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

'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)

Damaging the Body: Loss of Face - Vitriol Throwing in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Britain

The last seminar in the current series Damaging the Body: Physical Harm and the Self, 1850 - 2010, will take place in the Wellcome Library next Wednesday evening.  Details:

Wednesday 2 May
Dr Katherine Watson (Oxford Brookes University)
Loss of Face: Vitriol Throwing in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract:
This paper surveys the nature and extent of vitriol (strong sulphuric acid) throwing in Britain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will first seek to establish the incidence of this relatively rare form of assault, to identify the contexts in which it occurred (typically but not always a scenario revolving around bitter disagreement provoked either during an industrial dispute or as a result of sexual jealousy), the forms that it took, the individuals who resorted to it and the legal responses to them. This will indicate to what extent vitriol throwing was a gendered or class-related crime, give some indication of how it was perceived by the public of the day and how they judged the perpetrators in the light of claims of provocation (including those phrased in terms of temporary insanity brought on by ill usage), and show how and why these factors changed over time. The remainder of the paper considers the crime from the victim’s point of view. Although this is a more difficult perspective to gain access to, medical reports show how devastating the effects of an acid attack could be. In a culture that values physical regularity, the potential for isolation and ostracism is clear and the paper argues that victims faced physical, social, psychological and economic consequences that could last a lifetime and that far outweighed the penalties imposed on the perpetrators.

The seminar will take place in the Wellcome Library, 2nd floor, 183 Euston Road, NW1 2BE. Please deposit bags and coats in the ground floor cloakroom and meet in the 2nd floor foyer. Doors at 6pm prompt, the seminars will start by 6.15.

The Damaging the Body seminars have been organised by the UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines in conjunction with the University of the West of England. The aim of the seminars is to provoke interdisciplinary discussion of the ways in which the creation of more diverse histories of bodily damage in the nineteenth century and beyond might open up wider concerns.

Image: Jealous wife attacks her husband's girlfriend with vitriol, Paris 1897 (Picture No. 10007528, Mary Evans Picture Library).

The Georgian medicine vendor as physician: William Brodum

Wellcome Library no. 20131i

A watercolour in the Wellcome Library (left) shows an interior with three figures.  In the centre a plump, self-satisfied looking man  looks down with approval at the work of the second figure, on the right, who is Death himself. Death is a tall and physically active skeleton wearing a tie-wig: he vigorously stirs a pestle in a mortar to grind up ingredients for medicines. Some pharmaceutical vessels are shown on the floor around them, and the shelves in the background are full of apothecary's glassware.  The third figure is a woman patient who sits in front of the fireplace on the left, gripped by illness.

The obvious interpretation is that the man is an apothecary (pharmacist), hence the glassware on the shelves of his house. Death is the apothecary's business partner, making up medicines with lethal side-effects: clearly the woman is going to die as a result of taking the harmful medicine. Right?

No, not exactly.  If the setting is an apothecary's shop, the sick woman wearing night-clothes would be sitting in front of the fire in the pharmacist's establishment, not in her own home. To explain that improbability, one would have to assume that she is meant to be a member of his household -- which would rather reduce the applicability of the joke and take the edge off the humour. As the watercolour is attributed to the ever-humorous Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827), that would be a problem.

A possible clue to the subject came to light in January 2012 when Christie's in New York offered at auction another watercolour version of the same composition, inscribed in what looks like Rowlandson's hand "Dr Brodum and his assistant at work pro publico bono". [1] So who was Dr Brodum?

Wellcome Library no. 1397i

William Brodum (right) was one of several members of the Georgian medical fringe who were portrayed by caricaturists. Samuel Phillips Eady, also portrayed by Rowlandson and discussed in this blog-post, was another who could be so described. Unlike Eady, Brodum is dignified by an entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), where evidence is cited that he was a Danish Jew, born Issachar Cohen in Copenhagen around 1767. [2] He came to England around 1787 to work for another medicine vendor (Dr Bossy), using the name William Brodum. He obtained an Aberdeen M.D. degree in 1791, and from his house at 9 Albion Street, Blackfriars Road, London, launched his own career as a medicine vendor, specializing in two product lines: "Doctor Brodum's Botanical Syrup for the cure of scorbutic, leprous and scrofulous complaints" and "Doctor Brodum's Nervous Cordial for the cure of consumptive, nervous and debilitated constitutions, and people who have been in hot countries". His advertising for these products included a lot of code words that were euphemisms for syphilis (debility, leprosy, nervous weakness etc.), and the same insinuation was gracefully made in the title and body of a two-volume publication, Guide to old age, or, A cure for the indiscretions of youth (1795), dedicated to King George III, whose favour he received. A miniature portrait of him around this time was published in an engraving by Ezekiel Abraham Ezekiel (1757–1806), a member of the Jewish community in Exeter (above).

