'If not duffers won't drown'

We are pleased to announce that the papers of Roger E  C Altounyan (1922-1987) have now been catalogued and are available for research.

Roger Altounyan was a member of a distinguished Anglo-Armenian medical dynasty. His grandfather, born in Turkey, undertook medical education in the USA and Germany in the early twentieth century and founded a hospital in Aleppo, Syria. His son Ernest took over the running of this hospital and after qualifying in medicine Roger Altounyan worked there for a few years until changes in the political situation meant the family had to leave in 1955. There is a little material about this family background in PP/RCA/A.1/1.

During his childhood, the family enjoyed a sailing holiday in the Lake District with Arthur Ransome, a friend of his mother's family, an association which led Ransome to write the much-loved children's classic Swallows and Amazons and its sequels, in which Ship's Boy Roger Walker was based on Roger Altounyan, who remained very keen on small boat sailing in later life.

After education at Abbotsholme School (where he suffered from severe eczema), Roger Altounyan returned to Aleppo in 1939, and on the outbreak of World War II joined the RAF. He became a bomber pilot with particular responsibility for the development of low-level night flying procedures, and received the Air Force Cross in 1945. He then studied medicine at Cambridge and the Middlesex Hospital, qualifying in 1952, when he returned to Aleppo. After the family had to leave, he returned to England and found a job working for Bengers, a subsidiary of Fisons Pharmaceuticals and subsequently absorbed by them. He also undertook clinics in the chest departments of Manchester hospitals.

Altounyan had developed asthma while a medical student and was particularly interested in finding a remedy.  In order to examine the effects of various substances in a human subject he would induce attacks in order to record his response. The collection includes a substantial series of spirometer readings he took of these experiments using the equipment illustrated, recently part on an exhibition at the US National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, Maryland on the history of asthma.

This led to the development of Intal (disodium cromoglycate) from a Middle Eastern folk remedy, Khellin. Although Altounyan and his colleagues were told to stop pursuing the line of research they had begun, they continued this in secret with such success that Intal was passed through the necessary processes of approval and put into production with unusual alacrity.
This collection is particularly strong on Altounyan's work on Intal and other products during his period at Fisons; it also reflects his increasing international profile, in a series of files relating to talks and lectures given at a geographically broad range of venues. There is also a substantial amount of correspondence with colleagues as well as some material on working at Fisons generally.

His daring yet careful and responsible risk-taking in the interests of advancing understanding of asthma and its relief recalls the famous telegram that opens the action of Swallows and Amazons: 'Better drowned than duffers if not duffers won't drown'.

Anatomical Archives Available

The archive of the Anatomical Society has recently been catalogued and is now available to researchers at the Wellcome Library. The collection covers the founding of the society until the 1980s, and includes a range of documents on membership, (SA/ANA/C) financial information (SA/ANA/B ) and a considerable amount of correspondence ( SA/ANA/D).

The Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in May 1887 by Charles Barrett Lockwood, after collaborating with George M Humphry and Alexander Macalister. Lockwood was a surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and taught at the Medical College there, while Humphry and Macalister were renowned Professors and surgeons from the Medical College at Cambridge. The original minutes from the founding meeting in 1887 up until 1982 can be found in SA/ANA/A. By 1890 the society had its first overseas member and in 1894 two women were admitted from the London of Medicine for Women.

There have been over sixty presidents of the society, each one serving for just over two years and several have contributed to the advancement of biological and medical sciences. One such president is Professor Johnson Symington who was chair of anatomy at Queens College Belfast, and then appointed registrar of the college in 1901. He published several anatomy atlases, was president during 1903-1906, and the society reprinted an edition of his atlas in the 1950s. There are several awards in his name: The Symington Memorial Prize that was established in 1920 and is given out every 3 years by the society (see SA/ANA/D/11).

Another president was Professor George Mitchell, who was involved in the first use of penicillin amongst soldiers, initially distributing and in the Italy campaign, and then helping to give the drug out on D-Day. After the war he was appointed chair of anatomy at the University of Manchester. He was president of the society in 1961-1963 and some of his correspondence from this time is in this collection (see SA/ANA/D/3/3).

