'If not duffers won't drown'

We are pleased to announce that the papers of Roger E  C Altounyan (1922-1987) have now been catalogued and are available for research.

Roger Altounyan was a member of a distinguished Anglo-Armenian medical dynasty. His grandfather, born in Turkey, undertook medical education in the USA and Germany in the early twentieth century and founded a hospital in Aleppo, Syria. His son Ernest took over the running of this hospital and after qualifying in medicine Roger Altounyan worked there for a few years until changes in the political situation meant the family had to leave in 1955. There is a little material about this family background in PP/RCA/A.1/1.

During his childhood, the family enjoyed a sailing holiday in the Lake District with Arthur Ransome, a friend of his mother's family, an association which led Ransome to write the much-loved children's classic Swallows and Amazons and its sequels, in which Ship's Boy Roger Walker was based on Roger Altounyan, who remained very keen on small boat sailing in later life.

After education at Abbotsholme School (where he suffered from severe eczema), Roger Altounyan returned to Aleppo in 1939, and on the outbreak of World War II joined the RAF. He became a bomber pilot with particular responsibility for the development of low-level night flying procedures, and received the Air Force Cross in 1945. He then studied medicine at Cambridge and the Middlesex Hospital, qualifying in 1952, when he returned to Aleppo. After the family had to leave, he returned to England and found a job working for Bengers, a subsidiary of Fisons Pharmaceuticals and subsequently absorbed by them. He also undertook clinics in the chest departments of Manchester hospitals.

Altounyan had developed asthma while a medical student and was particularly interested in finding a remedy.  In order to examine the effects of various substances in a human subject he would induce attacks in order to record his response. The collection includes a substantial series of spirometer readings he took of these experiments using the equipment illustrated, recently part on an exhibition at the US National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland on the history of asthma.

This led to the development of Intal (disodium cromoglycate) from a Middle Eastern folk remedy, Khellin. Although Altounyan and his colleagues were told to stop pursuing the line of research they had begun, they continued this in secret with such success that Intal was passed through the necessary processes of approval and put into production with unusual alacrity.
This collection is particularly strong on Altounyan's work on Intal and other products during his period at Fisons; it also reflects his increasing international profile, in a series of files relating to talks and lectures given at a geographically broad range of venues. There is also a substantial amount of correspondence with colleagues as well as some material on working at Fisons generally.

His daring yet careful and responsible risk-taking in the interests of advancing understanding of asthma and its relief recalls the famous telegram that opens the action of Swallows and Amazons: 'Better drowned than duffers if not duffers won't drown'.

Lecture Announcement - Sustaining Plague Mortality in Late Medieval Milan

The Wellcome Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities 2012 Summer Seminar, ‘Health and Disease in the Middle Ages’, are delighted to announce details of a lecture by Ann G. Carmichael, M.D., Ph.D. (Associate Professor emerita, Indiana University, Bloomington, USA):

Sustaining Plague Mortality in Late Medieval Milan: Environmental Patterns and Non-Plague Causes of Death

3pm-4pm, 20th July 2012
Wellcome Collection Conference Centre
183 Euston Road
London
NW1 2BE

The lecture is free to attend. To reserve a space, please email Ross MacFarlane (r.macfarlane@wellcome.ac.uk)

Abstract: This talk will parse diagnoses of cause of death in Milan during the Sforza era, 1450-1524, using surviving urban mortality registers. With some lacunae, records that span three generations provide extraordinary detail for this time period. Diagnoses were recorded by the dukes’ Health Office, from oral and written reports made by physicians and surgeons in the metropolitan zone. Partial records survive from three severe plagues, from some epidemics of mixed plague and general crisis mortality, and from a few years of distinctively non-plague epidemic mortality. In all years, reporting diagnosticians were required to provide explanation for the death of every individual over age two years at death, if only to differentiate suspected cases of plague from non-suspect mortality. Every victim was further named and identified by parish, sector of the city, or other geographical locator. Often the physicians and surgeons offer far more detail than this minimum. From aggregate analysis of these records (a set of over 140,000 individual cases), the talk will explore questions that historians must now confront, now that we know late medieval plagues included deaths from Yersinia pestis. Plagues were multi-year crises, thus what human actions and environments helped to sustain plague mortality? What larger temporal and spatial patterns can we discern in the cases that these diagnosticians identified as plague deaths? What social and physical aspects of the natural and built environments were associated with higher plague mortality? In what ways did non-plague epidemics differ?

Image: From Fasciculus medicine, 1495 (EPB Incanabula 3.e.13 (SR))

New European Library portal goes live

The European Library's new portal has gone live, with this video showcasing its best features.

Designed to meet the needs of the research community worldwide, you can now cross-search nearly 10 million digital items from 48 national and research libraries across Europe.

We’ve blogged before about the Wellcome Library’s contributions to Europeana Libraries. We make our material available in the European Library through the Europeana Libraries project. In fact, our collections make an appearance in the new video at 1m 10s, Orthopaedic exercises for curvature of the spine, from Wellcome Film, and at 1m 26s, Engraving of a flea (from Micrographia), from Wellcome Images.

Guest Post: Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease

Dr James Kennaway is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Centre for the History of Medicine and Disease at Durham University. Here he describes the development of fears that music can make listeners ill.

Everyone has songs they can’t stand, and some of us are even tone deaf, but most people think of music as a very positive and healthy part of their lives. In the context of music therapy, it is even supposed to have medical benefits. However, my own research has revealed a darker side of music. For the last two hundred years many doctors, critics and writers have suggested that certain kinds of music have the power to cause neurosis, madness, hysteria and even death. My new book Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease outlines the development of theories that music can be seriously bad for your health, drawing on many happy hours spent looking at the books and archives held at the Wellcome Library.

