and was there for a purpose. In the 1790s attempts were made by the revolutionaries to suppress the Hospice, invoking the inmates' licentious life-style and spirit of independence. Suppression was avoided, but, despite their disparate characters, the Hospice and the Institut were amalgamated in 1805, largely for financial reasons. The print above recording Pope Pius VII's visit in that year shows the more decorous appearance of the blind, their more harmonious means of music-making, and their more regimented organization under the Institut.





















Sébastien Guillié (1780-1865). Left, as a young man: lithograph by C. Motte. Wellcome Library no. 3852i. His initial is given as J by mistake. Right, in later life: photograph by Giraudon, 1865. Wellcome Library no. 12835i

The merger did not last. In 1816 a new director, the despotic doctor Sébastien Guillié (above), determined to rid the Institut of its association with the Quinze-Vingts: he moved it away to a new site where, in the name of progress, he could carry out ophthalmological experiments on the blind children selected as his victims. [3] The Quinze-Vingts musicians continued their performances on the street for some years more, but could not defy change indefinitely: their building is now the site of a modern ophthalmological centre, the Centre Hospitalier National d'Ophtalmologie des Quinze-Vingts à Paris.

There is more to it than that, and more is provided in the article, which is available free online. One last point: the whole story would provide marvellous material for an opera. Richard Strauss and Clemens Krauss wrote Capriccio about different genres of drama and the relation between words and music. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill included in The Threepenny Opera street songs and conflict with the police. Perhaps the authors of Les Misérables would like to produce a successor to those works, based on the struggles of the Quinze-Vingts? There would be a dramatic conflict between the two types of music, the protagonists on each side would provide plenty of character, and there would be scope for a variety of indoor and outdoor sets. And Victor Hugo himself could have a cameo role: according to the article, he was one of the champions of the Quinze-Vingts in their struggle against bureaucracy.

[1] Ingrid Sykes, 'Sounding the "Citizen–Patient": the politics of voice at the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts in post-Revolutionary Paris', Medical history, 2011 October; 55(4): 479–502. Available free online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3199644/

[2] Pierre Henri, La vie et l'œuvre de Valentin Haüy, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984, pp 37-43 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

[3] Zina Weygand, The blind in French society from the Middle Ages to the century of Louis Braille, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. 261-267 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

The Giant Ape in the Library

Quick – what’s the connection between a hundred-foot rampaging gorilla and the Wellcome Library?

Well, it wouldn’t be a common sight in the reading room, and although stepping out onto the Euston Road has its hazards they usually relate to heavy traffic and air quality, not colossal primates. There’s a thread linking the two, however, and it runs through our manuscript 7797.

On the face of it, MS.7797 is an unremarkable little piece of correspondence. The letterhead indicates that was written on an ocean liner – it’s actually dateable from external evidence to the early 1930s, the great heyday of Transatlantic liner travel, the ship being the Empress of Britain belonging to the Canadian Pacific Line. The recipient is addressed only as “Dear Doctor” - one presumes this is the ship’s medical officer. The writer is clearly suffering from problems in the throat – he thanks the doctor for a gargle he has been given, and asks about a nose and throat spray that he has used in the past when suffering from catarrh. His valet, he explains, forgot to pack both his normal supply of the medication, and the atomiser used to administer it, and he is trying to work out what it is that he should ask for to replace this.

So far so good, but where do the giant apes come in? Well, turning the page we see the writer’s identity, and it takes us into the reliably fascinating world of Edwardian pulp fiction: this is the thriller-writer Edgar Wallace (1875-1932). Wallace was born the illegitimate son of actors and had to make his own way in the world: drifting through various jobs in his teens and early twenties, he found his metier when he enlisted in the Army at the time of the Boer War, at the age of 25. Not that he was cut out to be a soldier: he disliked the infantry (he was physically lazy and completely unsuited to a life of square-bashing) and arranged a transfer to the Royal Army Medical Corps, then moved on from here to the Press Corps, where he found his niche. (Our RAMC/1707 documents him at this time of his life, performing at a military entertainment by reciting a Kipling poem.) From here on his career was built around the Fleet Street core skill of producing large amounts of readable text quickly and to deadline: journalism for the Daily Mail and similar middle-brow outlets, and a series of thrillers beginning in 1905 with The Four Just Men. Various apocryphal tales are related about the speed and fluency with which he produced his works: one of these has him dictating an entire novel over the course of a weekend. By the early 1920s, one of his publishers estimated that a quarter of the books read in England that year were by Wallace.

The ability to produce text quickly and in a way that reflected the public’s taste reliably soon had Wallace receiving calls from the film industry, and it is here that our letter comes in. In late 1931 Wallace sailed for the United States, engaged by RKO to work as a “script doctor”. This letter was written on the voyage across the Atlantic (the name of the ship enables us to tie it to this journey) - although he doesn't give us the exact date, we're in November 1931 and thus pretty much exactly eighty years ago. In Hollywood, prolific as ever, Wallace cranked out various scripts to order, including – in a pulp-fiction summit meeting – one for The Hound of the Baskervilles. Most notable, however, was the project on which he worked from December 1931 to February 1932, collaborating on “a gorilla picture” with producer Merian C. Cooper. This was to be King Kong, which of course remains to this day one of the most famous products of the Golden Age of Hollywood.

