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)

Fifty years in clinical and human genetics

One of the Wellcome Trust’s challenge areas is maximising the health benefits of genetics and genomics.

Relating directly to this are the personal papers of Professor George Robert Fraser, which are now available for consultation in the Wellcome Library. George Fraser has dedicated his career to understanding the role of clinical genetics particularly in relation to inherited disabilities.

Fraser was born into a medical family in Užhorod, a town then in Czechoslovakia, in 1932. In 1939 he came to England with his family and went on to study the Natural Sciences Tripos at the University of Cambridge. Between 1952-1953 he opted to study genetics under R. A. Fisher. He completed his clinical training in medicine at the London Hospital (B.Chir. 1956, M.B. 1957) and was then awarded a Medical Research Council Scholarship in human medical genetics and moved to the Galton Laboratory, University College London to work under L. S. Penrose.

On completion of his Ph.D. in October 1959, Fraser joined the Medical Research Council Population Genetics Research Unit in Oxford. It was here that he began a study of the causes of profound childhood deafness, studying 2,330 children in special schools for the deaf in the UK and Ireland. The work of this and further surveys was published in 1976 as The Causes of Profound Deafness in Childhood. A study of 3,535 individuals with severe hearing loss present at birth or of childhood onset.

In his 1962 paper, 'Our genetical load: a review of some aspects of genetical variation', Annals of Human Genetics, Vol. 25, Fraser identified a multiple malformation syndrome later known as Fraser Syndrome. Fraser Syndrome is commonly characterised by cryptophthalmos, syndactyly and renal defects. There may also be malformations of the nose, ears, throat and genitals and many other organs. In the 1990s the locus responsible for the condition was tentatively identified as being on chromosome 4 and in the early 2000s the gene involved was shown to be at chromosome 4q21 and was named FRAS1 in Fraser’s honour.

In March 1963 Fraser worked on a study of blindness in childhood. This study involved 776 children at schools for the blind, and was a replica of his previous study of childhood deafness. The research was used for his M.D. thesis and was published as The Causes of Blindness in Childhood. A study of 776 children with severe visual handicaps. On the completion of the work, in January 1966, Fraser moved to the University of Adelaide where he undertook further extensive studies of blind children and of both adults and children with profound childhood deafness, in Adelaide and its surroundings.

Throughout his career Fraser held many positions all over the world from Seattle to The Netherlands to Canada, and was involved in different research projects including work on the distribution of blood polymorphisms, genetical load, the concentration of common variable immunodeficiency, and Hodgkin's disease. In 1984 Fraser returned to the UK and was appointed Senior Clinical Research Fellow in the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and Honorary Consultant in Medical Genetics at the Churchill Hospital, Oxford. Fraser established a Registry of Familial Cancer, comprising families with unusual aggregations of common cancers and in 1990 he established the Cancer Genetic Clinic at the Churchill Hospital (ref. PP/GRF/F). He reached formal retirement age in 1997, but continued for two years as an unpaid Honorary Consultant (non-clinical) in the Department of Medical Genetics at the Churchill Hospital.

The papers of George Fraser document his long career in human and clinical genetics and cover his major research activities. As such the collection includes a large amount of medical case files, particularly in sections B and C, the majority of which are closed under the Data Protection Act. This collection has been catalogued by Timothy Powell and Simon Coleman, with the advice of Professor Fraser, as part of a project hosted by Cardiff University’s Special Collections and Archives and funded through a grant from the Wellcome Trust Research Resources in Medical History programme.

Image: Photograph of George Fraser in Chicago (ref. PP/GRF/A.41)

Author: Toni Hardy

Music of the blind

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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





















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

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

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

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

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

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

Global Handwashing Day

It is Global Hand Washing Day today and we've chosen to mark the date by highlighting material from a recent library acquisition of African health posters, a number of which remind us all of the importance of hand washing and basic sanitation.

For instance, the simple act of washing hands with soap (752738i) and segregation of toilet facilities (756161i) can prevent common ailments in children like diarrhoea associated with cholera (755196i), eye infections (755601i) and since 2000, avian flu (755530i).



Personal hygiene was key to the 2000 Sara Campaign, an initiative aimed at adolescent girls developed in 10 countries of Eastern and Southern Africa with UNICEF assistance. Originally a radio series, the programme branched out into animated films, comic books, storybooks, audiocassettes, guides and posters. (Source: www.unicef.org/lifeskills/index).

Hand washing with soap is said to be the most effective and cheapest way to prevent diarrhoea (associated with cholera and typhoid fever) and acute respiratory infections (like TB and pneumonia). Such infections take the lives of millions of children in developing countries each year, according to the Global Public-Private Partnership for Hand Washing who initiated Global Handwashing Day (GHD) in 2008. Posters are an essential way of promoting the routine which, it appears, is seldom practiced in some areas yet could save more lives than any single vaccine or medical intervention. (Source: http://globalhandwashingday.org/).