The society is also associated with the Journal of Anatomy (originally the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology) which was founded in 1865 by Humphry and Macalister. The Journal was independently edited for several years but upon the founding of the society in 1887, this ceased and it became fully owned by the society in 1916, when physiology was dropped from its title. (see SA/ANA/D/9) The society also has another journal: Aging Cell, which was launched in 2002.

The society’s aims are to promote, develop and advance research and education of the anatomical sciences. It achieves this through general, annual and scientific meetings, national and international conferences, awards and bursaries, exhibitions and publishing its own journals. In July 2010 the society shortened its name to the Anatomical Society.

For more information, please see the Anatomical Society website

Author: Morwenna Roche

Image: Mascagni, Paolo. Anatomia universa XLIV, tabulis aeneis juxta archetypum hominis adulti accuratissime repraesentata... Pisa: Firmin Didot for Nicolò Capurro, 1823[-1831] (Wellcome Library, F.267a)

Colouring in the last bits: the end of an era

Exactly ten years ago, on April 26th 2002, one of the Library's archivists sat at a PC and started our archive catalogue programme, went through various options to set up an import of data, selected the source file and clicked OK...
...and a matter of seconds later, our archive database had received its first load of converted catalogue data and we had set out on a journey from paper to digital, a journey completed a few days ago with the conversion of our last paper archive list.

It is hard, now, to think back to those early days, so accustomed are Library users and staff to the archive database. The complexities of rendering a hierarchical archive catalogue on the screen - plus, for a long time, a lack of agreement as to what an archive catalogue should actually do [1] - meant that good catalogue software for archives developed more slowly than that for libraries, and it was only in the 1990s that a move to database catalogues gained some momentum. (Happily, this took place at the same time as the explosion in use of the World Wide Web, so archive catalogues when they did arrive were able to jump straightaway to giving readers web access, rather than forcing them to work with pre-web technologies such as Telnet.) Up till that time, the reader wanting to use our archives and manuscripts sources was confronted by six meaty published volumes of manuscript cataloguing, and some two hundred spiral-bound word-processed lists of twentieth-century archive collections.

For the reader wanting a particular organisation or individual's papers, this worked, and usership was steady. For the reader wanting thematic access across the collection, however, life was much harder. Some topics, of course, came up repeatedly, and for these we compiled sources guides describing material relating to particular themes or areas: many of these, radically recast and updated, are still to be found on our website. For the reader with a new, unusual or quirky topic, however, rather than one of the staples such as shell-shock or abortion, it could be difficult to know where to start. A few years ago, for instance, a user of the Rare Materials Room wanted to know about our sources relating to Marmite: the sort of question that would have been virtually impossible to answer before the database. [2]

The database was to revolutionise all this, and to democratise access to archives and manuscripts profoundly. It enabled readers to ask the questions that they wanted to have answered, not simply the ones we had managed to predict; and by opening up the database to a wider range of enquiries, saw some hitherto quieter areas of the collection, such as the American manuscripts, receiving heavier use than ever before.

First, though, we had to get the data into it. The turn of the Millennium saw a large number of collaborative exercises launched to get archive data onto the web, and it was from one of these that our first converted catalogues came. Access to Archives, or A2A, was a programme dedicated to converting archive catalogues to web-readable form and mounting them on the National Archives website, enabling a web presence for those many repositories which, at that stage, did not have their own site. One strand of the project worked to convert documents relating to London's contacts with the wider world, through exploration, trade and colonism, and it was material submitted to this which came back to us as a digital file in early 2002 and was loaded on that fateful April 26th. Among the items made available to readers in that first tranche were the journals of naval surgeon Fleetwood Buckle (MSS.1395-1404 and 5656), the papes of Sir James Cantlie, the tropical medicine specialist (MSS.1456-1499, 6931-6941 & 7920-7941), the diaries of the Tsimshian Native American Arthur Wellington Clah (WMS/Amer.140)... we were up and running.