It was also the culmination of Wallace’s career, although he never lived to see it: by the time the film was released in 1933 he was dead. A lifetime of too much food, several packs of cigarettes every day, lots of sugary tea and as a little exercise as possible (the classic Fleet Street lifestyle, although to do Wallace justice he was a virtual teetotaller, omitting one of the classic journalist’s vices at least) caught up with him in late January 1932, when a doctor identified that he had been suffering from severe diabetes, untreated, for years. As if in response to the diagnosis, Wallace fell into a coma almost immediately and died in Beverly Hills on February 7th.

We see him in MS.7797, then, in the very last months of his life, but at a high point in his career: about to embark on the project that would outlive him and the reputation of his books. Wallace’s novels are still in print (at least, some of them – he wrote over 170 books and many require a search of second-hand bookshops) but although Sanders of the River and The Four Just Men have an honourable and secure place in the history of pulp, they don't have the massive public profile that they did in Wallace’s heyday. King Kong, however, lives on, and has been paid the ultimate Hollywood compliments of remakes and spinoffs. In a sense, having produced the script Wallace’s work was done, his place in history secure. It’s unlikely that the next remake will feature the Wellcome Library, with a screaming Fay Wray held aloft above 183 Euston Road. Still, we like to feel proud of our little foothold in this landmark of popular culture.


Images
MS.7797, front.
MS.7797, back, including signature (and annotation by a previous owner of the letter).
R.M.S. Empress of Britain, passing through the Saint Lawrence River near Quebec. Taken on July 10th in 1937, on the "Ile d'Orléans" by Horace Bélinge, now deceased. Made available under Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ ) through Wikimedia.
Original poster for King Kong, 1933, from Wikimedia, now out of copyright in the USA, EU and many other domains (see Wikimedia page for details of copyright status).

A big push for midwifery history

The last few weeks have seen two major collaborative projects in the field of midwifery archives come to fruition, opening up exciting new avenues for research and exploration.

Thanks to the Wellcome Library’s own partnership with the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) and the generous support of the ICM for the cataloguing of its archive, this has now been completed and the material is fully accessible to researchers. Further details about this collection are available in a separate blog post.

On 4th November 2011 an event was also held at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) to mark the re-launch of the library and archive collections of the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) which are now co-located with the RCOG’s own archive and heritage collections at the RCOG’s headquarters at 27 Sussex Place, London. As highlighted by several speakers at the launch, anyone with even a passing awareness of the history of maternity care in this country will realise that the relationship between the two sets of professionals represented by these bodies has not always run smoothly and that childbirth has always been a highly-contested area, medically, socially, culturally and historiographically. This makes it all the more to be applauded that the RCM and the RCOG have shown the necessary vision to work together to secure a future for their heritage collections. We hope that some of our own users will support the venture by taking a pleasant stroll across Regent’s Park to consult them.

To give you a flavour, an outline catalogue of the RCM archive is now available on-line. There are organisational records going back to the foundation in 1881 of the Matron’s Aid Society. In addition, uniforms, badges, instruments and other objects, photographs, posters and the papers of individual midwives such as case registers, notebooks, and diaries give an insight into the work and experiences of midwives during the 20th century. Printed collections include a complete set of Nursing Notes and Midwives Chronicle. There are obvious synergies with the material held in the Wellcome Library, such as the papers of Rosalind Paget, who was heavily involved with the then Midwives Institute, and which include material relating to the running of the journal and the company Nursing Notes Ltd.

The RCM heritage collections can now be consulted alongside those of the RCOG which include its own institutional records, the personal papers of obstetricians and gynaecologists, and records of related organisations such as the Women's Visiting Gynaecological Club and the Royal Maternity Charity. The College also houses a collection of obstetric, midwifery, surgical and gynaecological instruments and artefacts and around 2000 rare books, including multiple editions of all the major works in the area, such as the obstetric atlases of Smellie and Hunter, and runs of clinical reports from maternity hospitals.

We have already noticed a growing interest in the history of midwifery, including from our friends at de partu, and hope that access to these major collections will give a further impetus to this trend.

Author: Jenny Haynes

Images:
- Midwife teaching at antenatal class c1940 (RCM/PH7/2)
- Midwife providing instruction in breastfeeding c1940 Archive Reference (RCM/PH7/2)
Both from the RCM Archive held at the RCOG. Copyright of the Royal College of Midwives.

Please DO eat in the library

I know, shocking! But for one weekend only, lucky guests at the Wellcome Collection’s Feast to Cure Melancholy on Friday 11 and Saturday 12 November were invited to break the rules and dine in the library’s Reading Room as part of an edible experiment exploring 17th-century beliefs about the four humours.

Each guest spent the evening in the guise of a new character, from melancholic Prudence (a student suffering from anxiousness due living in city away from her rural family, and uncomfortable with the fast pace of city life) to choleric Rowland (a quick tempered City worker, in a pressured environment on a high salary, finding it difficult to wind down after work).

On hand to offer advice were a Physician, Apothecary and Housewife, each competing with the other to provide the most effective and affordable cures for guests’ physical and psychological humoral imbalances.

But if snail scum and fox’s lungs cures didn’t appeal, the edible remedies created by food artists Blanch & Shock were a delight for both the eye and the palate. How could melancholic Prudence not be put in a better mood by the sanguine treat of wild mallard breast and Jerusalem artichoke?