Apart from basic hygiene issues, the majority of posters from this collection highlight family planning issues (birth control, family size, contraception etc) but, not surprisingly, many other problems are revealed: malaria (755536i), polio (755539i ), TB (752340i), typhoid (755617i) avian flu (752086i), trachoma and blindness (752498i ), diabetes (755362i) and hypoglyemia (755464i).







Less commonly depicted are issues concerning female circumcision (755185i and 755386i ), genital mutilation (752291i), and in 2001, the ‘flying toilet’ problem in Kibera slums (755701i, and 755711i).

Details of our collection of African health posters can be seen in the Wellcome Library catalogue.

Images:

A girl washing her hands in a bowl above a tap in a washing cubicle; health education in Ethiopia. Colour lithograph by Health Education Centre (?), ca. 2000, Wellcome Library ref. 752738i

School children visiting a segregated corrugated toilet and washing their hands: hygiene in Kenya. Colour lithograph by Ministry of Health, Kenya, ca. 2000, Wellcome Library ref. 756161i

Women preparing a chicken and washing their hands: preventing avian flu in Kenya. Colour lithograph by Ministry of Health, ca. 2006, Wellcome Library ref. 755530i

A girl holds a chicken on a plate as a man washes his hands: protecting against avian flu in Kenya. Colour lithograph by UNICEF and Maskew Miller Longman, ca. 2000, Wellcome Library ref. 755918i

Campaign against female genital mutilation in Djibouti. Colour lithograph by A. Rachid and A. Djama for Ministère de la Santé MGF project, ca. 2010, Wellcome Library ref. 752291i

Three toilets in the form of ducks in flight: appeal to improve sanitation in the slums of Kibera. Colour lithograph by AMREF, 2001, Wellcome Library ref. 755701i

Item of the Month, June 2010: William Moon and Moon Type

Today is the 130th anniversary of the birth of Helen Keller, the American author and activist. We could write an 'Item of the Month' post on the holdings in the Wellcome Library on this fascinating woman, but have decided to focus on a lesser-known figure who aimed to transform the lives of people with visual impairments.

William Moon (1818-1894) may not be a household name now, but during his lifetime he was recognised as the creator of the first widely-used practical reading alphabet for the blind.

Moon grew up in Kent, but by the time he was 22 he had become totally blind (the after-effects of contracting scarlet fever as a child) and moved to Brighton, to live with his sister and widowed mother.

There, he set up his own day school for blind children and taught his pupils how to read using existing embossed reading codes. However, due to the boys finding it difficult to use these systems, in the 1840s Moon devised his own, which became known as Moon Type.

Moon Type uses embossed lines and curves – similar to print – to create nine basic shapes. Rotating or reflecting these shapes in different positions creates the 26 letters of the Roman alphabet and the basis for providing a tactile version of any text.


(Guide to Moon Type from William Moon's An Elementary Reading Book, 1860)


(First page of embossed text from William Moon's An Elementary Reading Book, 1860. How well can you read it?)

Moon Type was the first widely-used practical reading alphabet for the blind in this country. Moon published his new system in 1845 16 years after Louis Braille had invented his system. However, Braille had yet to cross over the channel, and Moon Type was well established before Braille was taken up in Britain.

Understandably, demand for materials in Moon Type was high and William Moon began on an energetic campaign of printing pamphlets and travelling the country setting up Moon Type printing presses. A man of strong faith, by 1860 Moon was printing chapters of the Bible but his dream of producing all the books of the Old and New Testaments in Moon Type never came to fruition in his lifetime. The large type – and therefore, need for large, one-sided pages – made for bulky and heavy volumes.



(Book of John, in Type for the Blind).

However, Moon expanded his system into other languages: using his original nine basic shapes, by the time of his death in 1894, he had embossed the Lord’s Prayer or another portion of scripture into 476 languages or dialects. He moved into less liturgical works, printing some scientific treatises and selections from authors such as Shakespeare, Scott and Burns and devised Pictures for the Blind, which taught blind people by touch the form and shape of common objects.

Although William Moon’s system has been subsequently replaced in popularity – and recognition – by Louis Braille’s system, Moon Type is still used by people who have difficulty reading Braille, and has been found to be suitable for people who have lost their sight after learning to read.

Moon’s achievements were recognised during his lifetime, with elections to the fellowships of both the Royal Geographical Society (1852) and the Royal Society of Arts (1857) and the award of an honorary degree by the University of Philadelphia in 1871.

More details on Moon Type is available from the website of the Royal National Institue for Blind People (RNIB). And also thanks to this blog post, which inspired us to choose Moon's works held in the Wellcome Library for this Item of the Month post.

Item of the Month, March: Spring comes in 1807

Today, officially, marks the first day of spring in the Northern Hemisphere: the point from which days are longer than nights, and the long winter is finally behind us. Of course, this is an artificial date: spring is not something that is switched on on a particular day, but a gradual process, a slow awakening that takes place at different times at different latitudes. There is strong variation even within the United Kingdom: the same flowers may be in full bloom in Cornwall, whilst Scotland will not see them for weeks yet. For each part of the country, however, there will be a rough average date at which, year on year, the different markers of spring appear: the first snowdrops, the first catkins, and – famously the subject of competitive letters to the Times – the first cuckoo.