From that point onwards, the process of retroconversion (to use the appropriate jargon) never stopped. We experimented with cutting and pasting word-processed catalogue into the database but the process was so complex (most of the old lists had been laid out on the page with copious paragraph markers and tab-stops, all of which needed to be removed) that it worked out quicker and cheaper to re-key catalogues. A dedicated project officer started work that year, working entire days at marking up catalogues in coloured pens (each colour corresponding to a database field) before posting the results to New Delhi, from which a spreadsheet of rekeyed data would appear with terrifying speed in the inbox. Little by little, several thousand records at a time, the database grew; little by little the profits of a particular stationers' on Cleveland Street, which boasted the best selection of coloured markers in Fitzrovia, swelled. At the end of this project, well over 75% of our data was in there. In the time since then, members of the archives department have converted the remaining catalogues in spare half-hours here and there (evening and Saturday duties have been particularly fertile times). Now, that era has ended. After a little under ten years, the final catalogue has been converted and loaded: the catalogue of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy's papers, which had drawn the short straw and ended up last of all, was converted and loaded last week. You have only to go to Wellcome Images and search for the phrase SA/CSP to get an idea of the sort of things now described online: we expect the scrapbooks on the "massage scandals" that led to the CSP's formation to notch up a large number of hits all on their own...

2012, then, sees the end of an era: all of our archive catalogues online at last. It comes, as luck would have it, just as a new set of technical developments needs work: the wholesale digitisation of archive holdings, among other library materials, and the need to make catalogue records and images link up in as smooth and seamless an experience for the reader as we can manage. The archivists, needless to say, are not putting their feet up at this particular moment; it is, however, time for a few minutes of retrospect and quiet satisfaction as a long-running project comes to a close.

[1] For those who are interested, the breakthrough came in 1997 when the International Council on Archives set out the snappily-named ISAD(G) - the International Standard on Archival Description (General).
[2] It turns out that we have quite a few.

Images:
1/ The import screen for our CALM archive catalogue programme (backstage client): further information from the manufacturers here.
2/ Napoleon's tomb, St. Helena, from MS.1395, one of the papers of Fleetwood Buckle that were among the first items to be loaded to the database.
3/ Some of the actual pens used in retroconversion, kept for posterity.

Thalidomide 50 Years On

The archive of the Thalidomide Society (SA/TSY) and the papers of Professor Richard Smithells (PP/SML) have been catalogued and are now available to researchers at the Wellcome Library. Thalidomide was developed by the pharmaceutical company Grünenthal in Germany in 1957, and was used as a painkiller and tranquillizer. It was also effective in treating morning sickness during pregnancy, and many scientists believed that this drug would not harm the developing baby. However this was found not to be the case, and over 10,000 children in 46 countries were born with deformities such as phocomelia. The drug was licenced in Britain in 1958, marketed as Distaval, and was withdrawn in late 1961. Between 1959 and 1962 approximately 2,000 babies were born with deformities due to the drug, and only 466 survived. 2012 is a landmark year concerning thalidomide: it is just over 50 years since withdrawal of the drug Distaval and is the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Thalidomide Society.

The Thalidomide Society (originally called the Society for the Aid of Thalidomide Children) was formed by a meeting of four parents in August 1962, at the Dolphin Hotel in Southampton. Their aim was to set up a national society devoted to the aid of their own and other children affected by the drug thalidomide. The inaugural meeting took place on 20th October 1962, with forty-four parents attending. A draft constitution was created (SA/TSY/A/1) which states that the Society would not only include children affected by thalidomide but those with similar disabilities. Branches of the Thalidomide Society were set up, due to the wide geographic range of the parents. They would meet regularly and operated with local organisations that could help the families.

