Voodoo panels bring Wellcome Library to 750,000

It seems appropriate that in the 75th anniversary year of Henry S. Wellcome's death, the Wellcome Library, named after him because it was created by him in his lifetime, has added the 750,000th work to its online catalogue (online at http://catalogue.wellcome.ac.uk) . That's a myriad's worth of catalogue records for every year that has passed since the Library's founder died in 1936. And since The Wellcome Trust came into being on Wellcome's death, these electronic records have all been created in the 75 years of the Wellcome Trust's stewardship of Wellcome's legacy. In their present electronic form they have been created over the last thirty years, but the essential pre-cataloguing work of identification and arrangement started in Henry S. Wellcome's own lifetime.

Wellcome Library no. 750000i

Work number 750,000 is a set of six paintings in acrylic on wood, which formed the walls of the shack of a voudun healer in Benin, West Africa. A slight detour on terminology: "voudun" is the Benin version, as distinct from the Haitian version "vodou", and the English word "voodoo". That last word has been made familiar in the Anglophone world –- especially for the Louisiana version -- by the tabloid press and through Hollywood films such as White Zombie (1932). It is of course now used in English for irrational beliefs generally, as in "voodoo economics" (over 400,000 hits in Google) and "voodoo neuroscience".

Returning to the paintings, they were found in 2010 in the market-place of Adjarra, near the border of Benin with Nigeria. They were discovered there by Jack Bell, the proprietor of a London gallery specializing in sub-Saharan African paintings and acquired from him by the Wellcome Library in 2011.

Adjarra has a market place about half the size of a football field. Most of the vendors have stalls under a thatched covering, separated by uncovered walkways, similar to the market in nearby Porto Novo shown in this photograph. Alongside dealers in vegetables, clothes and electronic gadgets, there are a large number of sellers of voudun remedies: skulls, wooden fetish figures, dried animal flesh, and talismans in many forms (photograph here).

However, one specialist provider in the market place has his own premises: a corrugated iron shack formerly decorated with what are now the Wellcome Library's paintings.
Inside the shack, the proprietor provided voudun treatments promoting sexual health, by offering animal parts to be used as carriers of spirits against diseases. And on the outside, he advertised, through these paintings, the conditions that he thought would persuade the local populace to seek his services.

The six paintings form three pairs: men, women, and organs, and have text in English – presumably for the benefit of people coming over the Nigerian border, as the main language of Benin is French. (One word, "boile", is in franglais.) The paintings of men show syphilis and gonorrhoea; those of women show pregnancy (desired or problematic) and breast cancer. For both sexes there are graphic depictions of urogenital organs, the eye, and leg-sores. The choice of subjects raises the question as to why only men are shown with sexually transmitted diseases: other factors apart, they may be workers in the trade in oil and petrol across the frontier from Nigeria. Passers-by, even if they did not read English, would be left in no doubt as to the speciality of this healer, and customers would appreciate the ability to have a confidential consultation in the privacy of the healer's shack.


For some people accustomed to different conventions of figuration (not to mention therapy), the painted figures may be disturbing: the outlines are strong but not differentiated in strength, and sometimes seemingly arbitrary: the depiction of the feet for instance, or the thighs of the woman shown above, suggests that a cropping stencil was used. And talking of different conventions: the lettering is in Oxford blue on a background of Cambridge blue, respectable academic associations for our practitioner!

The Wellcome collections differ from many other medically-related historical collections in that they did not arise from a medical institution such as a hospital, a medical school, a college of medical specialists or a university medical department. The Wellcome organizations have never treated patients. Rather they arose from the interdisciplinary research interests of one man, whose collection emphasized the horizontal links across conventional fields of study, unified only as the understanding of mankind. These paintings from Benin arise from an intermixture of cultures, placing English medical illustrations at the service of West African religion and cosmology. What could be more suitable as a 75th anniversary tribute to the memory of that man, Henry Solomon Wellcome?

For copyright purposes, the paintings are orphan works. Rights holders are invited to contact the Wellcome Library.