Brodum was therefore both a commercial medicine vendor and a doctor of medicine. Since the two professions were theoretically distinct and incompatible, problems could arise with the regulatory bodies, one of which was the Royal College of Physicians of London. In practice, this combination was not unusual at the time: Sir Hans Sloane, Dr Robert James, and Dr Richard Mead were among physicians associated with proprietary medicines (chocolate in Sloane's case), a fact which led one commentator to ask "Have not members of the College dined at Dr Brodum's table?". [3] In any case, Brodum was summoned before the College and told he could not accept consultation fees and should remove from his house the brass plate which described him as “Dr Brodum”. Brodum refused to accept this ruling, and the academic authorities in Aberdeen did not appreciate the College’s scorn for the value of their doctorate. Brodum continued to visit patients for an advertised cost of 5 guineas a week, while outpatients could visit him at his house every Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. [4]

Whether by accident or design,the goings-on in Rowlandson's watercolour fit this situation perfectly. If the man is meant to be identified with Brodum -- he died in 1824 and Rowlandson in 1827 -- we need not ask whether it shows a medicine vendor or a physician. Brodum and Death together make up the medicines at Brodum's pharmaceutical laboratory in Southwark, while the patient in the background, huddled in front of her own fireplace, represents the use to which the medicine will be put in Brodum's medical practice.

[1] Christie's, Old Master and early British drawings and watercolors, New York, Rockefeller Plaza, 26 January 2012, lot 38

[2] Edgar Samuel, 'Brodum, William (fl. 1767–1824)', Oxford dictionary of national biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008. Brodum wrote that he was "born and bred" in the same country as the Queen, Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, in north Germany (Guide to old age, or, A cure for the indiscretions of youth, 1795, vol. 1, fol. A2r)

[3] Roy Porter, Health for sale, Manchester 1989, p. 9

[4] William Brodum, Guide to old age, or, A cure for the indiscretions of youth, 1795, pp. 153-155

A treat at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin

© The Trustees of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin

Only a few more days for readers in Ireland to see the exhibition China through the lens of John Thomson: 1868-1872, which comes to an end at the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin on Sunday 26 February, before moving on to Northern Ireland.

The Chester Beatty Library is a gem in its own right, with valuable and exquisite works displayed in two permanent exhibitions: one covering the principal religions of the world and the other the arts used in the making of books, including printmaking and painting. The latter starts with a magnificent George Stubbs mezzotint of a tigress, acquired in 2007 from the Christopher Lennox-Boyd collection. Other prints of particular interest include etchings by 17th-century masters such as Abraham Bosse, Jacques Callot and Antonie Van Dyck. A collection of etchings by Romeyn de Hooghe (1692) of King William III's return from Ireland to Holland is a work by the anatomist and courtier Govaert Bidloo. A rare book illustrated by Raoul Dufy, Mon docteur le vin(Paris 1936), claims that wine prevents appendicitis by killing germs in the intestines and resists typhoid, infant sicknesses, and diabetes (the WellcomeLibrary has the 2003 English translation).

A remarkable story is told by a box of Manichaean manuscripts which were entrusted to a conservator in Berlin in the 1920s, were removed to Leningrad in 1945, went back to East Germany in the 1960s, and finally returned to the Chester Beatty Library after 1990. Among the most recent works is a print of the physician and fable-writer Lu Xun (1881-1936), of whom the Wellcome Library has also recently acquired a portrait: the portrait in the Chester Beatty Library (by Wu Biduan, 1998) is appropriately a woodcut, as Lu Xun championed the woodcut technique as the medium of the people.

The other exhibition, Sacred Traditions, also contains many works which have their counterparts in the Wellcome Library, such as Burmese parabaik and Jain cosmological paintings – as well of course as splendid Qur'an manuscripts and other unique works.

