Archives from the pioneers of modern genetics to be brought together for the first time

More details have been announced today of the Wellcome Library's groundbreaking digitisation project, 'Modern Genetics and its Foundations'.

Tens of thousands of notes, letters, sketches, lectures, photographs and essays, produced by the key players in the discovery of the structure of DNA and the development of genetics - including Francis Crick, James D Watson, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins - will be made freely available online.

These vast collections contain iconic documents, everyday exchanges, complex research notes and personal ephemera and highlight the extraordinary networks of insight and inspiration behind pivotal moments of scientific discovery. The material will be released in phases from autumn 2012.

Working in partnership with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA, The Churchill Archives Centre, the University of Glasgow, King's College London and UCL (University College London), the archival papers of James D Watson, Rosalind Franklin, Sydney Brenner, Lionel Penrose, J B S Haldane, Guido Pontecorvo, James Harrison Renwick, Malcolm Ferguson-Smith and Maurice Wilkins will be digitised. They will join material from the Wellcome Library's own holdings, including the papers of Francis Crick, Fred Sanger, Arthur Ernest Mourant, the MRC blood group, Hans Gruenberg and Gerard Wyatt.

The material will offer a comprehensive picture of the complex relationships between the scientists unlocking the secrets of the structure of DNA, in their own words, and give researchers and curious minds access to the personal and professional thoughts, blind alleys and breakthroughs of the circle of brilliant minds whose ideas transformed our understanding of the matter of life.

To tie in with this news, Radio 4's Today programme broadcast yesterday a feature exploring the project. The feature - presented by BBC Health Correspondent Fergus Walsh - is available to listen to online (scroll down to 0846).  Walsh has also written about the project on his BBC blog, asking the question ‘The most important photo ever taken?  The Today programme’s website also displays some of the images from the papers of Francis Crcick held in the Wellcome LIbrary that will be made available online as part of the project.

Image: Sketch of the DNA double helix by Francis Crick (PP/CRI/H/1/16).

'Making History' at the Wellcome Library

This week's edition of BBC Radio 4's series Making History, features an exploration of the Victorian 'fern craze'. 

In a sequence recorded in the Wellcome Library, historian Helen Castor and researcher Pia Ostlund, look at this growth in amateur botany in the context of Henry Bradbury: a businessman, who with the aid of the new technique of 'nature printing', produced intricate images of ferns many of which illustrate the volume The Ferns of Great Britain and Ireland (1857).

This episode of Making History will be available on the BBC website listeners in the UK for the next seven days.

Image: A fern frond, possibly of the male fern (Dryopteris filix-mas). Colour nature print, c. 1860 (Wellcome Library no. 23663i)

Random Edition on BBC Radio 4

In this week's episode of BBC Radio 4's Random Edition, presenter Peter Snow marked the 150th anniversary of the death of Prince Albert.

The programme focused on how the Prince Consort's death was reported in one issue of the London Daily News, but also featured recordings made at a number of relevant locations to Prince Albert's life and legacy, such as Osborne House, Windsor Castle and the Royal Albert Hall.

One segment of the episode was recorded here at the Wellcome Library, in which Peter Snow came face-to-face with the painting shown above, a vast canvas depicting Prince Albert on his deathbed. The programme concludes with a discussion over competing theories over the cause of the Prince Albert's death.

Random Edition: Prince Albert is available on the BBC iPlayer to listeners in the UK until Wedensday 21st December.

Image: The last moments of HRH the Prince Consort. Oil painting by Oakley under the pseudonym Le Port, ca. 1861. (Wellcome Library no. 47371i).
See also W. Schupbach, 'The Last Moments of H.R.H. The Prince Consort', Medical History, 1982, 26, pp321-324 (free to access PDF)

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)

Out in the World

Last Sunday saw the start of a new series on BBC Radio 3, Out in the World - A Global Gay History. Here's the details from the programme's website:

Richard Coles embarks on an excavation of same sex desire through the ages, starting with the modern construction of gay identity and its links with the ancient world.

Across four programmes and a range of investigations which reach from the UK to India, Egypt, Greece and Native America, Richard discovers a far more complex and nuanced story than one of darkness into light.