By the eighteenth century, music was increasingly regarded less as an expression of cosmic harmony and more as a form of nervous stimulation. And like other dangerous modern stimulants such as novels or coffee, music, it was believed, could be the root of a whole range of illnesses. The glass harmonica, which works on the same principle as rubbing a finger around a glass of water, and makes a similarly eerie sound, was regarded as especially dangerous. Its popularity was such that Mozart composed for the instrument, but the idea that the instrument caused dangerous tension in the nerves was commonplace. In 1786 the German composer and harmonica player Karl Leopold Röllig suggested it could ‘make women faint; send a dog into convulsions, make a sleeping girl wake screaming through a chord of the diminished seventh, and even cause the death of one very young’. There are accounts of the instrument being banned by physicians who cited possible ill effects including prolonged shaking of the nerves, tremors in the muscles, fainting, cramps, swelling, paralysis of the limbs’ and seeing ghosts.

The first serious medical panic about a specific composer’s work related to Richard Wagner. His patron King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who would later succumb to a peculiarly Wagnerian form of madness, drowning with his psychiatrist in mysterious circumstances, reportedly passed out during a performance. Even more dramatically, the first singer to perform the role of Tristan, Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, died in a Tristan delirium at the age of 29. Von Carolsfeld was not the only person to apparently ‘die’ of Tristan. Aloys Ander, who had played Tristan in the abortive Vienna production, died insane in 1865. Such was the atmosphere of elicit eroticism surrounding Wagner’s work that the French writer Léon Bloy suggested that Wagner’s innovative idea of turning off the lights in the theatre was in order to allow secret groping in the audience. The American psychologist Aldred Warthin at the University of Michigan claimed that he had been informed by colleagues of quasi-hypnotised listeners being brought to orgasm by the composer’s music, but reported that he could not replicate this result in his experiments. He did however suggest that such Wagnerian trances ‘may be attended by danger’. ‘The symptoms of collapse developed at times’, he wrote, and ‘the accompanying emotional shock, might be increased beyond the point of safety’.

Other observers suggested that the sexual power of Wagner’s music could be related to what was seen as the medical condition of homosexuality. The famous sexologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, whose papers are held at the Wellcome Library, interviewed several men who said that listening to Wagner had made them homosexual. And in his 1907 book The Intersexes Xavier Mayne included a questionnaire in order for the reader to discover if he was ‘at all Uranian?’, a euphemism for homosexuality. Along with more obvious questions such as, ‘Do you feel at ease in the dress of the opposite sex?’, it asked, ‘Are you particularly fond of Wagner?’ Since it was widely believed that homosexuals, despite their innate musicality, were unable to whistle, it also asked, ‘Do you whistle well, and naturally like to do so?’

In general, however, the warnings about the effect of sexual excitement were generally aimed at women. As I learned from the Wellcome Library’s collection of old psychiatric and gynaecological textbooks, physicians argued that even piano lessons could have disastrous consequences for female health. In 1900 the doctor J. Herbert Dixon wrote that it could lead to ‘pronounced neurasthenia’ with symptoms such as ‘headaches, neuralgia, nervous twitchings, hysteria, melancholia and madness’. The consequences of modern musical over-stimulation for female fertility were a common topic of debate during the final decades of the nineteenth century. Some gynaecologists argued that musical stimulation could over-excite the female reproductive system, causing premature puberty and excessive menstruation. The Argentine psychiatrist José Ingegnerios described a case in 1907 that demonstrated, he believed, that female ‘morbid musical feeling’ peaked when the women concerned were menstruating. He also reported the case of a ‘melo-sexual’ young woman who achieved ‘complete sexual satisfaction’ from playing the piano, which had led to her ‘sexual neurasthenia’.

In the poisonous atmosphere of the Weimar Republic, anti-Semitism came to play an increasing role in attacks on ‘sick’ music. The Nazi takeover of power in 1933 was regarded by many critics of ‘degenerate music’ as the basis for a restoration of musical ‘health’ and liberation from the ‘bacillus of putrefaction’ of bad music. To this end, all foreign music sold in Germany had to be approved by the Reich Ministry for Propaganda. The combination of racism, reaction and misused psychiatry in music that had developed through the Weimar Republic and into the Nazi era reached a peak with the Degenerate Music exhibition in Düsseldorf in 1938. Musical ‘hygiene’ had become state policy, leading to thousands being silenced, exiled or murdered.

Race has played a major role in most medical panics about music since ragtime. Already in 1904, an American critic commented on the popularity of the argument that the ‘peculiar accent and syncopated time’ of ragtime could have a ‘disintegrating effect on nerve tissue and a similar result upon moral integrity’. The association of ragtime with nervousness was such that a whole sub-genre came into being, the ‘nervous rag’, including examples like Paul J. Know’s ‘Every Darkey has a Nervous Spell’ (a song about stealing chickens). When jazz hit the mainstream after the First World War there was a wave of anxiety about its effects on the body, sometimes involving the authorities on public health grounds. The Health Commissioner of Milwaukee, Dr George C. Ruhland opined that jazz excited ‘the nervous system until a veritable hysterical frenzy is reached. It is easy to see that such a frenzy is damaging to the nervous system and will undermine the health in no time’. The orchestra leader at Napa asylum near San Francisco stated that, ‘from my own knowledge that about fifty percent of our young boys and girls from the age 16 to 25 that land in the insane asylum theses days are jazz-crazy dope fiends and public dance hall patrons’.

After the Second World War, the influence of Pavlov’s concept of the conditioned reflex combined with an atmosphere of Cold War paranoia, led to a panic about the supposed ability of music to ‘brainwash’ listeners, causing mental illness and political trouble. The term "brainwashing" emerged during the Korean War, when it was feared that Communists had developed powerful forms of mind control. The CIA then promoted the term to explain the behaviour of American POWs and began its own research into such techniques, some of which used music. The prominent English psychiatrist William Sargant, whose papers are kept in the Wellcome Library, advanced a Pavlovian account of musical manipulations in his book Battle for the Mind, which portrayed rock ‘n’ roll as a dangerous threat to the mind. As I discovered from Sargant’s own copy of the magazine held at the Wellcome Library, he later argued in an interview in Newsweek that Patty Hearst had been turned from an heiress kidnap victim into a politically motivated armed robber by loud rock music.