Flying postmen and magic glass

The Paleofuture blog looks back at past projections into the future, an exercise that is usually instructive in one way or another. A few months ago (17 June 2011) it had a feature on a picture of "Rocket mailmen" which had been published in Arthur Radebaugh's Closer than we think, 4 October 1958 (image left). To travel that final distance to deliver the mail to its recipient, the postman flies through the air, with the aid of jet propulsion equipment on his back. As a sign of her status, the housewife receiving her post has a verandah supported by an elegant Georgian-style iron trellis.

Coloured etching by William Heath, 1829. Wellcome Library no. 37252i

The idea of the flying postman had appeared in a futurological vision from the actual Georgian period in England, published in May 1829 (a decade before Sir Rowland Hill's idea of the Uniform Penny Post was introduced in 1840). This vision was the "March of intellect", a satire by Paul Pry (pseudonym of William Heath, 1795-1840): click on the image above to see details. Heath's print made fun of the movement associated with Jeremy Bentham, Lord Brougham and the Wellcome Library's former neighbours at University College London who used the phrase "March of intellect" or "March of mind" as a promotional slogan for their belief that mass education and technological progress would solve the problems of society.

Thus, a steam-powered waggon travels between Bath and London in six hours;
a pneumatic tube takes passengers from Greenwich Hill to Bengal; there is a suspension bridge between Bengal and Cape Town; a giant flying fish takes convicts from England to New South Wales; and Irish emigrants are fired from a cannon. And in the lower left corner, a postman equipped with wings collects a letter for delivery by the "Twopenny post" (image right). His wings resemble bats' wings, but any resemblance to Batman is coincidental.

There are several clues to the ironic and satirical nature of the print. One of them is the epigraph in the upper margin "Lord how this world improves as we grow older." This is a heavily ironic quotation from the poem The knight and the friar (ca. 1800) by the once very well-known poet and playwright George Colman the younger (1762-1836):

The Lady wrote just what Sir Thomas told her;
For, it is no less strange than true,
That Wives did, once, what Husbands bid them do;--
Lord! how this World improves, as we grow older!

Another is the use of technology to accomplish tasks that a better-organized society would not need to bother about in the first place. For example (image right) coffins are lifted by crane up on to the roof of a church for burial in order to foil body-snatchers: Heath's print was probably published in May 1829, and William Burke, the Edinburgh body-snatcher and murderer, had been hanged on 28 January 1829.

The organization of manual postal deliveries is controversial in many countries. In Switzerland, a division of opinion as to how the Swiss post should manage it led to much rancour and the resignation of the chief executive in 2010. In the Netherlands, according to an article in the London Review of Books [1], the privatised mail service has dispensed with local sorting offices: instead, crates of unsorted mail for a given area are delivered to the flats (apartments) of the postmen and postwomen, who then sort the mail on their beds or on the work surface next to the kitchen sink before setting out with it for house-by-house deliveries. Crates full of letters and parcels that are undelivered to their intended recipients owing to illness or family problems tend to clutter up the home of the delivery person until the time when their contents can be delivered (if ever).

Electronic communication is of course one solution to the problems of hard-copy delivery. Its potential is imagined in the widely-circulated video "A day made of glass" produced in 2010 for the Corning Inc. glass company. Their vision reveals a future almost as fantastic as William Heath's "March of intellect".

There is no mention of the information overload that tends to follow enlargement of the information pipeline. And, as James Weinheimer remarked when he introduced this video to the discussion list NGC4LIB, the people shown in the video are (like the 1958 lady with her wrought-iron trellis) the fortunate and the wealthy rather than the typical population. Still, Corning's magic glass could obviate the need for the long-imagined flying postman of the future.

[1] James Meek, 'In the sorting office', London review of books, 28 April 2011, vol. 33, no. 9, pp. 3-9

Item of the month, July 2011: On this day in Amsterdam ...

This print (left) sits in the Wellcome Library among a group of Dutch posters about the use of recreational drugs. It is exceptional for its casual production values: scraps of paper torn out of a notebook, containing incoherent verses which surround incompetently scrawled drawings, photographed on a ready made background and put together with whatever editing software was available for such purposes in 1995, the date on one of the drawings.