The first episode featured Coles visiting the Wellcome Library to speak to Senior Archivist Dr Lesley Hall, to discuss the work of pioneering sexologists from the late 19th century. Their dialogue partly focuses around Richard von Krafft-Ebing - whose papers are held here - and includes a discussion of the image that accompanies this post.

The first episode of Out in the World is available for listeners in the UK until Sunday 25th September, through the BBC iPlayer.

Image: Photograph of a man with a moustache dressed in women's clothing (PP/KEB/E/6)

Midwifery on The ONE Show

Last night's edition of BBC's The ONE Show included a feature on the history of midwifery.

Filmed in the Medicine Man gallery of Wellcome Collection, the sequence featured an interview with Prof Elaine Hobby (Loughborough University), who illustrated her account of the changes in practice with the Wellcome Library's copy of Jane Sharp's The Midwives Book.

The episode is available for viewers in the UK for the next seven days through the BBC iPlayer.

If Walls Could Talk

Last week, Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist, Wellcome Library, appeared in an episode of BBC4's new history series, If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home.

In the series, presenter Dr Lucy Worsley uncovers the history of familiar domestic spaces. In the most recent episode, devoted to the bedroom, Dr Hall discussed that space as the site for childbirth, pre-nineteenth century.

To illustrate this, Drs Hall and Worsley toured Wellcome Collection, taking in the birthing chair in the Medicine Man gallery and the Wellcome Library's copy of Jane Sharp's Compleat Midwife's Companion (1724).

If Walls Could Talk is currently available to watch for viewers in the UK through the BBC iPlayer.

Image: Frontispiece of the Compleat Midwife's Companion, including a scene of a woman who has recently given birth, being attended to by midwives.

Wellcome to the South Pole

Last Sunday, BBC2 broadcast The Secrets of Scott's Hut, a documentary which featured presenter Ben Fogle journeying to Antarctica, to observe the work of a team of conservators, attempting to preserve the hut of the explorer Captain Robert Falcon Scott. The hut acted as both accommodation and research centre during Scott's attempt in 1911 to reach the South Pole. It was then abandoned, leaving behind 10,000 items: the everyday and scientific materials of Scott and his men.

We've written before of the connection between Burroughs Wellcome & Co (BW&Co) - the pharmaceutical company co-founded by Henry Wellcome - and Scott's Antarctic Expedition, so it was nice to see within a few minutes of the documentary, Fogle and two conservators unpacking a surving medicine chest, which included Burroughs Wellcome & Co products.

More BW&Co chemicals were visible on screen when the documentary discussed the role of Herbert Ponting, the photographer on the Expedition. To illustrate the importance of Ponting's role, Scott's hut even had a dedicated dark room set outside for Ponting to develop his photographs. And there on the shelves of the dark room... developer supplied by Burroughs Wellcome & Co.

The Wellcome Foundation Archives held in the Wellcome Library include more details on the role Burroughs Wellcome & Co played in this and many other expeditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

The Secret of Scott's Hut is available on the BBC iPlayer to viewers in the UK until Sunday April 24th.

Images:
- Medicine bottles in Scott's hut. On the right is Burroughs Wellcome & Co 'Tabloid' Liquorice Compound Powder, to soothe upset stomachs. Taken from this BBC Slideshow.
- Advert for 'Tabloid' 'Rytol' showing Herbert Ponting, official photographer to the British Antarctic Expedition, 1910, developing a plate with 'Tabloid' 'Rytol' in his dark-room in the hut featured in the documentary (WF/M/PB/25/01/10).

Woman's Hour

Yesterday's edition of Woman's Hour on BBC Radio 4, featured an interview with Dr Lesley Hall talking about her new book - recently highlighted here - The Life and Times of Stella Browne: Feminist and Free Spirit.

The interview discusses Browne's career and relationship with other birth control campaigners, and begins with Dr Hall giving as the starting point for her research, her cataloguing of the papers of the Abortion Law Reform Association, held in the Wellcome Library.

Listeners in the UK can listen again to the interview through the Woman's Hour website.