In America right-wing evangelical Christians have used the idea of rock music as a sinister form of brainwashing to argue that it was literally a Communist plot. Author David Noebel argued that, ‘The Communist scientists and psycho-politicians have devised a method of combining music, hypnotism and Pavlovianism to nerve-jam the children of our nation without our leaders, teachers or parents being aware of its shocking implications’. ‘If [such] scientific programmes [were] not exposed,’ he warned, ‘degenerated Americans will indeed raise the Communist flag over their own nation’. He provided ingenious if paradoxical reasoning to explain why Communist states themselves banned rock music although it was their own sinister invention - it just showed that they know how dangerous it really was! Along with well-worn themes relating to sex and drugs, Noebel also brought to light a less common aspect of music’s dangers – the threat posed to plants. He reported an experiment conducted by Mrs Dorothy Retallack of Denver that demonstrated, he claimed, that avant-garde classical music made plants wilt and Led Zeppelin made them die.

The American anxiety about musical brainwashing that developed in the context of the Cold War in the 1950s was in part shifted onto another supposed worldwide conspiracy during the Reagan era - Satanism. During the 1980s and 1990s a full-scale moral panic swept the country, linking the pseudo-science of brainwashing, the literal belief in a supernatural satanic threat and the musical genre of heavy metal. A wide range of books with titles like The Devil’s Disciples, and (my personal favourite) Hit Rock’s Bottom accused certain bands of brainwashing innocent American teenagers with subliminal messages which turned them towards devil worship, sexual immorality, murder and suicide.

One apparent element of this diabolical plot was the use of so-called ‘Backmasking’, hidden messages in the music that only made sense to the conscious mind when played forwards, which, it was argued, could influence listeners subliminally and thus damaging their mental health. Bands like The Beatles popularised backmasking techniques pioneered by 1950s’ musique concrète composers, sparking conspiracy theories relating to what the messages really said. Self-proclaimed experts often disagreed about what dangerous message was hidden in the music, and exposed themselves to ridicule with their analysis of backmasking tracks. One well-known preacher in Ohio publicly burned a recording of the theme tune to the TV series Mr. Ed (which featured a talking horse) because he said it had ‘Someone sing this song for Satan’ backwards.

Just as the novel became more respectable as the cinema became the bugbear in the early twentieth century, and the cinema was replaced by the ‘video nasty’ in the 1980s only to be replaced in turn by the Internet, so each new musical medium has been viewed by many as especially ‘modern’, immoral and bad for the health. In the last couple of years a new medical/moral panic about the danger of sound has taken the place of backmasking in the public imagination: ‘i-dosing’. The Daily Mail was among the first to hype this potential new moral panic, with an article describing ‘the world of “i-Dosing”, the new craze sweeping the internet in which teenagers used so-called ‘digital drugs’ to change their brains in the same way as real-life narcotics’. I-dosing involves so-called binaural beats, a tone of slightly varying frequencies is played to each ear and the listener can perceive an extra low beat.

More real - and much more worrying - is the deployment of music and sound in warfare. Like waterboarding, the use of music to ‘break’ a prisoner leaves no visible scars that might cause an outrage if they were shown in the media. As early as May 2003 the BBC was reporting that the US army had played Metallica’s ‘Enter Sandman’ and Barney the Dinosaur’s ‘I Love You’ to ‘uncooperative’ detainees at high volume in shipping containers.  It seems that although almost all the panic about music’s effect on health over the past couple of centuries has been disproved, this more modern application of music may be seriously bad for the health after all.

This post is based on a radio programme (available online) based on Dr Kennaway's research.  For more on recurring fears about musical hypnosis and brainwashing, see James Kennaway, 'Musical Hypnosis: Sound and Selfhood from Mesmerism to Brainwashing', Social History of Medicine, (2012) 25(2): 271-289.   (PDF available through open access). Bad Vibrations: The History of the Idea of Music as a Cause of Disease is available now.

Images:
- Dandies at the opera, one of them swooning, overcome with emotion. Coloured etching by I.R. Cruikshank, 1818 (Wellcome Library no. 12030i)
- Richard von Krafft-Ebing. Photogravure. (Wellcome Library no. 13018i)
- William Walters Sargant, identity card, 1947 (PP/WWS/A.19)
- Pierre Schaeffer, early exponent of musique concrète (photograph in Wikimedia Commons)

Guest Post: History of Healthcare Curriculum for Excellence Resource

In the following post, Dr Emma Newlands (Lecturer, University of Strathclyde) discusses the creation of a history of medicine web resource aimed at schools in Scotland

The History of Health and Healthcare Curriculum for Excellence Resource is a web resource devised by academics in the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at Glasgow Caledonian and Strathclyde Universities. Its aim is to deliver history of medicine materials to local schools, centred round the key themes of: infectious disease in the 19th century, disease in the developing world, occupational health, mental health, the rise of the NHS, and war and medicine.

The project began in 2011 with researchers at Strathclyde and Glasgow Caledonian working with local school teachers and archivists to determine what sorts of materials would fit into the Curriculum for Excellence scheme in Scotland. This aims to develop four key attributes -  successful learners, confident individuals, responsible citizens and effective contributors - through interdisciplinary learning.

The Wellcome Library’s collection of art, film, photographs and Medical Officer of Health reports proved to be an excellent source of information for the project and in August 2011 Rachel Meach undertook an internship in the Library with the task of mining the collection to identify resources that could be employed by teachers in the classroom. In particular, Sir John Simon’s reports on the health of the population of London during the mid-nineteenth century, provide excellent first-hand accounts of the public health issues facing urban populations during this period. Also, a film such as Hospitals for All, made by the UK Ministry of Health in 1948, teaches students about the beginnings National Health Service by focusing on three Scottish hospitals and their specialised departments.