And now the Reading Room is once again a place of peaceful, food-free study, I can’t help wondering, did it all really happen?

Posted on behalf of Helen

Image copyright Mike Massaro

Flo-Motion: Nightingale in Wellcome Sound and Vision

Next Thursday (24th November), Wellcome Library Research Officer Ross MacFarlane will be giving a talk at the Florence Nightingale Museum. Flo-Motion: Nightingale in Wellcome Sound and Vision will explore audio visual material from the Library's collections which have a connection to the life and legacy of Florence Nightingale.

From the starting point of a recording of Nightingale's voice, the talk will examine the fascinating origins of this historic audio recording and reveal the curious connection between Nightingale, Henry Wellcome and the dawn of television. The talk will also feature films showing the treatment of injured soldiers from both World Wars and Public Health films from the 1940s.

The talk will be followed by a free glass of wine and an opportunity to view the museum. More details, including booking information, is available from the Florence Nightingale Museum.

The Mystery Correspondents

Arthur Balfour, politician; Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate; Sir James Crichton Browne, physician and psychologist…

In 2002, the Wellcome Library’s online catalogue of archives and manuscripts went live, replacing various large printed manuscript catalogues and several hundred typed lists of archives. Putting all this data online involved a campaign of retroconversion, the majority as part of a dedicated project and the remainder, as has been noted here before, undertaken over succeeding years by the archives department in odd snatches of time (typically, something to be done on a quiet Saturday morning). Almost all catalogues are now converted, with the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists (SA/CSP) the only major collection still to appear on line in full (this one is on the stocks and approximately two-thirds converted).

Andrew Carnegie, manufacturer and philanthropist; Austen Chamberlain and Neville Chamberlain, politicians; Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury…

Converting a catalogue is (relatively) simple, although the archivist faced with a 1980s word-processed document whose page-layout is generated entirely through the use of tab-stops might snort derisively at that claim! A more difficult issue is how to capture the information that was often held in indices, some many pages long, at the end of the catalogue. Turning a line in a catalogue that tells one that file PP/BAR/C/234 is a file of correspondence from people with surnames A-H, covering the following dates, into a database record, is fairly quick. But how to capture and store usefully the information held in an index of correspondents made up of lines like this one:

Bridges (Robert Seymour), poet. Letters, 1900-29 and n.d. C/234, 316, 367, 391, 502, 1089
Browne (George Buckston), surgeon; Kt (1932). Letters, 1901, 1925. C/396; M/3, f. 17v.

Well, you could simply cut and paste the index into the Notes field at the collection’s top-level record, and get the desired result instantly. For some small collections with short indices this is what we have done. For the very long index, however – forty, fifty, one hundred pages long – this is obviously unsuitable: no-one is prepared to hold the scroll-down button for minutes at a time to reach the desired name. (Indeed, much thinking on web-design suggests that asking readers to scroll down at all loses up to a third of one’s audience.)

In an ideal world, Robert Bridges’ and George Buckston Browne’s names would of course appear on the catalogue records for each of the eight files listed in the sample line. To undertake this, however, would mean embarking on a lengthy process of handcrafting, picking each line apart entry by entry: just think of the two lines above, which would require one to visit and edit eight separate database records, and multiply that by hundreds. Readers would wait years for the information to be made available on that basis. What is needed is something that breaks up the index in at least a partly granular fashion, whilst being relatively quick and, ideally, something that can be done through routine, mechanical processes.

In recent years we have experimented with various processes that take word-processed indices and break them up using search-and-replace commands, splitting data in a way that enables them to be put in a spread-sheet and sorted before returning to word-processed form. We will spare you the details! – the upshot, however, is that with the expenditure of only a little time, many pages of index can at least be broken up into the data that relates to individual sections of the catalogue, thus enabling readers to make a better judgement of which letters relating to an individual are relevant, and which are not. In collections of family papers, in which each section may correspond to a family member, this is particularly useful, as it may be a particular family member, and him/her alone, whose correspondence is of interest. With some thought about the way the data in the original catalogue is shaped, this process can be done in hours or days rather than the months required to handcraft records for individual files: the work of the proverbial quiet Saturday, rather than a long-running process.

This process has been applied to various collections in the past, most notably the Hodgkin family papers (PP/HO). The latest collection to receive this treatment is the papers of Sir Thomas Barlow (PP/BAR), Royal physician, and his family. The Barlow papers span almost a century (Barlow lived a long life, from 1845 to 1945, and the collection continues with the papers of his children), and a large proportion is correspondence, covering a wide range of activities: not merely medicine, but also the arts, philanthropy and personal family letters – the last including letters from his son Basil from hospital after being wounded on the Western Front, wounds from which eventually he died. The range of correspondents, then, is a wide one. All the very varied names set at intervals into this article, in italics, are drawn from the Barlow catalogue’s index. The Barlow catalogue has been available on the online catalogue for some years now, but it is probably safe to say that the inclusion now of the original cataloguer’s hard work indexing the papers virtually doubles the value of the collection to the researcher. The reader is invited to look at the section-level records for the collection (go to the “tree” of the collection here and click the letter next to any of the entries to get into detailed section-level records) or simply to search for a name of their choice to see if it is in there (go to http://archives.wellcome.ac.uk, put the surname into the Any Text box and put PP/BAR into the Reference box). There will be the names listed above in italics and many, many more, including

King Edward VII, Field-Marshal Douglas Haig, Myra Hess DBE, pianist famous for morale-boosting free concerts during World War II…and more…

Image: Sir Thomas Barlow, undated caricature by Spy from Vanity Fair (in Wellcome Library Iconographic Collections, visible at Wellcome Images as image L0008407)

Don’t search our catalogues...