The John Thomson photographs on exhibition until Sunday complement the Chinese collections of the Chester Beatty Library, which shows its own related objects in showcases in the exhibition: they include a Chinese lady's shoes and 19th-century Chinese spectacles similar to those shown in the photographs. Outside the exhibition, the reading room of the Library has a fine Chinese lacquer ceiling(right) acquired in China by Chester Beatty, the founder of the Library.

Here's an article by the Irish travel writer Manchán Magan in the Irish Times about Chinese students from Birmingham visiting the exhibition in Dublin "to see their ancestors in the Chester Beatty Library". Admission is free, opening hours here, location here.

160 years of Great Ormond Street Hospital

Today marks the 160th anniversary of the opening of the Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, London.  As such, we felt we couldn't let the anniversary pass unnoticed, particularly as the range of material held by the Wellcome Library on the hospital cuts across so much of our collections: whether this be archive material, books, images (of all kinds, as we'll see below) and films.  

Key to the opening of the hospital were the actions of Dr Charles West.  Trained in France and Germany, where children's hospitals had long been in operation, West's book How to Nurse Sick Children (first published in 1854), made the case for children's hospitals in England and particularly in London.  West won support from a number of philanthropists and prominent health experts (including Baroness Burdett-Coutts and Edwin Chadwick) and enough backing was obtained for the Hospital - with ten beds - to open at 49 Great Ormond Street in February 1862.

Shown here is Sir Thomas Barlow, whose papers are held in the Wellcome Library.  Physician to Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George VI and Barlow was an expert in childhood diseases (in particular infantile scurvy).  He was appointed medical registrar at the Hospital for Sick Children in 1874, serving there in different roles until 1899.  The Hospital served as the location for his research, as his papers testify.

Given the themes of his novels, it's perhaps no surprise Charles Dickens was an early supporter of the hospital, as this item from our collections illustrates.  Indeed, as well as fundraising speeches and strenuous performances, Dickens raised the profile of the hospital through a number of articles he wrote for his magazines Household Worlds and All the Year Round.  The hospital even makes an appearance in one of Dickens's late novels, Our Mutual Friend (1864-65).   

However, the most famous literary figure associated with the Hospital is not Dickens, but the Scottish author and playwright J M Barrie.  In 1929, Barrie donated to the Hospital the copyright of his most famous work Peter Pan.  In one of the more surprising additions to our collections, these lantern slides give an indication of how Barrie's creation was interpreted in the 1900s (a version of these slides has been uploaded to YouTube).

To conclude this brief post, we must move outwith the collections of the Wellcome Library and mention the Historic Hospital Admission Registers Project (HHARP).  Although HHARP now includes details of admissions to three other children's hospitals (Evelina Hospital; the Alexandra Hospital for Children with Hip Disease and and the Royal Hospital for Sick Children, Glasgow) arose from work to create a database of late 19th century and early 20th century admissions to Great Ormond Street.  As well as the rich details provided by these medical records, HHARP also includes histories on all the hospitals it includes records from, a handy glossay of medical terms and contextualising detail on the growth of children's hospitals in the nineteenth century.

Images:
- Charles West. Photograph by G. Jerrard (Wellcome Library no. 13730i).
- The Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London: the main facade. Wood engraving by W. E. Hodgkin after D. R. Warry, 1872 ((Wellcome Library no.36052i).
- 49 Great Ormond Street, London, in course of demolition. Watercolour by J. P. Emslie, 1882 (Wellcome Library no. 36079i).
- Sir Thomas Barlow (1845-1945), physician to the King. Oil painting by Harry Herman Salomon after a photograph (Wellcome Library no. 45551i).

"The flamboyant Mr Chinnery"

Thomas Colledge with patients in Macao. Aquatint by by William Daniell, 1834, after George Chinnery. Wellcome Library no. 9880i  

"The flamboyant Mr Chinnery" is the title of an exhibition on view at Asia House, in the West End of London.* It is a rare chance to see a representative collection of paintings and drawings from private and public collections by the English artist George Chinnery (1774–1852). Though born in Gough Square in the City of London, and baptized at St Bride's church off Fleet Street, Chinnery spent most of his life in Bengal (1812-1825), then from 1825 to 1832 in Canton (Guangzhou), and finally in the Portuguese colony of Macao (Macau), where he died. Since Chinnery was not only well-travelled but also prolific, versatile and long-lived, the exhibition covers a lot of ground, in every sense.