"Mental: a history of the madhouse" available again (briefly)

Mental: a history of the madhouse is "a documentary which tells the fascinating and poignant story of the closure of Britain's mental asylums". It was originally broadcast on 17 May 2010 and in July 2010 was discussed in a posting on the Wellcome Library blog.

The film is now once again available for UK viewers free of charge on the BBC iPlayer for a limited period (11-21 January 2011). The Wellcome Library offers free internet access, so anybody who does not have easy access to the internet and can visit the Wellcome Library may watch the film in the Library free of charge.

The Brain: A Secret History

Beginning last night on BBC4, The Brain: A Secret History, is a new three part documentary series which illustrates the history of attempts to understand and manipulate the brain.

In the first episode of the series, 'Mind Control', presenter Dr Michael Mosley discussed the famous experiments of Ivan Pavlov, B F Skinner and Stanley Millgram. The documentary mixed archive footage with interviews and also included Mosley visiting the Wellcome Library to look at the personal papers of controversial psychiatrist William Sargant.

The episode is available to viewers in the UK through the BBC iPlayer, where it will be joined by the other two episodes once they air, until the 27th January.

Image credit: BBC

Christmas advice from Frank Rowntree

Francis St. D. Rowntree 1928-1996, aka Frank Rowntree, received an OBE in 1986 for his services to public health. During the 1970s, he was the Health Education Officer for Sheffield and in this capacity he was invited into the Walk Right in Studio at BBC Radio Sheffield for a regular weekly health spot where he gave his measured and pithy advice (usually in around 3 minutes) on many of the health issues of the time. Some of the advice may only resonate with the over 40s -such as the clacker craze which resulted in a new kind of illness described as 'clacker wrist'. Also tackled was the mystery of women’s menstrual cycles relating to mood swings and especially driving. He exhorts men to be more sympathetic and think themselves lucky that they do not have this cyclic phenomenon.

All the 106 broadcasts were donated by Rowntree’s family, originate on ¼” audio reels, have been digitised and made available online via the library’s Wellcome Film resource with permission from BBC Radio Sheffield. The audio recordings appear to have been made by Rowntree himself as a record of his broadcast activity with the majority of the recordings dating from 1972 and 1973.

There are a number of festive topics to which Frank Rowntree regularly returned. The first is a health and safety message to parents in the selection of appropriate toys for their children, which Rowntree talks about with campaigning zeal. There are three broadcasts on this topic. Suitability is key, he warns against highly inflammable toys and asks parents after Christmas to dispose of toys if broken or damaged.

Another seasonal topic discussed on air is keeping warm. Rowntree talks about the susceptibility of new babies to the cold. In 1973 Rowntree broadcasts about keeping warm in the light of the prevailing power cuts. He talks about appropriate clothing in winter such as “snuggies” (described as warm winter drawers or knickers). He recommends that a good breakfast is key to keeping you going through the day. Perhaps it is just as well that the practice of using hot bricks to warm up beds has fallen into dis-use…

Lastly, as it is the season of Christmas excess, Rowntree does not want to be a 'dismal Jimmy' and enjoys a drink and all the Christmas fare. In typical fashion, he asks for common sense and moderation.

The Moving Image & Sound Collection sends seasonal wishes to all (in moderation).

Author: Angela Saward

Image: 1970s Christmas, © This image is copyright djwhelan’s photostream and is licensed under this Creative Commons licence.

'The Beauty of Diagrams'

On 16th December, BBC4 broadcast the most recent episode of their series The Beauty of Diagrams, in which mathematician Marcus du Sautoy explores the stories behind some of the world's most familiar and influential scientific diagrams.

The latest featured diagram was the DNA double helix - one of the most replicated scientific images of the twentieth century. The programme examined the rich symbolism of the double helix and also featured a sequence shot in the Wellcome Library with Prof du Sautoy examining our early sketch of the double helix from the papers of Francis Crick.

The episode is available for viewers in the UK through the BBC iPlayer, along with the rest of the series - including programmes on Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man and Florence Nightingale's 'Rose Diagram' - until 30th December.

The Wellcome Library – A Picture Researcher’s Point of View

One of our Historical Picture Researchers, Rachael Johnson, is leaving the Wellcome Library for pastures new. Before she departs, she's offered us an insight into a typical day in Wellcome Images...