…search your browser!

Ever wondered if the Wellcome Library held something but couldn’t really be bothered to check? Ever wanted to have our search just a little more within your reach?

The Chrome browser’s omnibox gives you that help at your fingertips.

 

We’ve had information about how to add search engines to your Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers for a while. This is now updated with the instructions for adding a Wellcome Library search to Chrome’s omnibox.

It only takes a minute to set up, and will let you search our catalogues from your workspace instead of having to come to ours.

Armistice Day

From the papers of papers of Sir Matthew Fell (1872-1959), (RAMC/364), Wireless Press number 58 giving news of the armistice.

The International Confederation of Midwives

The cataloguing of the records of the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) is now completed and the catalogue is available on-line at the Wellcome Library, reference SA/ICM. The Library is extremely grateful to the International Confederation of Midwives for funding a temporary post to catalogue this extensive collection.

The idea for an international midwives’ organisation started in Belgium in 1919, when many national midwifery associations combined to form an International Midwives Union, which held its first International Congress in 1922 – at that time only representing European countries. Further meetings were held in 1932, 1934, 1936 and 1938; despite the loss of organisational records during the War, reports from these Congresses survive, and can be found in SA/ICM/R/1, Communications of the International Midwives Union. They offer an interesting insight into the issues facing midwives in the context of the 1930s: increasing mass unemployment, urban and rural poverty and poor nutrition, the rise of fascism and latterly, impending war. The 1936 Congress, for instance, was held in Berlin, and hosted and attended by the German government. While the Fuhrer was not able to personally attend, Hitler sent messages and various government ministers gave speeches exhorting the Congress to address the primary issue – in the government’s eyes – of the falling birth rate, and of the need for all countries represented to take urgent action and “promote motherhood”. The issue reporting this Congress includes a rather chilling fold-out photograph taken of the proceedings, showing fully uniformed SS and other Nazi government ministers addressing the Congress, made up of European midwives from Belgium, The Netherlands, France, and Great Britain. The tension created by the drive to war is further reflected in the records of the 1938 Congress in Paris, which concludes with a final resolution calling on Europe’s governments to “make peace, not war”. The next Congress, planned for 1941, did not take place because of the outbreak of war, and subsequently all records of the organisation from 1922, held in Belgium, were lost.

Based in France after the Second World War, the International Midwives’ Union agreed in 1953 that the first ‘World Congress’ of midwives should take place in London in 1954, the culmination of a drive by leading British and European midwives to re-start the international organisation after the upheaval of WW2. At this Congress the ICM adopted its new title and constitution, including a Triennial International Congress and administrative cycle. The ICM Secretariat was based at the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) headquarters in London. The RCM President, Miss Nora Deane, was elected first ICM President and Miss Marjorie Bayes elected Executive Secretary, a post she held until 1975. English, French and Spanish were now the official languages of the Confederation, having been English, French and German prior to the War. Membership of the ICM is of national midwifery associations, not individual practitioners. The RCM is the UK member association.

Records of the 1954 Congress (extensively covered in the collection with reports and photographs of proceedings found in SA/ICM/R and SA/ICM/U respectively) demonstrate the organisational success in ensuring midwives from around the world attended, and the real enthusiasm and drive of the founder members, many senior and renowned midwives in their respective countries, for promoting the role of the midwife as central to improving the standard of maternal and child health globally. Their approach reflected a wider international consensus, in the context of post-war political and economic recovery, of the need to improve maternal mortality and morbidity in resource-poor and developing countries, and to survey the current state of national midwifery training, status and practise in order to develop specific, locally applicable strategies. As the only international midwifery organisation affiliated to the United Nations (UN) and the World Health Organisation (WHO), the ICM played a leading role in international collaborative efforts to improve maternal and child health (MCH) over the following 25 years, and much of the collection relates to these activities.

In 1961, a Joint Study Group (JSG) was formed by the ICM and the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics (FIGO); the JSG was based at the ICM Secretariat, and Marjorie Bayes, ICM Executive Secretary, acted as Secretary (SA/ICM/M). Its first task was to carry out a 4 year international survey of midwifery and maternal health, the first of its kind, published in 1966 as Maternity Care in the World, providing information and data on 174 countries covering approximately 75% of the world’s population. This survey, later updated in a second edition published in 1976, provided the basis for the JSG’s aims and objectives: to promote family planning (FP) as an integral part of the midwife’s role; the establishment of common training requirements for a minimum international standard and uniformity of licensure regulations for midwives; and later, addressing the role of untrained birth attendants. The JSG developed a programme of Regional workshops, seminars and training for midwives, but was continually hampered by lack of funding; in 1972, its work was supported by a grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), which established a new ICM/USAID Project enabling the continuation, in close collaboration with FIGO, of the Regional workshop programme (SA/ICM/L).