In India and China Chinnery painted portraits and landscapes, and sketched picturesque scenes of Chinese card-players, boat-girls and builders at work. Among the portraits the exhibition includes mezzotints of William Jardine, the Scottish doctor who abandoned medicine to become an opium trader (co-founding the firm of Jardine Matheson & Co.), and of the Rev. Robert Morrison the missionary, who is shown in 1828 with his assistants translating the Bible into a 21-volume Chinese version, which raises the question as to whether the portrait is mentioned in Morrison's papers in the Wellcome Library. Chinnery's portrait of James Holman "The blind traveller", who travelled 250,000 miles recording his experiences with a "noctograph" is on loan from the Royal Society. A masterly pair of contrasting portraits belonging to HSBC shows two Chinese merchants of Canton: Mowqua (plump and relaxed) and Howqua (emaciated and self-controlled).

Group portraits include the aquatint of Thomas Colledge (1796-1879) operating in his eye-surgery in Macao established in 1827 (above and top), and the oil painting On Dent's Verandah (1842-1843, private collection), in which three men (French, American and British) involved in opium trading with Thomas Dent and Co. (rivals of Jardine Matheson) lounge in the humidity of Macao with a prominent opium poppy in the foreground. This will surely end up in one of the great public collections.

The landscapes show the fine Portuguese baroque churches of Macao (São Lourenço and the Jesuit church of São Paulo depicted before and after the fire of 1835) standing above the hustle and bustle of typical Chinese streets. A DVD Chinnery then and now cleverly juxtaposes Chinnery's street scenes with photographs of the same places in Macao as they appear today. A bridge at Honam (Canton) was painted at the request of the physician Thomas Boswall Watson, himself an amateur artist, who as a doctor would later perform an autopsy on Chinnery's body.

However, for any one familiar with Hong Kong, the most heart-stopping moment will be the last item in the exhibition: a drawing of Hong Kong made during a six-months visit in 1846, towards the end of Chinnery's life. After only five years of western ownership, the palatial headquarters of the great trading firms are already in place on the harbour front and are creeping up the hill – the start of the Hong Kong business building boom.

This drawing, like others by Chinnery, is inscribed by him in Gurney shorthand (his father was a teacher of it). At present the Colledge print is the only item in the Wellcome Library catalogue under Chinnery's name, but there are many uncatalogued drawings in the Library, and an eye should be kept open for drawings of East Asian subjects with shorthand annotations using this system – they are likely to be Chinnery's.

In Macao a street is named Rua George Chinnery in his honour, and in 1974 a trilingual inscription in English, Chinese and Portuguese was added to his tombstone to mark his 200th birthday. The exhibition is equally a fitting tribute to Chinnery's talent as a recorder of people and places, and shows that, given the right choice of subject, a modest exhibition space can provide as enriching an experience as any blockbuster.

For more on the exhibition see Brian Sewell's review in the London Evening Standard, 1 December 2011: he reproduces On Dent's Verandah. [1]

[1] http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/arts/review-24016398-the-flamboyant-mr-chinnery-an-english-artist-in-india-and-china-asia-house---review.do

* Open Monday-Saturday 10-6 until Saturday 21 January 2012 at Asia House, 63 New Cavendish Street, London W1G 7LP, admission free. Sponsored by HSBC.

HMS Beagle's Naturalist

On the 27th December 1831, one of the most famous expeditions of the nineteenth century was launched, as it was on this day, 180 years ago, that the second voyage of HMS Beagle begun. As such, let's mark this anniversary by briefly highlighting a manuscript we hold, written by the naturalist on board the Beagle at the start of its voyage. Quick question first - what was this person's name?

If your answer is 'Charles Darwin', then the wailing of the klaxons of QI be upon you - the correct answer, and the man who also held the post of ship's surgeon, was Robert McCormick (1800-1890).

McCormick's diary for the years 1830 to 1832, held in the Wellcome Library as MS.3359, helps to elucidate McCormick's relationship with both Robert FitzRoy (the Beagle's captain) and Charles Darwin (who was on board as a gentleman companion to FitzRoy, albeit one with a knowledge of geology and the natural world).