The Society worked closely with the Lady Hoare Thalidomide Appeal until 1974, to raise money to help the families affected, and increase awareness of their cause, this was helped by several national newspapers (see extensive press coverage represented in SA/TSY/G). There were a variety of fundraising schemes, general donations and offers of help (SA/TSY/C/1) and car competitions (SA/TSY/C/3). The money raised from these was used to support thalidomide families with social workers, research into new technologies (such as prosthetic arms and wheelchairs), a holiday home, and went towards the Oxford Centre for Enablement and the Chailey Heritage Craft School and Hospital. The Society is now a user led organisation; the majority of the council is made up of thalidomide affected people. The archive of the Thalidomide Society contains documents on its creation, (SA/TSY/A/1), fundraising schemes (SA/TSY/C), publications (SA/TSY/D), and of their recent events such as the annual AGM and conferences (SA/TSY/A/3).

Distillers (the company that distributed thalidomide: it is now owned by Diageo Ltd) and the parents of the children affected by thalidomide finally reached a settlement in 1973, after years of negotiations. From this the Thalidomide Children’s Trust (now the Thalidomide Trust) was set up to distribute the payments fairly amongst those affected. Professor Richard Smithells, a renowned consultant paediatrician, worked closely in these negotiations and provided medical testimony. Smithells became involved with thalidomide as a clinician on the Liverpool Registry of Congenital Abnormalities that was formed in 1960, where he began studying the links between prescription drug use during pregnancy and birth defects. Along with several other physicians he discovered the teratogenicity of thalidomide in 1961, and subsequently became a leading expert on thalidomide diagnostics. Much of his work concerning thalidomide and congenital malformations is reflected in the new catalogue PP/SML. These papers include a copy of a book for children he created for the NSPCC, Alphabet Zoop (PP/SML/A/3), correspondence and reports working with the Thalidomide Trust (PP/SML/C) and various textual resources he collected over the years regarding the drug (PP/SML/E). He became the Chair of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Leeds in 1968, and he served on the Thalidomide Trust advisory council from 1974, then as a trustee from December 1976.

The collections of the Thalidomide Society and Professor Smithells are part of the Wellcome Library’s Archives and Manuscripts collection. The catalogue can be searched on our online catalogue using the references SA/TSY and PP/SML respectively. Please note that due to the subject and nature of the material a significant proportion of the documents in these two collections have been closed for various fixed periods, for data sensitivity reasons.

Author: Morwenna Roche

Forthcoming attractions

January 1st in the archives is a time not only for new resolutions and new projects, but for new raw material: at the start of each year, a batch of material that has been closed for Data Protection reasons is opened for readers to work upon. The precise contents of this year's batch, of course, are still secret for a little over a week. We can, however, give at least the bare-bones information from the archive catalogue about these forthcoming attractions. They include:

More material from the papers of Lord Moran, Churchill's physician (PP/CMW), to join that released on 1st January 2011.

Two items from the Queen's Nursing Institute (SA/QNI): a volume of the Queen's Roll, on which inspections of nurses were recorded, covering 1926-1927; and - from the card index that replaced the original bound Roll - a microfilm of nurses' records on cards from 1907 to 1927.

A file from the Brain Research Association (SA/BRA) explaining the Association's position regarding the 1979 Protection of Animals (Scientific Purposes) Bill and the 1979 Laboratory Animals Protection Bill.

Files from the Beit Memorial Fellowship (SA/BMF) on various candidates for a fellowship, discussed in 1927.

A file from the papers of the psychiatrist Donald Winnicott (PP/DWW) relating to a few adult patients whose papers found in a small file of predominantly child patient notes from the 1920s.

The full list is as follows. Only a little while to go....