The ICM records from this period offer a wealth of material relating to country-specific population, health, and economic data, maternal and child health, and the status and practice of midwives and other health care providers, e.g. Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs); and the numerous Workshops and projects organised and/or sponsored by the ICM, including post-project reports and evaluation. The material also reflects the geo-political shape of the world at this time (e.g. the Cold War, prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union), and the political and cultural context in which international MCH programmes, and specifically ICM staff and local midwife organisers, worked to deliver projects and training across countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America (SA/ICM/K, SA/ICM/L, SA/ICM/M). The promotion and provision of family planning in some Latin American countries, for instance, was frequently subject to and in conflict with national health policies concerned with falling birth rates and the promotion of the family, as well as the influence of the Catholic Church on reproductive health legislation. Regional workshops in Africa, often years in planning, could be severely disrupted by local political conflict, or poor communication and travel infrastructure.

The USAID grant was terminated in 1980, and the ICM/FIGO JSG dissolved in 1982, with the creation of a Liaison Group to link the activities of FIGO standing committees with relevant international organisations in the field of MCH. Having adopted the regional structure of the WHO, with representatives at the regional offices in New York, Geneva, Vienna, Manila and Brazzaville, the ICM continued its collaborative work to achieve common goals in reducing maternal mortality, now the leading cause of death among women of reproductive age in developing countries, and to lobby for specific midwife representation at World Health forums and assemblies. The Safe Motherhood Initiative (SMI) launched by the WHO in 1987 built on the work carried out in the 1970s and early 1980s, and became a major focus of ICM cooperation with WHO/UNICEF. The ICM immediately adopted and worked to implement the 1987 WHO Action Statement on Safe Motherhood in support of its programme to improve obstetric care and outcomes for women, and to prevent the huge burden of unwanted pregnancies by increasing access to family planning (SA/ICM/P/1). The global challenge to reduce the MMR by 50% by 2015 was formalised as one of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) in 2000, and continues to frame ICM policy and activities.

Another key theme during the 1980s and 1990s was the emerging HIV pandemic and its devastating impact on reproductive health in countries with already high maternal mortality, with consequences for midwifery education, training and practice. Material relating to HIV/AIDS can be found in SA/ICM/K, and SA/ICM/P/1 and SA/ICM/P/2.

The ICM communicates with its member associations via a Newsletter (SA/ICM/S), and regular Letters to Members, which include a summary and update of ICM activities, the Triennial Congress and election of Executive Committee, key policy initiatives, membership information, Regional reports. The membership records and correspondence (SA/ICM/G and SA/ICM/H) include fascinating information about local infrastructure, regulation, training, remuneration and status of midwives in respective countries, and also demonstrate the contrast between conditions in developed and developing countries for midwives attempting to organise and participate in professional activities.

The history and records of the Confederation are particularly relevant today: at time of writing, UN reports highlight the challenges of meeting the MDG target to reduce maternal mortality, in the context of the global population increase and failure to significantly reduce fertility rates, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. The ICM remains at the forefront of international policy development to influence and promote midwifery at global and national levels, and to pro-actively support international strategies to improve maternal and child health, for the achievement of ‘Safe Motherhood’ for all women.

The ICM held its 29th Triennial Congress this year in June, in Durban, South Africa. For post-Congress reports, and for more information about current activities, see their website: http://www.internationalmidwives.org/.

Author: Deborah Holland, ICM Project Archivist

(We may add as a footnote that there have also been recent additions to our existing catalogue of the papers of the influential worker for global MCH, Cicely Williams (1893-1992)).


Image: midwives at the 1954 ICM founding congress (from the Nursing Times; image copyright The Nursing Times Limited).

Approaching Sikandra

Everyone who visits Agra in Uttar Pradesh visits the Taj Mahal, the monument which was built from 1632 onwards by the sorrowful Shah Jahan (1592-1666), fifth Mughal emperor, in memory of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, after her death in childbirth.

Not everyone visits nearby Sikandra. Here, those who do will find the magnificent earlier mausoleum of Akbar (1542-1605), the mighty third Mughal emperor, conqueror of northern India, patron of arts and sciences, and grandfather of Shah Jahan. [1] The mausoleum (above) was planned by Akbar himself and built by his son Jahangir (1569-1627) between 1605 and 1613. At Sikandra, the future builder of the Taj Mahal could therefore contemplate the mausoleum of his grandfather, built by his father. One might suppose that the earlier mausoleum would have influenced the later.

The historically-aware visitor would therefore want to view the Taj Mahal in the perspective of Sikandra, inter alia and vice versa. And many people have done so. The views of some of them on the Taj will be the subject of another posting on this blog. The present posting, however, concerns some of the many paintings, drawings, prints, photographs and written accounts of Sikandra that have found their way into historic British collections such as the India Office Library in the British Library, the British Museum, the Wellcome Library and no doubt others. This posting reviews some of the drawings and prints of Sikandra in the Wellcome Library, a repository of (among other things) records of sepulchralia of all kinds, and of Indian history.

Coloured soft-ground etching with watercolour by William Hodges, 1788.
Wellcome Library no. 26689i

We start on the approach road, in the company of William Hodges (1744-1797). Under the patronage of Warren Hastings, Hodges had sketched Sikandra on the spot in the early 1780s, and produced this print in 1788 --a year in which India was in the news in England because Burke, Fox and Sheridan were railing against Hastings at the opening of the latter’s trial in Westminster. The road at Sikandra as seen by Hodges is a broad dirt-track with a couple of donkeys on it, surrounded on either side with dilapidated minor tombs scattered in a park. More inviting than the immediate surroundings is the prospect of fine buildings glimpsed through the trees on the far right.

