Talking Nutrition

As previewed on this Blog, ‘Nutrition and History in the Twentieth Century’ was held last week (15 September) at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). This one-day conference, organised by the School’s Centre for History in Public Health and their Archives department, was a great success, attended by over 50 people.

The LSHTM’s nutrition collections were recently catalogued through a grant from the Wellcome Trust. Browse their online catalogue here.

The archive collections of the LSHTM and the Wellcome Library both complement and overlap in many areas, particularly in the field of nutrition. This was illustrated in conference talks by the archive departments of both organisations which focused on the history of nutritional science, diseases of malnutrition, nutrition and war time and nutrition propaganda during the twentieth century.

This first session was followed by recollections and analysis by former staff and students of the School. Their experiences of working at the institution over the last few decades were recorded for the archive’s oral history collection. The two afternoon sessions were devoted to a variety of papers on historical aspects of nutrition, including a summary of UK food policy since the 1970s presented and discussed by Professor Tim Lang of City University.

Amongst some of the collections highlighted in the paper on ‘Nutrition Archives in the Wellcome Library’ were those of Harriette Chick, Edward Mellanby, Robert McCance and Elsie Widdowson, Robert McCarrison, Surgeon Captain ‘Peter’ T L Cleave, Cicely Williams, Frederick Le Gros Clark, the Society of Medical Officers of Health, the British Medical Association and Francis Avery Jones. Details of these and our other archive collections on nutrition can be browsed via our Sources Guide on Nutrition or through the links to our online Archives and Manuscripts catalogue given above.

The papers of the London Food Commission (LFC), founded by Tim Lang, were also discussed. This collection is held by the Wellcome Library and cataloguing is due to commence in October 2010, with the papers becoming available to researchers before Summer 2011. The LFC archive will undoubtedly provide valuable insights into food issues and policy in the 1980s and 1990s, including food labelling, safety, composition and standards, and the school meals campaigns.

As one of the Wellcome Trust’s five research challenges, ‘Connecting environment, nutrition and health’, nutrition is a hot topic on Wellcome Library’s outreach menu. Early in 2011 a new Insights session will be held, focusing on various aspects of the Library’s diverse and vivid primary and secondary source collections on food, diet, nourishment and health. Keep an eye on the Wellcome Collection website - and the Wellcome Library Blog - for details of this session.

A taster of the wealth of our resources can be instantly experienced by searching the Wellcome Images website. Amongst its holdings are a wide range of historical and contemporary images on nutritional matters, such as those which have illustrated this post.

Images:
1/ Health and Beauty in Wartime (Ministry of Food leaflet) (GC/198/B/2/1)
2/ Page from from McCance and Widdowson’s Food Analysis research notebooks (GC/97/A/7)
3/ Community health worker in rural Jamaica showing a mother a leaflet promoting good nutrition

Author: Amanda Engineer

'Nutrition and History in the Twentieth Century'

A one day conference at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), will be held next month on 15th September.

The conference - 'Nutrition and History in the Twentieth Century' - is jointly organised by the Centre for History in Public Health and the LSHTM Archives, and will bring together historians, archivists and past and present members of the Nutrition Unit at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

The conference will draw attention to nutrition archives at LSHTM and at the Wellcome Library and speakers - on such themes as nutrition science, food policy, and famine - include David Smith, Sander Gilman and the Wellcome Library's Amanda Engineer.

A draft programme for the day is available and more details on the Conference - including an application form - can be found on the the LSHTM website.


Images:
A health worker in India, using flash cards to give health education on nutrition, mid-late twentieth century
Advert for Liebig's Beef Wine prepared by S. Stephens, Chemist and Opticians, Milnsbridge, 1900s

Polish posters at the London School of Hygiene

The Wellcome Library has a large collection of posters including a small but distinctive sample of Polish items. Frequently ironic with a grim humour, they are unusual in using solely graphic means without any slogans, as in this example showing opium poppies turning into grave-markers. The appreciation of posters in Poland goes back at least to the first ever international poster exhibition, which was held in Cracow in 1898.

An opportunity to learn more about the history of these works was provided on 16 February 2009 at a workshop on Polish and British posters at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), under the auspices of its Centre for History in Public Health. The workshop arose from an international collaborative project currently underway between the LSHTM Centre and the Medical University of Silesia, funded through a Wellcome Trust History of Medicine grant. This aims to document and analyse public health posters in Poland during the course of the twentieth century.

The first half of the workshop concentrated on the Polish poster, with talks by Krzysztof Krajewski-Siuda of the Medical University of Silesia, Katowice; Martin Gorsky of the LSHTM; and James Aulich from Manchester Metropolitan University. Among the key points were the use of star artists such as Maciej Urbaniec (1925-2004) and Andrzej Pągowski (b. 1953) as the designers of public health posters; the ambivalent position of the state as both responsible for reducing alcoholism and (qua monopoly manufacturers) as a beneficiary from the sales of alcoholic drinks; the questionable efficiency of the poster campaigns and the existence of the posters as symptoms of a crisis rather than as the solution to it.

Emerging incidentally from the presentations was the existence of splendid collections of posters in Poland, especially the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow, the Central Medical Library in Warsaw, and the Wilanów Poster Museum, established in a suburb of Warsaw in 1968. However, it was pointed out that the most collected posters are not necessarily those with the most active street-life: those posters which survive may be the unrepresentative, artistically outstanding ones.

The second half offered for comparison two talks based on the British experience. Catherine Moriarty from Brighton University introduced some posters in the collection of the International Council of Graphic Design Associations. The Council contributed representatives of their respective national outputs of posters and packaging to a central collection now in Brighton. There it joins other relevant posters in the archives of Frederick Henri Kay Henrion (1914-1990) and others. Poland and Cuba were mentioned as the two countries in which poster designers could become celebrities. Finally, Virginia Berridge of the London School of Hygiene described the ever-changing political context in which British health posters were produced from Attlee to Blair: policy swung to and fro between national and local production, leading to the present situation in which health campaigns were either run by government through the Central Office of Information or (for some topics such as alcohol) funded by industry, for example through the Drinkaware Trust. On past form, neither in Poland nor in the UK is the story likely to end with the current status quo.

Above: poster by Andrzej Pągowski (b. 1953) for the TZN (Towarzystwo Zapobiegania Narkomanii), 1987. Wellcome Library no. 646388i