With the website now live, the next stage in the Curriculum for Excellence project is to promote the resource through visits to local schools. None of this would have been possible without the help and advice offered by staff in the Wellcome Library. From all at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare and Glasgow, a huge thank you!

Image: View of the interior of a ward off the Bellahouston theatre, Royal Glasgow Infirmary (Wellcome Images, L0018637)

Author: Dr Emma Newlands

Papers of Carlos Paton Blacker to be digitised

As part of our programme to create a Wellcome Digital Library, we are pleased to announce that we will be digitising the papers of Carlos Paton Blacker. This will include the surprise addition to his papers received in March. 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. These images will enable readers to access large amounts of archive material remotely from anywhere in the world.

Blacker’s papers reflect his long and active career in psychiatry (including as psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital and as an Adviser to the Ministry of Health), and his activities with a number of organisations interested in population and birth control, including the Birth Control Investigation Committee, the Population Investigation Committee, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the Simon Population Trust. Blacker was also Secretary to the Eugenics Society between 1931-1961. His activities as Secretary are documented in his own papers as well as in the papers of the Eugenics Society, which are also being digitised. Through the Wellcome Digital Library Blacker’s correspondence and papers in these separate collections will be digitally united.

The collection will be digitised between 23rd July 2012 and 5th November 2012. In order to develop this world-class digital resource access to the collection will be affected. 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 arch+mss@wellcome.ac.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7611 8899 to ensure that material will be available for consultation.

The creation of the Wellcome Digital Library is due to be completed later this year. Other Library collections included in this phase of the project are the substantial Francis Crick archive, the papers of Fred Sanger, Arthur Ernest Mourant, Sir Peter Medawar, the Medical Research Council Blood Group Unit, and Honor Fell.

Image: C. P. Blacker receiving the Galton Medal from C. G. Darwin, in 1957 (SA/EUG/O.17)

Author: Toni Hardy

This is a public service announcement…

and some benefit will be gained by reading on… trust me. Yesterday I attended a programme of public health information films The Cinema of Disease held at the Open City Docs Fest, which is taking place in and around UCL 21st-24th June.

As a panel member, I had the opportunity to watch the films ahead of time and in fact it was no hardship to watch them again at the screening. They provided a fascinating journey with illustrations of the evolving production aesthetics of this genre. Science was in evidence and we all felt that we had learnt something we never knew (often with the benefit of imaging techniques using, for example, microscopy to make the hidden seen).

At the end, a lively discussion ensued facilitated by Claire Thomson, lecturer in Scandinavian Film & Head of Department; well do public information films have a role today? As of the 31st March this year, the coalition government closed down the Central Office of Information which became the successor to the war-time Ministry of Information in the UK. The UK-government appears to have no appetite to get involved in high profile health awareness. The devolution of healthcare means that we are more likely to seek health-care advice from the Internet. Fellow panel member Deenan Pillay (UCL Research Department of Infection) explained that clinical research in this area is moribund. In fact it was argued that greater public awareness has come from ‘seeding’ health messages within a less ‘high-brow’ context such as in soap operas – a good example of this was cited, having been scripted into the character of Mark Fowler in EastEnders; originally conceived no doubt to reflect the ‘real’ world but having a positive impact on awareness of this condition none-the-less. Cathryn Wood (Innovation Manager, DMI) added that this latter technique and the use of story, a narrative with an emotional hook, has proved instrumental in addressing maternal behaviour and infant mortality of 20% in some areas of sub-Saharan Africa.

Some health campaigns were remembered quite fondly, but there was a sense of unease around whether they were ever evidence-based; was the health campaign around HIV/AIDs; Aids Monolith, 1987 instrumental in changing behaviour? An example mentioned in the discussion, which did lead to changes in infant mortality; Life is a miracle, 1996 had a celebrity presenter, Anne Diamond, who was well known at the time and who gave added poignancy as she had lost her son to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome.

Public health information films are part of the conversation relating to health and well-being and part of the public understanding of science and biomedicine; it is an important part of the conversation. We have been digitising our moving image and sound collection to make this kind of material more freely available; films can be found in the Wellcome Film resource and on our YouTube channel - there are over 2000 subscribers and a growing number of lively comments to the films, particularly those relating to public health. Another port of call is the National Archives which has a selection of public information films online. There are many other online resources and I have taken the hard work out of sourcing these films by providing links so you can replicate the experience of watching the programme yourself.

You Have To Say It (On Doit Le Dire) O’Gallop / 1918 / France / 5’

Unhooking The Hookworm 1920 / USA /10’

[Mind Your Health (Beregi Zdorov’e) Aleksandr Medvedkin 1929 / USSR / 9’ this was not screened]

Preventing The Spread Of Disease 1940 / USA /10'

Tony Bacillus & Co. Colm O’Laoghaire / 1946 / Ireland / 6’








Surprise Attack Crown Film Unit / 1951 / UK / 10’











Unseen Enemies Michael Clarke / 1960 / UK / 27’
Unfortunately, no online copies are in evidence; a 16mm print copy is the Moving Image & Sound collection and can be viewed onsite. There may be a number of versions as the catalogue and programme state 1959/60; from memory, the date on the screening copy credits was 1974.

Author: Angela Saward

Item of the Month, June 2012: Charles Barbier, Petite typographie privée d'ambulance (Paris: Chez l'auteur, c. 1815)

At first glance, this image might look familiar. It’s a coded text that uses raised dots to be read by the fingertips. But one group of people who won’t find the code easy to understand are readers of Braille. That’s because this text isn’t written in Braille, but in a precursor to Braille devised by Charles Barbier, known as night-writing.

