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.

Rabies on The ONE Show

Fears of Rabies in the UK were resurrected on BBC1 last night, in a feature on The ONE Show, as part of their 'Panic' week.

In a segment shot in the Wellcome Library, Dr Neil Pemberton, Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, University of Manchester, discussed both UK Government Public Health posters which warned against Rabies in the 1970s and 1980s, and also the sensational novels of the period which played upon contemporary fears of the disease.

The episode will be available to viewers in the UK through the BBC's iPlayer service for the next seven days. For more on the UK's relationship with rabies, an article by Pemberton and Professor Michael Worboys on the topic is available through the website of History Today.

Image: Neil Pemberton and Michael Worboys, Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain, 1830-2000 (Palgrave, 2007)

The One Show

Items from the Wellcome Library's collections featured on last night's edition of BBC1's early-evening magazine programme The One Show.

Reporter Gyles Brandreth told the story of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, pathologist and so-called 'Father of Forensics'. As discussed in previous Wellcome Library Blog posts, we hold nearly 7,000 cards detailing autopsies carried out by Spilsbury.

The show not only included a film - partly shot in the Wellcome Library - in which Gyles discussed Spilsbury's achievements and but also featured Gyles showing presenters Matt Baker and Christine Bleakley some examples of the Spilsbury cards we hold.

This edition of The One Show is available for the next seven days for readers in the UK, through the BBC's iPlayer.

Jenner's Marvellous Medicine

As part of the BBC's History of the World series, BBC 1 West broadcast last night, Jenner's Marvellous Medicine, a documentary in which presenter Mark Horton told the story of Edward Jenner and smallpox vaccination.

The documentary drew extensively on Wellcome Images, our photographic library, and also featured our Head of Library, Dr Simon Chaplin, in his previous role as Director of the Hunterian Museum, discussing Jenner's friendship with John Hunter.

The documentary is available for seven days for readers in the UK, through the BBC's iPlayer.

Dr Henry Head

This Sunday sees the transmission of the last part of BBC One’s historical medical drama, Casualty 1909.

Set in the Royal London Hospital, the series is based on the Hospital’s original records, personal papers and contemporary newspapers accounts. So far in the series, the doctors and nurses of the hospital have contended with Anarchist ‘outrages’, protesting Suffragettes and militant animal rights activists.

Pictured above is one of the main characters in the series, Dr Henry Head (portrayed by actor Anton Lesser), by 1909 Assistant Physician at the Royal London.

Head is described in promotional material for the series as:

A pioneering psychologist, with a fiercely enquiring mind, yet a gentle touch. Despite the many frustrations Head perseveres where other doctors would give in and is able to reach even the most lost of his patients. He is willing to take huge personal risk to advance the development of medicine.

This ‘huge personal risk’, was the real-life Dr Henry (later Sir Henry) Head's research into the human nervous system, and his actions as a human guinea pig. In collaboration with W H R Rivers, Head (pictured left) carried out a series of experiments in which his cutaneous nerves were severed, and the stages in which sensation returned were measured.

Papers relating to Head’s medical work, reside in the archives of the Royal London Hospital, and at the Library of the Department of Experimental Psychology in the University of Cambridge. However, the Wellcome Library does contain an extensive collection of Head’s personal papers (PP/HEA).

Whilst our papers may not record Head’s major achievements in medicine, they do include an incomplete autobiography which Head dictated in his later years, and correspondence which illustrates Head’s close relationship with the literary and artistic circles of his time. This material formed the basis of Dr Stephen Jacyna's recent book, Medicine and Modernism: A Biography of Sir Henry Head (2008).

All of the episodes of Casualty 1909 – including those featuring Head’s self-experimentation - are still available to watch through the BBC’s iPlayer.