Wellcome Images researchers currently supply around 3,000 digital images every month to a wide client base, from academic scholars and lecturers to newspapers, book publishers, television and even design companies. No two days at Wellcome Images are ever the same, but here are some of the things we find ourselves researching.

I’m at my desk (with a cup of tea) by 9.30am and can begin by going through the email enquiries. On an average day, most are from academics requesting permission to use Wellcome Images pictures as part of their journal article, monograph or scholarly publication. I ascertain whether these clients are requesting contemporary biomedical material (which we hold as part of our contributor collections), or historical images, photographed in-house from items held in the Wellcome Library.

As well as the academic orders, we also receive numerous email requests from commercial companies, wanting to publish or broadcast our pictures. Although we are happy for academic clients to use many of our images free of charge, we do charge reproduction fees to commercial clients. A recent example is our collaboration with a Japanese TV company, who want to broadcast three of our images showing Jenner and his first vaccination. It’s enjoyable working with broadcasting companies, as we often get to see our images ‘in action’ in popular programmes including the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?, The Great British Bake-Off and Victorian Pharmacy. We have recently been approached by two production teams working on upcoming feature films, wanting to use some of our images as set dressing: unfortunately the titles of both films are still a closely guarded secret, but do watch this space for more information once they hit the cinemas. One of the most unusual recent uses of our pictures was as part of the Grolsch beer website, illustrating a timeline of historical (non-beer related) events.

We always ask clients using our images in publications to send us a copy: we have recently featured on the cover of the Annals of Royal College of Surgeons, as well as History Today magazine.

We receive a steady stream of picture requests via the Wellcome Trust Press Office. As Wellcome Images hold pictures of all of the gallery exhibits in Wellcome Collection, we are frequently asked for images by publications such as What’s On and Time Out, so that they can entice their readers into our exhibitions with interesting pictures (including the image below, recently used in our recent Skin exhibition).
We receive a daily trolley delivery of items and requests from readers within the Wellcome Library. As we have an in-house studio and photographer, we can accommodate most requests for new photography, from miniature portraits to manuscripts and rare books. The most unusual item that I have ever asked to be photographed was an oil painting of the First World War, measuring almost 4 ½ metres square, which had to be photographed from above as it lay on the floor. As soon as any new photography has been completed, we catalogue the pictures and add them to our Wellcome Images website.

Although most of our clients have already seen the pictures they would like to order, we do also receive many speculative requests, where clients contact us in the hope that we can find them something rare, unusual or (in some cases) even impossible. I try to save these more involved requests for the afternoon, after I’ve been fortified with an excellent Wellcome Trust lunch.

A recent request came through for a selection of pictures showing the history of childbirth, for a publishing client. This involved searching through illustrations of birthing instruments, such as forceps, midwifery through the ages, foetal development and of course, labour itself. By the end of the day I have successfully found 53 great images for my birthing client and another 20 for a television documentary on the Plague.



The day normally ends at about 5.30pm, (unless I receive a telephone call from one of the national newspapers, who always seem to phone with an urgent request at 5.29) and I can head home, wondering what I’ll be searching for tomorrow.

Images:
1/'Wound Man', MS. 290
2/ Front cover of History Today (featuring image of William Price of Llantrisant (1800-1893) MRCS, LSA, medical practitioner, in druidic costume, with goats, Wellcome Library no. 45771i), May 2009.
3/ Rubber beauty masks, worn to remove wrinkles and blemishes (Wellcome Library no. 565924i)
4/ A birth-scene. Oil painting by a French (?) painter, Åbo, Sweden (later Turku, Finland), 1800 (Wellcome Library no. 4469i).

Author: Rachael Johnson

Crossing

Crossing the road at Langham Place. On the left is BBC Broadcasting House and on the right All Souls Church.

'Sinful Sex and Demon Drink' in the Wellcome Library

This week saw the broadcast on BBC2 of the concluding part of Ian Hislop's Age of the Do-Gooders, a series which set out to restore the reputation of Victorian social campaigners and reformers.