MS.8155; Christo P. Popoff; 1957; letter to Dr. C. Allen of the Seamen's Hospital, Greenwich, London. Popoff writes about a case of schizophrenia and enquires about the effectiveness of Largactil in stabilising patients suffering from this condition.
PP/CMW/D.9/1; Moran's Notes; 1950-1951.
PP/CMW/D.13/2; 1951 Recommendations; 1951.
PP/CMW/D.13/2/1; London Teaching Hospitals and Regions 'For meetings, 7/2/52 & 6/3/52'; 1951.
PP/CMW/D.13/2/2; Index to 1951 recommendations; 1951.
PP/CMW/D.13/3; 'Notes 1951'; 1951.
PP/CMW/D.13/3/1; Birmingham I, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle; 1951.
PP/CMW/D.13/3/2; Wales, Leeds, Sheffield; 1951.
PP/CMW/D.13/3/3; North East, North West Metropolitan Region; 1951.
PP/CMW/D.13/3/4; South East, South West Metropolitan Region; 1951.
PP/CMW/D.13/3/5; Specialities, London Regions and Teaching Hospitals; 1951.
PP/DWW/F/1; Adult Clinical material; 1920s; A few cases of adult patients found in a small concertina file of predominantly child patient notes from the 1920s (now in PP/DWW/E.2/1) and separated out here.
PP/HUN/C/1/23; Cysticercosis; 1932-1943.
SA/BMF/A.2/109; Hacker, Henry Pollard; 1927.
SA/BMF/A.2/110; Winton, Frank Robert; 1927.
SA/BMF/A.2/111; Wooldridge, Walter Reginald; 1927.
SA/BMF/A.2/112; Morgan, Walter Thomas James; 1927.
SA/BMF/A.2/113; Eggleton, Philip; 1927.
SA/BMF/A.2/114; Marrian, Guy Frederick; 1927.
SA/BMF/A.2/115; Fee, Archibald Roderick; 1927.
SA/BRA/C.1/3/2; Brain Research Association response to the 1979 Protection of Animals (Scientific Purposes) Bill and the 1979 Laboratory Animals Protection Bill (Includes papers from the Committee for the Reform of Animal Experimentation, The Physiological Society, the Research Defence Society, The Royal Society, and the Universities Federation for Animal Welfare); 1980-1981.
SA/QNI/J.3/35; The Queen's Roll: 8301-8550; Oct 1926-Jul 1927.
SA/QNI/J.4/1; The Queen's Roll on cards; 1907-1927; 3055-8499.


Image: 19th century wood engraving from the Wellcome Library's Iconographic Collections.

An outbreak of Mad Cow Disease in the archives

The Wellcome Trust ’s mission is to foster human and animal health. Sometimes these two areas converge. The BSE crisis of the late 1990s was one such occurrence.

Sir John Pattison, former vice-provost of University College London School of Health, and National Health Service Head of Research and Development, was right at the centre of this crisis. As Chairman of the Government’s Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) from 1995-1999, Sir John had a unique view of the political decisions taken at this time.

SEAC provided advice on a number of issues, including the safe consumption of meat and milk, and the suitable treatment of animal carcasses by slaughterhouses. The committee remained in operation until 30 March 2011, when it was replaced by the ACDP Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy Risk Assessment Subgroup.

In December 2010, Sir John Pattison presented a memoir of his time in charge of SEAC to the Wellcome Library , along with a set of committee minutes, and supporting documentation. The minutes, and the documentation that Sir John used in compiling this memoir are now available to Wellcome Library researchers. The memoir itself will be available in the near future, once we have put in place facilities to allow user access to born-digital archival material.

The supporting documentation includes correspondence with politicians, members of the public, and the families of patients with Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (CJD). There are also press releases issued on behalf of the committee and other bodies, as well as information on potential tests for, and causes of, CJD.

More information on can be found via the Archives and Manuscripts online catalogue. The reference for this collection is PP/JPN .

The SEAC website can be accessed through the UK Government Web Archive .

The Mystery Correspondents

Arthur Balfour, politician; Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate; Sir James Crichton Browne, physician and psychologist…

In 2002, the Wellcome Library’s online catalogue of archives and manuscripts went live, replacing various large printed manuscript catalogues and several hundred typed lists of archives. Putting all this data online involved a campaign of retroconversion, the majority as part of a dedicated project and the remainder, as has been noted here before, undertaken over succeeding years by the archives department in odd snatches of time (typically, something to be done on a quiet Saturday morning). Almost all catalogues are now converted, with the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists (SA/CSP) the only major collection still to appear on line in full (this one is on the stocks and approximately two-thirds converted).