Coloured etching and aquatint by Thomas Daniell, 1795.
Wellcome Library no. 27432i

We next find ourselves tranported not only to the end of the road but also forwards seven years to the year 1795, when this aquatint by Thomas Daniell was published (above). It shows the leftmost of those buildings glimpsed through the trees: it is one of the gateways leading to the the mausoleum of Akbar. Though only a gateway, it is a grand building of sandstone topped with four white marble minarets. Not so long previously, vandalistic snipers have had some sport shooting the tops clean off those minarets. In the clearing in front of the gateway, a military camp is still in residence: it is a British one, to which the artist Thomas Daniell is attached.

In the early nineteenth century Indian artists also produced views of the building, presumably for purchase in the main by western visitors. These are commonly called Company drawings (after the East India Company), and those in the Wellcome Library are characteristic examples. One watercolour (left: Wellcome Library no. 25209i is small and relatively simplified, though attractive enough to its previous owner to be put into a gold frame.

However, the painter of a larger one (39 x 56.3 cm., below Wellcome Library no. 579856i), spares no effort to do justice to the elaborate flower and leaf motifs realized in pietra dura around the central doorway.


A photograph taken in 2008 (right) shows that the tops of the minarets have been restored. By comparison with the painting above, the photograph vindicates the great care taken by the watercolour artist. The minarets themselves may be called the grandfathers of those which stand at the four corners of the Taj Mahal.

Soft-ground etching by William Hodges. Wellcome Library no. 26823i

The gateway at Sikandra leads to a long walkway at the end of which is the mausoleum of Akbar the Great. Starting again with Hodges in 1788 (above), he shows the building as being obscured by vegetation. There seems to be no picture of the mausoleum by Daniell, but there are plenty of Company drawings by Indian artists, made slightly later and showing the building (actually or ideally) cleared of trees and bushes, perhaps in order to show it as they imagined it to be at the time of Akbar's interment.

Wellcome Library no. 579159i

This view (above), like three others in the Wellcome Library, shows an interplay between a white marble colonnade on the ground floor and three sandstone terraces above adorned at the corners with domes of the Rajasthan type (chhatris).

In current photographs of the building, that interplay no longer exists: the ground floor arcade seems to be painted red. All however show the topmost terrace as of crisply carved white marble, marking by its filigree craftsmanship and costly materials the cenotaph of Akbar, high above his actual tomb directly below in the crypt.

The Company paintings (such as, left: Wellcome Library no 25226i) differ among themselves in showing the setting of the building in varying perspectives in relation to its surrounding char bagh or Persian pleasure garden: the setting provides cooling channels for running water, gardens and pools.

The effect of the setting is to emphasize that even the humblest of the living can here enjoy the created world more than Akbar, for all his power, now that he is dead. One small but highly detailed watercolour (right: Wellcome Library no. 578936i) is taken from a viewpoint so close to the central runnel that the base of the first story is no longer visible, apparently as a gesture to western artistic conventions.

Finally, there is a complete outlier (left: Wellcome Library 575709i) in which the building is condensed so that the long first-storey terrace becomes the same width as the second storey. An inadvertent slighting of His Imperial Majesty! As we do not need to rely on this watercolour alone, we can afford to sympathize with the artist's mistake. The noble resting place of the mighty Akbar, author of this and other admirable buildings, remains for the recreation and inspiration of those lucky enough to visit it.

[1] Irfan Habib (ed.), Akbar and his India, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

Further reading
Catherine B. Asher, Architecture of Mughal India, Cambridge 1992 (The New Cambridge history of India, part I, vol. 4), pp. 105-111 (find in the Wellcome Library here )

Mildred Archer, Early views of India: the picturesque journeys of Thomas and William Daniell, 1786-1794, London: Thames and Hudson, 1980 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

Ernest Binfield Havell, A handbook to Agra and the Taj, Sikandra, Fatehpur-Sikri and the neighbourhood, London 1912

Thanks to the following for making their photographs available on Flickr.
Top: by Takehiko Ono at http://www.flickr.com/photos/onopko/529915275
Gateway: by Koshyk at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kkoshy/2252005330.
Detail of mausoleum by Saad.Akhtar at http://www.flickr.com/photos/saad/47375523.
Other images: Wellcome Library.

Brain Season on Radio 4

This week sees the beginning of BBC Radio 4's Brain Season.

The centrepiece of the season will be a new 10-part series, A History of the Brain, presented by Dr Geoff Bunn. The series airs at 1.45pm, Monday to Friday, for the next two weeks with an omnibus edition on Friday evenings at 9pm. The series will also be available as a podcast. Audio clips of the series are also available on the Radio 4 website, accompanied by an array of historical imagery from our picture libray, Wellcome Images.

Also airing today at 8pm will be The Lobotomists, which explores the controversial history of the lobotomy. As part of the research for the programme, Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist, Wellcome Library, spoke to the makers of the documentary about the Watts-Freeman lobotomy instruments we hold in our collections (the image above shows Dr Hall brandishing one of these tools).