The concluding episode - Sinful Sex and Demon Drink - featured a sequence filmed in the Wellcome Library. This discussed the work of the social purity campaigner Ellice Hopkins (1836-1904) and featured presenter Ian Hislop read from a copy we have of her instructional pamphlet 'True Manliness', which promoted the virtues of male chastity.

The episode - along with the first two in the series - featured a wealth of material on health in the nineteenth century and is available through the BBC iPlayer to viewers in the UK until Monday 20th December.

Image: Ian Hislop (BBC Press Office)

Vital Mental Medicine

A BBC Radio 4 documentary which aired today, Vital Mental Medicine: Shackleton's Banjo, offers an indirect insight into an aspect of Henry Wellcome's life.

The documentary tells the story of the instrument shown above: a banjo belonging to Leonard Hussey, a meteorologist who was part of Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition expedition party which set out on board the Endurance in 1914. Famously, the Endurance became stuck in pack ice forcing Shackleton and five crew members to sail the 1,300 km to South Georgia in a small boat in an attempt to get help. He left behind twenty-two men: one of whom was Hussey.

As the Endurance was sinking, Shackleton allowed each crew member to take 2 lbs of possessions with them. The only exception to this was Hussey's banjo - which Shackleton himself retrieved. "We must have that banjo", Shackleton was reported to have said, "It's vital mental medicine".

Miraculously, Shackleton made it to South Georgia and all the stranded men were eventually rescued. Their signatures adorn Hussey's banjo (now owned by the National Maritime Museum and currently on display in the National Maritime Museum Cornwall) which he played to the other twenty-one men he was stranded with.

As for the Wellcome connection... we move from the ice of Antarctica to the sun of the Sudan, as it was there that Hussey first saw the newspaper advertisement calling for volunteers for Shackleton's expedition. And the reason Hussey was in the Sudan? He was working on Henry Wellcome's archaeological excavations at Gebel Moya in the north of that country, during the winter of 1913-1914.

Between 1911 and 1914, Henry Wellcome funded excavations at Gebel Moya, south of Khartoum. Both a continuation of Henry Wellcome's charitable work in the Sudan and a practical example of his interest in archaeology, the excavations were a major contribution to the knowledge of the early history of Eastern Africa. They also featured an ingenious use of aerial photography - a development which these excavations have seldom been credited with. (Life at Gebel Moya during the 1912-1913 season was captured on a film now digitised as part of our Wellcome Film project).

It appears that Hussey's time with Wellcome at Gebel Moya was a major formative influence. Amongst the personal papers we hold of Wellcome's, we have correspondence between him and Hussey. Hussey, in a letter dated 21st August 1918, writes that:

"I don't think that we all quite realised the immense value of the training in discipline and especially in loyalty, which we had at Gebel Moya. Sir Ernest Shackleton - and I say this with all diffidence - always refers to me as "one of the most cheerful and loyal ones", and I wish for no finer epigraph". [1]

For more on Hussey's cheerfulness - and how his banjo kept spirits up amongst his fellow strandees - have a listen to the documentary, which is available through the BBC iPlayer to listeners in the UK until next Saturday (18th December).

Image credit: National Maritime Museum

[1] From file WA/HMM/CO/Ear/316. The letter also makes brief mention of Hussey and Shackleton about to embark on a "wartime mission in Northern Russia".

The Red Book

It's not often books purchased by the Wellcome Library have guested on a prime time American crime show, but then again, Carl Jung's The Red Book is no ordinary work.

A facsimile of Carl Jung's Liber Novus (New Book), The Red Book was only published for the first time last year. It records in words and images the innermost feelings and thoughts of Jung, who started the work after undergoing an intense spiritual and mental crisis in the 1910s. According to the book's editor Prof Sonu Shamdasani, the publication of the work is an enormously important event in the history of psychology: the whole of Jung's career can now be reinterpreted through this intense work.

Both literally and metaphorically a weighty tome, the shelves of the Wellcome Library hold a number of copies of The Red Book and all are available to our readers. For an introduction to the work, BBC Radio 3 devoted the interval to last Saturday's Prom concert to a discussion of the work between presenter Bidisha, Prof Shamdasani and artist Bettina Reiber (and to sample the book's visual style, take a look at this BBC Slideshow).