Would you know, however, when those rough dates are for the place you live? Could you tell if the daffodils came out a week later than usual? And, faced with the recent news reports that spring is coming earlier each year, would you be able to judge their accuracy against your own experience?

And could you do it without using your eyes?

March’s item of the month gives us a fascinating look at a man who could have said Yes to all those questions: the scientist, mathematician and all-round “natural philosopher” John Gough (1757-1825). Gough was born in Kendal, in the Lake District, and lived in the area all his life. Like many contemporary significant figures in science, he was a Quaker. He was the son of a prosperous dyer in the town, and thus came from a social stratum that would not normally expect at that time to go to university. His father Nathan Gough, unusually, was prepared to pay for him to remain in full-time education longer than was customary at this time, and Gough was still studying in his early twenties. To this extent, we could see him as having had an advantage over his peers. However, although his father could contribute to Gough overcoming social barriers, there was one difficulty Gough faced that could not be remedied: he had been blind since contracting smallpox at the age of three.

Gough’s disability did not prevent him pursuing his scientific interests. As a teenager, for instance, he set up a botanical club at school, in which he would subject a plant to minute analysis with his fingers whilst another boy would read out its description; and he carried out experiments in his father’s dye-house. As a young man he studied mathematics and collaborated with a fellow Lakeland Quaker, John Dalton (father of the modern atomic theory): Dalton would help Gough with his scientific works and in exchange Gough would tutor Dalton in Latin and Greek. Gough corresponded with the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Societey, and published papers on a wide range of topics, his core interest being in the physics and perception of sound – research in which he drew, of course, upon his own experience in using sound to compensate for his lost sight.


In the spring of 1807, Gough had just turned fifty years old. Our item of the month finds him in correspondence with another independent Quaker scientist, the chemist and meteorologist Luke Howard (1772-1864). Howard worked as a manufacturing chemist but his real interest was in meteorology: he subjected the weather and climate to long-term close examination and lives on today as the man who devised the classification scheme for clouds – stratus, cumulus and cirrus, and their various sub-categories. This classification – which revolutionised the way we look at the sky, delighted Goethe and has been cited as an influence on Constable and Turner – was first proposed in 1803. Four years later, when he and Gough corresponded, Howard was engaged in a long-term project to record the climate of London (which bore fruit in his book The Climate of London, originally published in two volumes in 1818-1820 and later reissued and enlarged in 1833).

For Howard, Gough provides a detailed breakdown, day by day, of the spring of 1807: the weather and the changes in the natural world. The large manuscript sheets on which this is recorded are now held at the Wellcome Library as part of the papers of the Hodgkin and Howard families under the reference PP/HO/K/A14.

Gough gives us an account of natural phenomena minutely observed. There is weather, of course, both general description and also precise measurements of wind direction and speed, atmospheric pressure, maximum and minimum temperatures, and precipitation. But there is also the naturalist’s perspective, recording birdsong and the way that plants are opening out in their appointed sequence, a close engagement with a landscape that can no longer be seen but can be heard and touched. Some sample entries give the flavour of what seems to have been, like this year, a cold March, but one in which there is a perceptible gathering of pace as the days pass:

March 2: Sambucus nigra, Elder, leafing
March 4: Slight snow showers A.M.: the three preceding days fine
March 17: Snow from 5 PM to 11 PM. Ewes lamb
March 22. White wagtail sings. Primrose fl[owe]rs.
March 24. Daffodil fl[owe]rs.
March 25. Goos[e]berry leafing.
March 26. Min[imum] of temperature at Kendal 23° [Fahrenheit], occasioned by hoarfrost. Oats sown.
March 30. Sleet. Snipe hums.

April continued intermittently cold, with two inches of snow as late as the 17th, and the fieldfare (a member of the thrush family that typically visits England from Scandinavia in winter) still present on the 20th. By the end of the month, however, he is noting the arrival of swallows (26th), thunder to the south and blackthorn blossom (30th) and – of course – the first cuckoo, on the 27th. All the markers of spring are in place.

On March 21st, incidentally, Gough records: “Wet. Lapwing arrives.” This weekend we invite our readers in northern Europe to walk in the fields – with luck, dry ones – and see if any lapwings have arrived to breed. (Identification details can be found here). For an extra taste of Gough’s work, sighted readers are invited to close their eyes, take a shoot or leaf between their fingers and feel it carefully, then try to work out how many different types of birdsong can be heard; and imagine themselves in the Lake District in 1807, as a long cold spell comes to an end and nature wakes itself.

The top image shows a chromolithograph of a goldfinch amidst cherry blossoms, from the Library's Iconographic Collections. The other images are from Gough's meteorological journal, PP/HO/K/A14.