The scrawl can however be forgiven, as the author of these drawings was not a professional artist, and their incoherence is their whole point. As the signature "brood" indicates, they are the manic ramblings of Herman Brood (right), the charismatic Dutch rock-and-roll star whose well-publicised life was fuelled by drug-use: chiefly LSD, cannabis, heroin, amphetamines and alcohol. His heyday was the 1970s and 1980s. When the music industry became too strenuous, he turned to painting in the graffiti-influenced street styles which have since become more popular than they were then, and, though colour-blind, won some renown as a spraycan artist. This poster is an example of his drawing style, apparently published to dissuade drug users in Amsterdam from following his course in life.

As well they might (be dissuaded). For in Brood's case, years of drug-use had taken their due, and although he had made plans for a new recording with a full orchestra, the future must have looked unappetising to him. On 11 July 2001 he leapt to his death from the top of the Amsterdam Hilton hotel. To remember that moment, and the life that came to a sudden end at that time, a memorial event has been organized to take place there today, 11 July 2011, at 13.15 pm.

Image credits
Poster: Wellcome Library no. 748920i; © DACS 2011

H. Brood in December 2000 with parrot: photograph by Sander Lamme in Wikimedia Commons: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bestand:Herman_Brood_2000_Amsterdam_Sander_Lamme.jpg

Hilton Hotel, Apollolaan, Amsterdam: by PatrickDR on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/patrickdr/2469928582/

World AIDS Day: from despair to defence

During the year since World AIDS Day 2009 the Wellcome Library has continued to add to its already substantial collection of AIDS posters. This (left) is the first to be received from Tajikistan; indeed it is only the ninth work from Tajikistan (these are the nine) in the entire Wellcome Library catalogue (which as of today contains records for 704,361 works). Although created with support from international organizations, its depiction of a family at dinner and other scenes is thoroughly local. In showing nothing amiss, it resembles some of the earliest AIDS posters from Asian countries. The poster was donated through the good offices of Dr Nikolaj Serikoff of the Wellcome Library.

By contrast the earlier posters from Europe did not hesitate to pile on the agony of HIV infection, and this tactic is still shown in this poster (right) from Antwerp published in 1991. The design was selected through a competition held for Flemish art students in April 1990.

The German-language AIDS posters appear to be all now in the Wellcome Library catalogue – "appear" because it is possible that we still have some more somewhere that have not yet been catalogued; and many of the earlier records are first-draft records that need subsequent upgrading. Their completion (as it may well be) is thanks to Anna Ostrowska of the Wellcome Library, who had already catalogued the Polish ones. Many of the more recent posters (published in 2000 and subsequently) show more confidence than their predecessors in defending the status of the HIV positive, and less despair about their future, which may reflect the introduction of Retrovir and improvements in combination therapy. It also suggests that the earlier generation of poster designers and activists had been successful in their aim of taking the stigma out of AIDS.

Defending is the very subject of this poster (left): four defenders for FC Bayern Munich, all of non-German ancestry, represent the "defence" of immigrant HIV positive people against discrimination on World AIDS Day 2003: Willy Sagnol (French); Owen Hargreaves (English); Sammy Kuffour (Ghanaian); and Robert Kovač (Croatian). English Wikipedia says that Hargreaves was born in Calgary, Alberta, of a Welsh mother and an English father, and German Wikipedia says Kovač was born and brought up in Berlin. The nationalities may be somewhat fluid, but if these heroes of Bavaria are perceived as assets to Germany, the message stands: "Defend against exclusion. Live and let live".

The poster above shows a Bavarian maypole decorated with coats of arms, flags, harvest symbols etc. The maypole stands "high", and therefore represents consumers of recreational drugs who have become dependent on them. This often hidden sector of the population is alluded to ironically through the most traditional of public symbols. The photograph is by Andreas Doehring and probably dates from 2003. Though the poster was published by an AIDS support charity (Münchner Aids-Hilfe e.V.), the clinical symptoms of AIDS disappear beneath a strident message in favour of non-bourgeois values.

Credits:
Tajik AIDS poster: Wellcome Library no. 729001i
Despairing Flemish couple: Wellcome Library no. 728713i
Footballers: Wellcome Library no. 728560i
Maypole: Wellcome Library no. 727923i