Nicholas Marie Charles Barbier de la Serre (1767-1841) was a captain in the Napoleonic army, who became obsessed with ways to improve communication with his troops and in particular with relaying orders in the dark without alerting the enemy. Barbier’s solution was a kind of phonetic code - he split the French language into 36 sounds which he laid out in a grid of numbered rows and columns. Though various methods, Barbier suggested, these grid positions could be communicated, and the sounds understood. One of these methods used the hands, rather like sign language – a number of fingers on the light hand were touched to a number on the left hand, representing the number of rows and columns on the grid. In another variation the code was cut into a piece of paper with a pocket knife; in yet another dots were impressed into the paper using a blunted stylus – the first line of dots represented rows, the second columns.

Barbier was confident that his invention was a good one – he just didn’t know what it could be used for. Rough-handed soldiers found it hard to read the impressions with their fingertips and the system was dismissed by the army as impractical and difficult to learn. Undeterred, Barbier considered various other uses. In a series of self-published pamphlets, of which Petite typographie privée d'ambulance is one, he proposed uses ranging from teaching the illiterate to read and write, to surreptitious note-taking, to creating multiple copies of the same article.

Finally Barbier realised that a system that had been designed to be used in the dark could be equally useful to the blind. In 1821 he presented his method to the blind children at the Institution Nationale des Jeunes Aveugle for testing. It was by no means the first type of embossed text the pupils had encountered - the founder of the school, Valentin Haüy, had produced tactile books for the blind since 1786. However, Haüy’s alphabetic script was not at all suited to reading by touch – rounded letters are easily distinguished from another by sight, but with the fingers they are slow to read, even with two hands. Barbier’s invention was received enthusiastically by the testers, but there were problems – the system was phonetic, so no good for boys who needed to master spelling and grammar to prepare them for work. Worse, there was no punctuation, meaning that the sounds ran into one another and became jumbled.

In the end it was a pupil at the school who made the adaptions necessary to put the code to use. Louis Braille heard the presentation when he was just 12 years old. His improvements - adapting the code from a phonetic to an alphabetic one and using 6 dots rather than 12 - meant that it could be read quickly with the fingers of just one hand. It was these changes that made the system practical and fast enough to give blind pupils a taste of the independence they craved. In 1837 Braille published his modified code, and in 1854, it was officially adopted in all French schools.

By all accounts a stubborn and condescending man, Barbier continued to proclaim his écriture nocturne to be the superior system, even as it was eclipsed by the success of Braille’s. Nevertheless, Braille acknowledged Barbier’s contribution in the second edition of his work, praising the ‘ingenious’ invention that had allowed him to construct his system of communication for the blind.

Author: Jo Maddocks

Further reading:

Charles Barbier, Petite Typographie Privée d'Ambulance (Paris: Chez l'auteur, c. 1815)
Lennard Bickel, Triumph Over Darkness: the Life of Louis Braille (London : Unwin Hyman, 1988)
Elizabeth M. Harris, In Touch: Printing and Writing for the Blind in the Nineteenth Century (Washington : Smithsonian, 1981)

Library Insight: Visualising the AIDS crisis

It is 30 years since the Terence Higgins Trust was founded. This week's free Library Insight talk highlights the changing approaches to AIDS in that time, as revealed through the Wellcome Library’s international AIDS posters.  The global nature of this collection highlights different cultural attitudes to sexual health in a vast array of visual styles.

Our talk is from Julia Nurse, Content and Metadata Officer, who worked on the project to catalogue and digitise these posters.

The event takes place between 3-4pm on Thursday 21 June, tickets can be collected from the Wellcome Collection Information Desk after 1.30pm on a first-come, first-served basis.

Image: Three rows of individuals affected by AIDS, some with their heads turned, others with their hands on their faces with comments on how they need help; advertisement for the SIDA Info Service, Lithograph, Paris 1990s (Wellcome Library no. 672534i).

Shackled in leg irony: black humour of the lower limb

Mezzotint by Jacob Gole (1660?-1737?) after Annibale Carracci.
Wellcome Library no. 24994i

It is a common experience to have enough feet but not enough shoes. The man shown here is, paradoxically, in the opposite situation: he has plenty of shoes but lacks a foot. The irony has a further twist: he is a shoe-seller whose single surviving foot is unshod, presumably because he cannot afford his own wares. No wonder he needs to keep up his spirits with a tobacco pipe.

Black humour (gallows humour, Galgenhumor) is a common feature of discourse about disability. However much we may deplore the fact, loss of mobility due to amputation of the lower limb -– at the thigh, leg or foot -- has been considered a particularly appropriate subject for such humour, perhaps owing to suppressed fear of losing such mobility as we may have. Irony is a way of playing down the horror of immobility while at the same time acknowledging it; and there can be intellectual pleasure (at least for functional bipeds) in the various paradoxes that can arise from limblessness, which are prominent in the drawings, photographs, prints and paintings in the Wellcome Library shown here.

Watercolour by C.W.D., 1866. Wellcome Library no. 12109i

Loss of a limb in a railway accident elicits no sympathy from this compensation board.
The victim (to Chairman) "Sir, in consequence of the carelessness of your servants. I have been compelled to have my leg amputated, besides suffering other injuries, and I consider myself entitled to compensation."
Facetious director. "Lost your leg have yer? Regular stumps etc? - Well! If yer any-think of a cricketer it must be an ill-convenience!"
Benevolent chairman. "Quite right sir - qu-i-te right, compensation by all means, loss of leg - eh? - an unfortunate accident that for all of us." (To secretary) "Here Mr Jones award this gentleman twelve shillings for a wooden one - and enter it on the minutes."'
Jones replies: "The usual discount sir I suppose for ready money? That'll make it eleven shillings." Another director adds: "One can't be too cautious but he don't look like a malingerer!".

Coloured etching, 19th century. Wellcome Library no. 44050i

To break one's natural leg is bad enough, but then to break its wooden replacement adds insult to injury. Two approximately contemporary prints show this subject. In the one above, the driver of the offending vehicle is asleep at the reins.