McCormick's diary forms the basis of a recent monograph published by the British Society for the History of Science: 'He is No Loss': Robert McCormick and the Voyage of HMS Beagle by Emily Steel.

The monograph - which also includes a transcription of McCormick's diary - examines McCormick's attitude to Fitzroy and Darwin and why it was McCormick left the Beagle in April 1832.

McCormick's diary may not be as famous as some of our other holdings, but its (relative) unfamiliarity is arguably a virtue: it's one of the manuscripts held by the Wellcome Library that directly reminds us that there can be disputed accounts of 'familiar' historical events.

Merry Christmas!

The Wellcome Library closes today for the festive period at 6pm and re-opens at 10am on Tuesday 3rd January 2012.

We would just like to take this opportunity to wish all Library readers and followers of the Library Blog, a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Image: A snowballing scene with boys playing in the snow. On the reverse of the picture is an advertisement for Onnen's German Fever and Ague Mixture. 1890s (EPH 348)

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)

A Doctor on Holiday: World Tourism Day

Regular visitors to this Blog will know, the Wellcome Library holds the personal papers of many doctors, surgeons, medical scientists and practitioners throughout the ages. These collections, especially from the 19th century onwards, frequently include entertaining journals, notebooks, letters and ephemera generated during the course of travels, trips and holidays undertaken by these medics.

To mark World Tourism Day, we'll focus on a particularly appealing set of holiday journals: those of London-based Scottish doctor Charles Brodie Sewell (1817-1900). They comprise 18 volumes, mainly covering his trips around all parts of Britain and the resorts of Europe between 1868 and 1892 and are illustrated with much inset material such as brochures, advertisements, tickets, menus, photographs and folding maps (MSS.4498-4515). Evidently once Sewell had built up a popular and successful practice he was able to reward himself with substantial holidays when could he de-stress and make use of his many contacts abroad.

There are, however, some notable diversions from the traditional British and Continental destinations. In 1883, when he was around 65 years old Sewell and his companion (it is likely that this was his wife, but it is possible that it may have been his daughter) made a long-intended trip to the North Eastern seaboard of the United States of America and into Canada (MS.4508). During this period, September-October, he had the chance to meet American friends and colleagues, some of whom he’d only ever been able to correspond with over the years. There were also many opportunities to experience new scenery and different races and cultures as the pair traveled through the state of New York, up the Hudson River, to Lake George, Saratoga Springs, Toronto, Montreal, Lake Ontario, the Lachine Rapids, Quebec, Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC.

The holiday began with the Atlantic sea crossing. This is particularly anticipated and relished by Sewell who writes an entertaining account of the two weeks from Liverpool to New York on the White Star liner Britannic. As one would expect, this takes in stormy weather, severe bouts of sea-sickness, gossip regarding fellow passengers, sporting activities on deck (tug of war, long jump and hop scotch) and complaints about the racket coming from the saloon at night.



Once the “strict and venal” searches by New York harbour customs officials were completed Sewell and his companion were free to explore the sights. The recently completed Brooklyn Bridge in New York City especially impresses Sewell who takes a ferry along the East River and passes underneath it. At this point in time it is the longest suspension bridge in the world. Anchored by two neo-Gothic towers and a complex framework of steel-wire cables it was guaranteed to amaze.



As well as striking man-made structures, magnificent natural phenomena such as Niagara Falls take up many pages in the journal. Sewell’s hotel room provides a view of the American and Canadian side of the falls, which he describes as “dazzling” and “an intoxicating sight, grand and beautiful beyond description”. A truly memorable day out, it is also characterized by the - even in the 19th century - familiar tourist sights of people offering guide services, photographs and cheap souvenirs. Viewing the Falls from a sheltered position, Sewell gleefully describes seeing two men in standard issue yellow oil skins get soaked through and looking miserable, several drenched people and "a fool" using an umbrella.

The journal contains descriptions of a great many buildings, places, sites and scenes which would not vary much from the itinerary of today’s visitors to the eastern United States and Canada. Also in not too dissimilar tourist fashion, Sewell expresses annoyance at various officials, amazement at the large portions of food in America, and gives his opinions on the standard of accommodation (overall, Canadian facilities are presented as being somewhat less comfortable than those in the United States), troublesome fellow passengers, rude hotel staff, touts, hawkers and prices. If he was alive today, one can imagine him posting comments on travel advisory websites, giving his ratings on various hotels, services, tourist sights and transportation.