The Lobotomists, A History of the Brain and the rest of the Brain Season will available for listeners in the UK to listen to after broadcast through the BBC iPlayer, for the next seven days. Listeners outwith these shores are able to listen live through the Radio 4 website.

Wellcome Library Insight - From Blue Beads to Hair Sandwiches: Edward Lovett's Folklore Collection

This week's free Wellcome Library Insight explores the figure of Folkore collector Edward Lovett, whose collection lies at the heart of the current Wellcome Collection exhibition Charmed Life.

Illustrated by personal correspondence held in our archives, the session will seek to explore Lovett's motivations and methods and offer an overview of the huge array of amulets, charms and talismans collected by him during the early years of the 20th Century (the themes of the session were also discussed in a recent article on the Daily Telegraph website).

The event takes place this Thursday (10th November) between 3 and 4pm. Tickets are available from 1.30pm on the day. Please see the Wellcome Collection website for more details.

Image: Sketch made by Edward Lovett, showing districts of London where Lovett had collected blue amulet necklaces, which were thought to protect the wearer from illness (WA/HMM/CO/Ear/532).

Papers of the Eugenics Society to be Digitised

We are delighted to announce that with the kind permission of the Galton Institute, and as part of our programme to create a Wellcome Digital Library, we will be digitising the papers of one of our most popular archive collections; the papers of the Eugenics Society. The collection will be digitised in full and made freely available online, subject to Data Protection and privacy issues as set out in our access policy (pdf). These images will enable readers to access large amounts of archive material remotely from anywhere in the world.

In order to develop this world-class digital resource access to the collection will be affected. The collection will be digitised in batches between 21st November 2011 and 26th September 2012. Please see the archives digitisation schedule for full details. We regret that we are unable to make any exceptions to allow individual readers access to material, and encourage readers to contact the Archives and Manuscripts team beforehand at archs+mss@wellcome.ac.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7611 8899 to ensure that material will be available for consultation. Microfilm copies of material in the Eugenics Society collection will not be affected and will remain available for consultation. Access to this collection whilst it is being digitised will continue to be granted only once prior written permission from the Galton Institute has been obtained.

The creation of the Wellcome Digital Library is due to be completed in late 2012. Other Library collections included in this phase of the project are the substantial Francis Crick archive, the papers of Fred Sanger, Arthur Ernest Mourant, the Medical Research Council Blood Group Unit, Honor Fell, and Carlos Paton Blacker. The aim is to provide a documentary record of modern genetics, not only from a scientific perspective, but also from political, economic, technological, social, cultural and personal viewpoints. It will throw open the doors of the Wellcome Library and its unique collections to a worldwide audience, and provide a global resource for the study of the history of medicine and modern bioscience.

Image credit: Photograph of Eugenics Society stand at the Exhibition of Health and Housing, c.1935. Reproduced from the Eugenics Society collection (SA/EUG/G.40) with the kind permission of the Galton Institute.

Author: Toni Hardy

The first antiques roadshow?

Today has seen the BBC celebrate 75 years since the launch of the world's first regular television service.

Given their current popularity, it's no surprise that the daytime schedules of both BBC1 and BBC2 have today (as on most other days) included a number of antiques shows - Bargain Hunt, Flog It! and Celebrity Antiques Roadtrip.

However, the origin of such BBC antiques shows - and let's not forget the long-running Antiques Roadshow, nor it's forerunner Going for a Song - may have an intriguing Wellcome connection...

The Wellcome Library holds a series of newspaper cuttings, collated by the Wellcome pharmaceutical business after its co-founder Sir Henry Wellcome's death in 1936. These cuttings not only include an array of obituaries from across the globe, but newspaper reports from the next few years on the establishment of the Wellcome Trust and the early sales of objects no longer deemed appropriate to be part of Wellcome's collection.

One such cutting dates from the 13th February and is from the Sunday Observer. "Television Pre-View of Auction - Model Ship Collection", is its title and the article is worth quoting in full:

"For the first time an important auction sale has had a television pre-view.

All three television programmes from Alexander Palace on Thursday included a selection of the 200 ship models collected by the late Sir Henry Wellcome. Tomorrow they will be offered for sale by auction at Alford House, Princes Gate, Knightsbridge.

While Mr M. B. Roberts explained their oddities, models of ships floated down the centuries and across the television screen. There was an Egyptian barge wanting but a thumb-sized Anthony and Cleopatra for perfection. Under the sun-smitten canopy of a Burmese state barge smooth-bronzed royalty sat.

A Chinese houseboat had the carved elaboration that rich merchants seek, but a galleon in silver had less of the spicy East about her. Her longest voyage had been from table-end to table-end, her hull a port decanter.

More curious was the paper filigree boat of no recognisable design, but of most fragile build. An ostrich egg-shell made her hull, hens' eggs her row-boats. Strange me and stranger fishes tramped her decks and frolicked in her little pot of ocean.

Lastly, there were the wooden walls of England reduced to a foreman's length - a stout original dockyard model of a 64-gun late eighteenth century man-o'-war. She had a dignity that made Mr Roberts wish for her a home in some national museum.

Whilst considering when a day's schedule on the BBC could feature only three programmes, let's also ponder whether this was the start of the BBC's auction and antiques broadcasting.

It should also be said that this isn't the only connection between the early days of television and Sir Henry Wellcome - there's a more direct link but it's one we'll save for a future date. Keep watching this space...