Coloured engraving published by Laurie and Whittle, 24 February 1800. Wellcome Library 44090i

But at least here the victim can smile as he sees the irony of his situation – and it's much less painful this time round for the young sailor who had lost his leg in the Far East. Fortunately a carpenter is passing with a saw and pot of glue in hand; "A broken leg, or the carpenter is the best surgeon. Haloo! Young Glewpot, de ye see Jack Junk has shivered his timbers, and we want a splice here." The surgeon coming out of his house on the left has no part to play on this occasion, and is pushed away.



There are even positive advantages to losing a leg!


Here another seadog has lost both his legs to the naval surgeon, but there's one compensation: no more suffering from corns ("Keine Hühneraugen mehr!").

 

Lithograph after Johann Bahr, 1909. Wellcome Library no. 577262i

Etching by Frederick Carter, 1928. Wellcome Library no. 44343i (Wellcome Library/©RG Clark)

"What, no legs? Lucky man!" are the words spoken by Ahasuerus (the Wandering Jew) to an immobile Spanish beggar in Frederick Carter's gloomy etching. It is the Jew's misfortune to be forever moving over the face of the earth without respite; the beggar's not to be able to move at all. You can see the world, or you can have a rest, but you can't do both.

Discarded crutches at Lourdes. Photograph, 1937. Wellcome Library no. 578619i

Once a leg has been lost, surely only a miracle could make it grow again. It was a friend of the writer Anatole France (1844-1924) who, contemplating the hundreds of discarded crutches at Lourdes, murmured "Une seule jambe de bois en dirait bien davantage" (Just one wooden leg would be much more significant). [1]

Coloured lithograph by C.J. Grant, 1834.
Wellcome Library no. 11854i.

The regrowth of a natural leg from an amputation stump was considered absurd enough to be worthy of an advertisement for Morison’s pills – the heavily-advertised vegetable remedy for diseases attributed to iatrogenic blood poisoning. The man on the left went to bed with wooden legs, took a dose of Morison's Universal Pills, and "when I awakes in the morning to kick off the clothes, I'm blessed if I didn't find myself with these 'ere couple of jolly good legs and my old wooden ones right at the bottom of the bed!!!".

 Yet … looking towards a future age of stem-cell therapy, who would claim that regeneration of a limb could not occur?

Colour lithograph by H.G. Banks, ca. 1899.
Wellcome Library no. 556713i

It would need more than stem-cell therapy to put poor Callaghan together again. In the song What will poor Callaghan do? a disabled soldier has his wooden legs stolen by four drinking companions in a bar.

The song describes an evening out for four stage-Irishmen called Hogan, Casey, Murphy and "me"; originally "me" was Michael Nolan, a popular Irish music-hall performer. They had spent all their money drinking beer in a pub with an ex-Highland soldier called Patsy Callaghan, who had had his legs shot off from under his kilt when at war. To recover their funds, they got Callagahan drunk, removed his wooden legs and false teeth, pawned them, and left Callaghan literally legless on the pub bench. His plight, depicted on the front cover of the songsheet, is regarded by all as hilarious, though the speaker can't help wondering (in the words of the chorus) "What will poor Callaghan do?".

Michael Nolan asking "What will poor Callaghan do?"

Poor Callaghan was a precursor (or, from another point of view, a post-mediaeval successor) to The Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) who unwillingly makes comedy out of limb-deprivation. "'Tis but a scratch!" he says after losing one arm, "It's just a flesh-wound!" after losing the other, and "All right, we'll call it a draw" after finally losing both legs. Before the Black Knight, one-leggedness had been the subject of another piece of tasteless comedy: One leg too few, a sketch written by Peter Cook while a Cambridge undergraduate in 1960. For this sketch Cook appears to have coined the Latin-derived word "unidexter" to denote a person with one leg, although there was already a Greek-derived word in English, namely "monopod". Again there was an ironic twist of which some audiences were unaware: the actor playing the one-legged role (Dudley Moore) had had club-feet as a child and still had one ineffective leg. Irony and club-foot lead us on the well-intentioned but disastrous operation in Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1856), but we have enough space here merely to allude to it.

Oil painting attributed to the Master of Los Balbases, Burgos, ca. 1495.
Wellcome Library no. 46009i

Conversely, many people are shocked by the absence of irony in this Spanish altarpiece showing a verger's dream. The verger dreams that his bad leg is substituted by Saint Cosmas and Saint Damian with the leg of a black man, and on waking, finds it is true. Some viewers tend to resort to jocularity, showing that they are sophisticated enough to realize that transplants cannot routinely be performed by such means, but not knowledgeable enough to understand the episode as a miracle that could, for example, comfort diabetics. 

The dream of Saint John Damascene: the Virgin attaches his severed right hand.
Drawing, 16--. Wellcome Library no. 651341i

Similar pictures showing the reattachment of a hand do not seem to arouse the same facetiousness. But then in favourable circumstances, surgical reattachment of a hand (or for that matter a foot) to its original limb is not impossible today, according to this popular webpage about "fascinating reattachment surgeries". That really is something to be glad about.

The first examples discussed here have irony and humour, while the last two examples show that in religious contexts lack of a limb could be represented without humour and without irony. Let's end with an example that has irony but not (I suggest) humour.

Engraving by L. Gaultier, ca. 1613. Wellcome Library no. 571261i

This engraving by Léonard Gaultier (1561-1641) shows a man with a wooden leg carrying arms, legs and feet in a basket. At first sight it appears to have a similar subject to the Dutch mezzotint after Annibale Carracci (top).

However, it is a detail of a broadsheet designed by the Franciscan friar Martin Meurisse (1584-1644) to teach logic in Paris in 1613. If it is the nature of man to be a biped, is a "unidexter" a man? And if the function of a foot is locomotion, does a detached foot have the nature of a foot? The answer is that parts that naturally belong to an entity and are necessary for its completion, if removed from that entity, are reduced to predicates of it. Students whose minds have been befuddled by the many distinctions in Aristotle's writings on logic will have been glad to have had such a vivid and ironic image to remind them of how the contingencies relate to the substance of human life.