What makes this (and all the other journals in this collection) all the more enjoyable are the humorous anecdotes which vividly convey Sewell’s character and opinions. At one point he describes a train journey during which he encounters an incessantly garrulous passenger who he tries to avoid by pretending to be asleep… alas to no avail!

On a more serious note - and with particular relevance to the ethos of World Tourism Day - this journal also insights into contemporary relations between the African-American and white communities in the USA and Sewell's impressions of the status of Native Americans in Canada.

Sewell’s enthusiasm for travel continued for nearly another ten years as he undertook further trips to Europe (including visiting Switzerland, Germany and parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and England. There is a notable detour to Norway in 1888, an account lavishly illustrated with pictures of dramatic fjords and mountain landscapes (MS.4512).

Images:
- Drawing of a steam boat on the Lachine Rapids, Canada
- The saloon passenger list of the White Star Line steamship 'Britannic' for its journey from New York to Liverpool, 27th October 1883
- A general view of the Brooklyn bridge taken from Columbia Heights, Brooklyn. New York can be seen in the distance
- The view from the top of Brooklyn Tower, looking down upon the bridge and towards New York
(All images, from MS.4508).

Author: Amanda Engineer

Guest Post: Neurology, the “Unconscious” and Victorian Psychiatry

The Bethlem Blog is run by the Bethlem Royal Hospital Archives and Museum to provide historical information on one of the world's oldest psychiatric hospitals, access to the Museum's art collection, and to contribute generally to the public understanding and destigmatisation of mental illness. This guest post discusses the work of one of the Hospital's Superintendents, Theophilus B. Hyslop (1863-1933).

The copy of Theo Hyslop’s 1895 publication, Mental Physiology in the Wellcome Library was, presumably, originally the doctor’s own, as it is interleaved with reviews, calling cards and letters to Hyslop from other mental health professionals, forming a fascinating archive in itself.

Mental Physiology was written mainly for the psychological part of Hyslop’s London M.D, which he completed while working as Assistant Medical Officer at Bethlem. Hyslop’s successor, William Stoddart, found it “strange” that the book never reached a second edition. [1] Perhaps Hyslop’s efforts to associate somatic and psychological theories of mental health and illness did not integrate easily with a growing divide between neurological and psychotherapeutic approaches. Nonetheless, Mental Physiology certainly shares similar evolutionary concerns with much British psychiatry of the period, in emphasising the importance of volition (or will) to both the individual and broader civilization, simultaneously associating mental ill-health with a loss of, or failure to attain, this self-control.

Hyslop was also heavily influenced by French neurology, much of which stemmed from the work of Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière in Paris. Mental Physiology contains numerous references to the writings of Charcot’s pupils, such as Charles Féré and Pierre Janet. Janet is of particular note here: his calling card appears among the numerous psychiatrists’ cards pasted into the Wellcome Library's copy of Mental Physiology (from physicians across Europe and the United States), presumably received when they either visited Bethlem or attended a conference or meeting of the Medico-Psychological Association.

A letter from Janet to Hyslop, also included in the Wellcome's edition of Mental Physiology, would seem to be part of a longer correspondence between the two, for it discusses the symptoms, and treatment, of a particular individual, presumably known to both parties. Since Henri Ellenberger’s research into The Discovery of the Unconscious in 1970, Janet’s work has been regarded as important in the formation ‘dynamic psychiatry’ and psychotherapeutic techniques, through his explorations into repressed memory, multiple personality and the connections between past events and present trauma. [2] It is interesting to see here evidence of an established link between French and English psychiatry during a period in which, according to the traditional historical view, continental ideas had limited influence in England.

[1] Stoddart, W. H. B. 1933. “Obituary: Theophilus Bulkeley Hyslop, M.D., CM., M.R.C.P.E., F.R.S.E.”. Journal of Mental Science 79, no. 325: 424-426.

[2] Ellenberger, H. 1970. The Discovery of the Unconscious: the History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.

This post also appears on the Bethlem Blog.

Studying the stomach

Had not been for an encounter with a fur trapper, it is likely that William Beaumont (1785-1853) (pictured left) would have been just another surgeon in the United States army whose name was lost to posterity. As a result of this meeting, however, Beaumont became the first person to observe human digestion as it occurs in the stomach.