Image: Alexandra Palace (Credit: BBC)

Motherhood and apple pie

Some great graphic novels and comics have come into the library recently on the themes of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood.

Kate Brown’s graphic novel Fish+Chocolate provides three short stories around the theme of motherhood. The third of these, Matryoshka is the most powerful. With beautiful, intense and at times brutal imagery, it is the heart-rending account of a woman struggling to cope with the aftermath of miscarriage. It’s in no way a medical account, but the moving depictions of an alienating encounter with a well-meaning workmate, devastating recollections and hallucinations of loss and grief go some way towards helping an outsider (health professional or otherwise) empathise with the woman’s experience. Here's a stunning example of how graphic art might contribute to narrative medicine. You can see samples of the artwork in a review of all three of the stories at Forbidden Planet.

Entirely different in tone is Francesca Cassavetti’s The Most Natural Thing in the World, a deceptively light-hearted and charming take on a young couple’s journey from deciding to have a baby, trying to get pregnant, pregnancy, child-birth, through to coping with the new baby. It’s deceptive because, despite the comic (pun intended) tone, it doesn’t shy away from the emotional roller-coaster (for both parents) of pregnancy and childbirth, yet still manages not to be so worthy that it alienates non-parents or so scary as to terrify prospective new parents. Even without the great drawing, that’s quite an achievement.


Offering the male perspective on childbirth is the comic Miracleman (issue No. 9), with an episode entitled “Scenes from the nativity”. Miracleman (known as Marvelman in the UK version) is a superhero who was created by a scientist as a result of secret experiments with alien DNA. In this episode Miracleman rescues his heavily pregnant wife from an attack and flies her to an isolated location where he delivers their baby.

During the birth it is the father’s comments and thoughts that are to the fore as he delivers the baby and tries to reassure the mother: “yes… I can see the fontanelle and it doesn’t feel as if the cord’s tangled. Just keep breathing.” As the baby is delivered, he thinks about the scientist who created him in a laboratory: “Did it feel like this when you took the first cell scrapings? Did it feel like this as you watched it divide and replicate as you hauled me dripping from the tank?”. He concludes that for all the trauma, the natural birth of his own child is an act of redemption: “For here is blood. Here is violence… redeemed by love, by this pure act of creation.”

It has been suggested that the poignant quality of the scenes was a result of the writer Alan Moore’s experience of the birth of his own child. This issue of the comic gained some notoriety for the very explicit nature of the birth scenes, which, along with the use of some clinical language certainly suggest an eye witness account of childbirth. The significance of the Nativity is that the baby goes on to become the first naturally born superhero.

From the sublime to the seemingly ridiculous in four easy steps. My final offering is Al’s Baby, which was first published as a comic in serial form in 2000AD with Judge Dredd, but is now available as a graphic novel of the complete story. This is another very male view of pregnancy and motherhood, but with a twist. The violent gangster Al Bestardi, known as Al the Beast, is a hitman for mafia boss Don Luigi, and also married to his daughter, Velma. Al tells Velma that The Don has issued him with an ultimatum: either provide him with a grandson or “he’s gonna fit me up wit’ a pair a’ concrete overshoes!” Unfortunately for Al, Velma’s not willing to comply, she points to a newspaper headline that reads “Florida man gives birth” and suggests that Al could do it himself. At his wit’s end, Al goes for a consultation, where the doctor (held at gunpoint) unsurprisingly agrees to ‘remove a section of your intestine’ to make room for the pregnancy.
Once pregnant, Al goes through all the things involved in pregnancy, he gives up smoking his ‘gangster’ cigars, endures morning sickness, and goes for a scan: “nobody puts the grease on me Lady” he warns the nurse giving the scan. He is advised throughout his pregnancy, not by a recent mother, but by his henchman who reassures him that he has delivered three of his own. None of this stops him going about his hitman duties for Don Luigi. He practises changing diapers, feeding and bathing as a form of humiliation on one of his victims.

The birth itself couldn’t be more different from the naturalistic ‘nativity’ in Miracleman. In a modern operating theatre surrounded by a full medical team, he prepares for a caesarean section. Unfortunately the operation is interrupted by a deranged enemy who cries “Here comes your caesarean” as he hurls an axe and various surgical instruments at the prone figure of Al. In a whirlwind of sharp objects, blood and violence, the attacker is finally brought down by Velma, Al’s wife, and the caesarean proceeds as planned, culminating in the birth of their son. The issue ends with a charming family portrait of Al the Beast, Velma, and Don Luigi and his new grandson, festooned with the words “He’s one mean mother!”

A Merman comes ashore in Bromley

This Saturday (5th November), Wellcome Library Research Officer Ross MacFarlane will join Paolo Viscardi, one of the Horniman Museum's Natural History Curators, at the Bromley Musuem, Orpington, Kent, on "a voyage of discovery across oceans, through time and into the realm of the merman".

The free event, which begins at 11.30am, ties in with the temporary loan of the merman to the Bromley Museum from the Horniman. Before entering the Horniman's collections, the Merman was previously owned by the Wellcome, being purchased for Henry Wellcome in 1912.

For those wishing to join Paolo and Ross on their journey into the cultures and contexts of mermen and mermaids, more details on the event are available from the website of the Horniman Museum.

Image: Merman, Horniman Museum. Photograph by Heini Scneebelli.