[1] Anatole France, Le jardin d’Epicure (1895), Paris 1923, p. 158

Easing the way for literature

16th June 1904: a young Dubliner goes on a first date with the woman who will become the mother of his children and (much later) his wife. Eighteen years later – that is, in 1922, ninety years ago – he will publish a book that, as well as encapsulating all literature, will capture Dublin as it was on the day of that first date, so that, as he was to say, if Dublin were destroyed it could be rebuilt from the information in that one volume. The young man is James Joyce, his date Nora Barnacle and the book Ulysses. Bloomsday, as 16th June is known to Joyce enthusiasts, is celebrated every year, but readers in Britain will be aware of extra coverage this year, as the BBC marks 90 years since the book’s publication with various events culminating in a dramatization of Ulysses spread across Radio 4 throughout Bloomsday, whilst in Ireland RTÉ's arts programme The Works will be devoted to Joyce.

A character resembling Joyce does feature strongly in the book – the rather humourless, priggish Stephen Dedalus, whom readers first met on a journey from childhood to young manhood in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – but a quite different figure is at the centre of Ulysses, the middle-aged Jewish everyman Leopold Bloom. From the moment that he appears, at the start of the fourth chapter, Bloom is never far from the book’s action and it is his interior monologue that features most strongly as he navigates the city: hence, of course, the name Bloomsday.

Ulysses exists on multiple levels – as high conceptual art and meta-fiction, a discourse about literature via literature, picking up, pastiching and parodying various forms and tropes; but also on a more down-to-earth level as an experiment in rendering experience via language as completely as possible. This for Joyce means a focus upon the detail of basic, quotidian experience, observed closely and rendered faithfully and without judgement. Moments after Bloom’s first appearance, the brilliant ear Joyce brought to this project is summed up in one line from Bloom’s cat –

The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
-Mkgnao!

- which captures perfectly a particular sound to the extent that it is hard, having read it, not to hear all cats in future as saying “Mkgnao!” rather than the conventional Miaow. The focus on the quotidian however, also leads Joyce with some relish into areas often considered offensive or taboo. On the very first page Stephen Dedalus’s friend Buck Mulligan borrows Dedalus’s handkerchief and goes into flights of verbal fancy over the colour “snotgreen” – gazing out over Dublin Bay, he embarks on a verbal riff about “The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.” Joyce’s characters, unlike many in literature, have bodily fluids and bodily waste: snot, urine, menstrual blood, farts, semen and excrement are all produced by one or other of them in the course of the eighteen hours tracked by the novel.

Human beings as part of the physical world, of course, are the stock in trade of the Wellcome Library, with Sir Henry Wellcome’s collecting vision of the history of medicine being (inter alia) a history of humankind’s physical side. It is, therefore, particularly appropriate that Wellcome, or rather one of his products, has a walk-on part at precisely one of those moments in the book. Bloom first appears early in the morning, frying breakfast and making tea (some of the meat is begged by the cat we met earlier, whilst a cup of tea is taken to his half-asleep wife). Like many of us, we suspect (but we won’t pry), he finds that after a short while up and about, his bowels kick into action and he has to go off to the privy at the end of the garden, where he muses on defecation during the act and provides a little endorsement for a Wellcome product:

..his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada.

Cascara sagrada was a widely used natural laxative, derived from the dried bark of a species of Buckthorn - a routine element in the materia medica of the time. “Tabloid”, however, makes the mention more specific: this was (and is) a Wellcome trademarked word and at this time Wellcome was assertively litigious in defending his intellectual property, so there is no question that when Joyce has Bloom think of a product delivered in “tabloids” it is a Burroughs Wellcome item. (An image of Burroughs Wellcome Cascara Sagrada can be found in the Science Museum's Science and Society picture library.) Wellcome rarely missed a trick when it came to publicity and was keen to make sure his products were prominently placed in, for example, accounts of polar exploration. We suspect, however, that he was unaware of this bit of product placement in a notoriously “dirty” and long-banned book, and if he had known he might well have been rather too prudish to enjoy it.

It is a quirk of Joyce’s works, perhaps a function of the years each took to write, that by the end of each they tend to be turning into the next. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man brings Stephen Dedalus from infancy to the priggish young man who appears on the first page of Ulysses, whilst as the latter progresses its balance shifts from intense focus on everyday experience and interior monologue towards a more purely literary nature, working through various literary genres and parodies in an “unrealistic”, meta-fictional mode. This foreshadows Finnegans Wake and its attempt to bundle all of human experience and all human language into a tale of one archetypal family told in “night-language”, the slurred language of dreams in which concepts collide and coalesce in an endless series of puns, some serious and some joyfully smutty. We cannot, alas, say whether Wellcome or his products appear in the Wake, although its professed aim of encompassing all human experience means that they might well be in there somewhere. Perhaps Joyce missed a trick: in the first pages of Finnegans Wake we find ourselves inside the Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park, enlarged and transformed into a museum - “Now yiz are in the Willingdone Museyroom” – and he would surely have loved to include the Wellcome Museyroom, and to use the founder’s name as the opportunity for a smutty double entendre. Wellcome’s tense relationship with his more easy-going partner Silas Burroughs, too, is reminiscent of the Wake’s "Tales Told of Shem and Shaun", the stories of personality clash between two contrasting brothers (based on Joyce and his more strait-laced brother Stanislas) that include the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper. The beauty of Finnegans Wake is that, containing multitudes, it lends itself to application in all sorts of ways: if Wellcome, or indeed anyone one wishes, does not appear in it explicitly one can still find some sort of analogue. Another of its beauties is that having mentioned it one is immediately absolved from bringing a blog post to any sort of conclusion; like Finnegans Wake itself, one can start anywhere and just end in mid-

Illustration: James Joyce's grave in Fluntern Cemetery, Zürich. Copyright, Lars Haefner, made available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license via Wikimedia Commons. Fluntern Cemetery is high on the rounded top of the Zürichberg and backs onto Zürich Zoo: when she buried her husband there Nora Joyce commented that he would be able to hear the lions roaring and would like that.