On 6 June 1822, Beaumont - serving in the Army Medical Service in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan - was summoned to treat Alexis St Martin. St Martin was a 28-year-old French-Canadian fur trapper who had been injured by a gunshot blast to the stomach. The initial wound was sizeable - in Beaumont's words, "more than the size of the palm of a man's hand". It gradually healed, but after a nearly a year, small holes (or fistulas) remained in the skin. This meant that Beaumont could move a flap of skin and actually see the workings of St Martin's stomach.

Beaumont realised that this afforded fantastic opportunities for research, and he even employed St Martin - who was no longer fit to resume his previous work - for a time as his family's handyman. Beaumont was assigned to different locations through his attachment to the army over the next decade, but he continued his observations of digestion occurring in St Martin's stomach intermittently in this time.



At a simple level, he removed gastric juices from St Martin and mixed them with canned beef. He also inserted a similar piece of beef tied to a piece of string into St Martin's stomach, then removed this beef to compare the rates of digestion of both pieces of meat. In later research, he tried inserting different foods into St Martin's stomach, including vegetables, raw oysters, sausage and mutton. Beaumont discovered that anger hindered digestion - this from the fact that St Martin sometimes, perhaps understandably, became irritable during the experiments...

Beaumont carried out further experiments with St Martin on the rates of digestion and the constitution of gastric juices. In 1833, he published his research as Experiments and Observations on the Gastric Juices and the Physiology of Digestion. This work - which has proved extremely influential - outlined the complexities of the digestive process, describing the stomach in motion and at rest, and even suggested the damage caused to the workings of the stomach by alcohol.

In 1840, Beaumont was able to leave the Army. He became a prominent local doctor in St Louis, Missouri, a job he held until his death in 1853. But what of St Martin? Despite his injuries, he lived to the ripe age of 86 (outliving Beaumont by nearly 30 years).

St Martin's family were nervous that doctors would want to obtain his body, so they deliberately let his corpse decompose for four days before burying him in an unmarked grave. It was only in the 1960s that St Martin's descendents disclosed his grave's location, allowing a plaque to be placed near it. The plaque gives details on St Martin's life and says that "through his affliction he served all humanity".

Images:
- Portrait of William Beaumont, from Jesse S Meyer Life and Letters of Dr William Beaumont (St Louis, 1912)
- 'Represents the ordinary appearance of the left breast and side, the aperture filled with the valve; the subject in erect position', from William Beaumont, Experiments and observations on the gastric juice, and the physiology of digestion (Plattsburgh, 1833)
- Portrait of Alexis St. Martin, aged 81, from Jesse S Meyer Life and Letters of Dr William Beaumont (St Louis, 1912)

A version of this blog post appears in the new issue of 'Big Picture'

Find out more on the William Beaumont family website.

Twins take the stage

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of a very famous pair of twins - Chang and Eng.

These conjoined-twins are from where the term "Siamese twins" originates. They were born at Maklong near Bankok in Siam of Chinese extraction; they were taken to America and then England in 1829, by a British merchant, Robert Hunter, who with his American partner Abel Coffin, began to exhibit them as curiosities in tours across Britain and America. They caused great excitement and curiosity, and their act included standing still on stage, performing acrobatics and as shown here playing a variation of badminton.

After visiting the principal cities in Europe they returned to America in 1839 and settled as farmers in North Carolina, adopting the name of Bunker and marrying two sisters who bore each of them many healthy children. Over time however, financial concerns - due in no small part to the American Civil War - saw them take to the road again.

In 1869 - on another European tour - they took advice on the possibilities of surgery to separate themselves (the advice was inconclusive). Both twins died on 17th January 1874. Chang, suffering from pneumonia, died suddenly in his sleep; Eng passed away three hours later.

Their fame in their lifetime is indicated by this satirical print from our collections, with the Duke of Wellingtong and Sir Robert Peel being compared to Chang and Eng. For a wider sense of the world the twins inhabited upon the stages of Europe and the United States, our Freak show ephemera captures many of the other speciality "acts" of the time.

Images:
Chang and Eng the Siamese twins, aged eighteen, playing badminton. Lithograph (Library no. 2447i)
Wellington and Peel compared with the Siamese twins (above); a rich bishop and a poor parson; and a street vendor. Etching by W. Heath, 1830. (Wellcome Library no. 12230i)