The discussion will be available to listeners in the UK through the Radio 3 website until next Saturday: the Red Book feature begins 10 minutes into the programme.

BBC audio slideshow "The secret of life" highlights Wellcome digitisation project

The BBC has published an audio slideshow about the Wellcome Library's newly announced digitisation project. The slideshow focuses primarily on the Crick archive, which, at 300 boxes of material, represents some quarter of a million pages to be made freely available online at the end of a 2 year pilot project.

Dr Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, narrates the slideshow describing the content, the significance of Crick's research and the impact this online resource will have on the research community.

Images in the slideshow feature key items from the Crick archive (and other collections to be digitised related to the foundations of genetic research). The images also provide a behind the scenes view of conservation, preparation and photography.

Getting public health messages across

"A really successful poster actually tells people what to do". That's the opening message from Dr Laragh Gollogly of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the BBC's new audio-slideshow on public health posters. The posters shown are some of those selected by Dr Gollogly for publication in a splendid illustrated book Public health campaigns: getting the message across (Geneva: WHO, 2009), which was launched at the Wellcome Library earlier this year.

The international coverage of the WHO (it has 193 countries as members) makes it well suited to display the particular problems arising from health campaigns in more than one country, which are discussed by Dr Gollogly in the audio commentary and illustrated in the choice of posters. Without detailed local knowledge, it would be impossible to respond to people's fears and desires, stir their emotions and engage them in the mission to do whatever the campaign needs to get done. Some of the posters are less concerned with "telling people what to do" than with raising their awareness of what not to do, and in fact a wide range of approaches is revealed.

Anyone working with historic posters faces particular obstacles. The collections are scattered. There are not many catalogues, and most of them are too laconic from want of contextual information. Almost all the posters other than those produced by the US government are in copyright, and clearance of copyrights can be arduous. Information about dates and print runs is hard to find except in bureaucratic regimes such as Soviet Russia. As a result of Soviet dirigism we know that this diphtheria poster (right) was produced in 1939 and had a print run of 10,000 impressions, but most British, Dutch and Danish posters (for example) do not have the print run printed on them, and we can only guess at the date (1940s or 1950s) of the American swimming-pool poster reproduced above (top).

But the posters are often the main means of communication between health organizations and the public, so it can be rewarding to meet these challenges, as the WHO has done here. And if one does so, one often finds an interesting backstory behind the production of the poster, as for example with Abram Games's controversial Your Britain series (left).

And as more posters are catalogued the job becomes easier, since the opportunities to compare and contrast are increased, and further light is shed on previously obscure designers, publishers and catchphrases. The Wellcome Library catalogue currently includes 4,208 posters, and new items are being added frequently, whether from new acquisitions or from existing, previously uncatalogued, holdings. There are also good online catalogues at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC; the US National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland; the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library at the University of California in Los Angeles; the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam; the Swiss National Library in Berne; the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich; the Kunstindustrimuseet in Copenhagen; the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin; and elsewhere. Printed catalogues such as those by William H. Helfand and Marine Robert-Sterkendries have not been superseded by online works, and the WHO's new volume is a useful addition alongside the publications of those expert authors.

The BBC's introduction to the WHO's new work is one in a series of productions by Paul Kerley, who has refined these five-minute talks with music and visual evidence into a fine art. Recent productions by him deal with Pope John Paul II's almost-cancelled tour of the UK in 1982, Siegfried Sassoon's World War I manuscripts in Cambridge University Library, and the current exhibition of Frederick Cayley Robinson's paintings at the National Gallery in London: all highly recommended for their production skills in addition to their subject matter.

Top: poster designed by Dorothy Darling Fellnagel (1913-2006) and published in the USA in the 1940s or 1950s. Wellcome Library no. 47637i
Above right: "Protect your child from diphtheria. Go to the doctor and get him vaccinated.", Moscow 1939. Wellcome Library no. 545750i
Above left: poster designed by Abram Games (1914-1996) in 1942, showing Kensal House, at the north end of Ladbroke Grove in London, as a promise of improved housing after the war. Wellcome Library no. 20283i