'I can think of nothing lovelier than owning cattle'

Photograph of West by Madame Yevonde, 1971
 (National Portrait Gallery)

Archives and Manuscripts has recently acquired a letter (MS.8815) from the writer, critic and journalist Dame Rebecca West [Cicely Isabel Andews, nee Fairfield] (1892-1983) to Sir Weldon Dalrymple-Champneys (1892-1980), Deputy Chief Medical Officer of Health at the Ministry of Health (whose papers we hold), in response to one from him. It is undated but must have been written well after World War II. (West is also, of course, known for her affair with, and son by, H. G. Wells.)

West opens the letter by indicating the 'strange connections' that bring them together. She had had 'unhappily to take an interest in brucellosis' at the time when she owned a herd of Jersey cows (a significant part of her activities during World War II was maintaining this dairy herd) and thus had read Dalrymple-Champney's writings about the disease, on which he was a significant authority.

Letitia Fairfield during World War II

She recalls, in connection with his reference to Edith Wharton, her own meeting with this distinguished American novelist in her younger days, at the home of the bohemian painter and short story writer Stacy Aumonier, and his wife, the musician Gertrude Peppercorn, describing Wharton drinking beer in the Aumoniers' garden and having 'a large, rolling laugh'. She further reminiscences about Sir Eric Maclagan, the curator of the Victoria and Albert Museum, also in response to a mention by Dalrymple-Champneys.

In a postscript she claims that, living as she does in a flat in Kensington, 'it is my great sorrow that not possibly could I house a herd - and I can think of nothing lovelier than owning cattle'.

In associated material, besides the papers of Dalrymple-Champneys, the Wellcome Library also holds the papers of West's elder sister, Letitia Fairfield (1885-1978), who had a distinguished career in public health, Senior Medical Officer to the London County Council, 1911-1948, and also as a medical officer during both world wars, in the Queen Mary's Auxiliary Army Corps and the RAF in World War I, and the RAMC in the Second World War, retiring with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. The sisters' relationship has notable tensions: correspondence in the Fairfield files suggests that other family members strongly dissented from West's portrayal of Letitia in her memoir, Family Memories.

Summer Insight talks

Our popular Insight sessions offer visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. These free sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections. Details of upcoming Insights are now available:

Visualising the AIDS crisis 3-4pm, Thursday 21 June. Our speaker will be Julia Nurse, Content Officer at the Wellcome Library, who has catalogued one of the world's largest collections of AIDS posters.

From games of goose to snakes and ladders 2-3pm, Saturday 14 July. Research Officer Ross MacFarlane looks at games, puzzles and how we play, featuring items from the Wellcome Library collections. This event is part of  'Games week: A celebration of games in London' (7-15 July), organised by History and Heritage Adult Learning London (Games Week schedule (PDF)).

Superheroes 7-8pm, Thursday 30 August. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? It is in fact Stephen Lowther, Ephemera Curator, tackling our fascination with Superheroes as they appear in the Library's graphic novels.

For more details on how to attend the sessions, please follow the links above to the appropriate pages on the Wellcome Collection website.

Images: 'Without? Without Me.' Stop AIDS campaign poster, Swiss, 1990s Wellcome Image ref. L 53786
Goose with golden eggs board game, 1848 Wellcome Image ref. V 40571
Photograph of pioneering body builder, Eugene Sandow, 1920s Wellcome Image ref. L0033345

Anatomical Archives Available

The archive of the Anatomical Society has recently been catalogued and is now available to researchers at the Wellcome Library. The collection covers the founding of the society until the 1980s, and includes a range of documents on membership, (SA/ANA/C) financial information (SA/ANA/B ) and a considerable amount of correspondence ( SA/ANA/D).

The Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in May 1887 by Charles Barrett Lockwood, after collaborating with George M Humphry and Alexander Macalister. Lockwood was a surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and taught at the Medical College there, while Humphry and Macalister were renowned Professors and surgeons from the Medical College at Cambridge. The original minutes from the founding meeting in 1887 up until 1982 can be found in SA/ANA/A. By 1890 the society had its first overseas member and in 1894 two women were admitted from the London of Medicine for Women.

There have been over sixty presidents of the society, each one serving for just over two years and several have contributed to the advancement of biological and medical sciences. One such president is Professor Johnson Symington who was chair of anatomy at Queens College Belfast, and then appointed registrar of the college in 1901. He published several anatomy atlases, was president during 1903-1906, and the society reprinted an edition of his atlas in the 1950s. There are several awards in his name: The Symington Memorial Prize that was established in 1920 and is given out every 3 years by the society (see SA/ANA/D/11).

Another president was Professor George Mitchell, who was involved in the first use of penicillin amongst soldiers, initially distributing and in the Italy campaign, and then helping to give the drug out on D-Day. After the war he was appointed chair of anatomy at the University of Manchester. He was president of the society in 1961-1963 and some of his correspondence from this time is in this collection (see SA/ANA/D/3/3).

The society is also associated with the Journal of Anatomy (originally the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology) which was founded in 1865 by Humphry and Macalister. The Journal was independently edited for several years but upon the founding of the society in 1887, this ceased and it became fully owned by the society in 1916, when physiology was dropped from its title. (see SA/ANA/D/9) The society also has another journal: Aging Cell, which was launched in 2002.

The society’s aims are to promote, develop and advance research and education of the anatomical sciences. It achieves this through general, annual and scientific meetings, national and international conferences, awards and bursaries, exhibitions and publishing its own journals. In July 2010 the society shortened its name to the Anatomical Society.

For more information, please see the Anatomical Society website

Author: Morwenna Roche

Image: Mascagni, Paolo. Anatomia universa XLIV, tabulis aeneis juxta archetypum hominis adulti accuratissime repraesentata... Pisa: Firmin Didot for Nicolò Capurro, 1823[-1831] (Wellcome Library, F.267a)