Andrew Carnegie, manufacturer and philanthropist; Austen Chamberlain and Neville Chamberlain, politicians; Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury…

Converting a catalogue is (relatively) simple, although the archivist faced with a 1980s word-processed document whose page-layout is generated entirely through the use of tab-stops might snort derisively at that claim! A more difficult issue is how to capture the information that was often held in indices, some many pages long, at the end of the catalogue. Turning a line in a catalogue that tells one that file PP/BAR/C/234 is a file of correspondence from people with surnames A-H, covering the following dates, into a database record, is fairly quick. But how to capture and store usefully the information held in an index of correspondents made up of lines like this one:

Bridges (Robert Seymour), poet. Letters, 1900-29 and n.d. C/234, 316, 367, 391, 502, 1089
Browne (George Buckston), surgeon; Kt (1932). Letters, 1901, 1925. C/396; M/3, f. 17v.

Well, you could simply cut and paste the index into the Notes field at the collection’s top-level record, and get the desired result instantly. For some small collections with short indices this is what we have done. For the very long index, however – forty, fifty, one hundred pages long – this is obviously unsuitable: no-one is prepared to hold the scroll-down button for minutes at a time to reach the desired name. (Indeed, much thinking on web-design suggests that asking readers to scroll down at all loses up to a third of one’s audience.)

In an ideal world, Robert Bridges’ and George Buckston Browne’s names would of course appear on the catalogue records for each of the eight files listed in the sample line. To undertake this, however, would mean embarking on a lengthy process of handcrafting, picking each line apart entry by entry: just think of the two lines above, which would require one to visit and edit eight separate database records, and multiply that by hundreds. Readers would wait years for the information to be made available on that basis. What is needed is something that breaks up the index in at least a partly granular fashion, whilst being relatively quick and, ideally, something that can be done through routine, mechanical processes.

In recent years we have experimented with various processes that take word-processed indices and break them up using search-and-replace commands, splitting data in a way that enables them to be put in a spread-sheet and sorted before returning to word-processed form. We will spare you the details! – the upshot, however, is that with the expenditure of only a little time, many pages of index can at least be broken up into the data that relates to individual sections of the catalogue, thus enabling readers to make a better judgement of which letters relating to an individual are relevant, and which are not. In collections of family papers, in which each section may correspond to a family member, this is particularly useful, as it may be a particular family member, and him/her alone, whose correspondence is of interest. With some thought about the way the data in the original catalogue is shaped, this process can be done in hours or days rather than the months required to handcraft records for individual files: the work of the proverbial quiet Saturday, rather than a long-running process.

This process has been applied to various collections in the past, most notably the Hodgkin family papers (PP/HO). The latest collection to receive this treatment is the papers of Sir Thomas Barlow (PP/BAR), Royal physician, and his family. The Barlow papers span almost a century (Barlow lived a long life, from 1845 to 1945, and the collection continues with the papers of his children), and a large proportion is correspondence, covering a wide range of activities: not merely medicine, but also the arts, philanthropy and personal family letters – the last including letters from his son Basil from hospital after being wounded on the Western Front, wounds from which eventually he died. The range of correspondents, then, is a wide one. All the very varied names set at intervals into this article, in italics, are drawn from the Barlow catalogue’s index. The Barlow catalogue has been available on the online catalogue for some years now, but it is probably safe to say that the inclusion now of the original cataloguer’s hard work indexing the papers virtually doubles the value of the collection to the researcher. The reader is invited to look at the section-level records for the collection (go to the “tree” of the collection here and click the letter next to any of the entries to get into detailed section-level records) or simply to search for a name of their choice to see if it is in there (go to http://archives.wellcome.ac.uk, put the surname into the Any Text box and put PP/BAR into the Reference box). There will be the names listed above in italics and many, many more, including

King Edward VII, Field-Marshal Douglas Haig, Myra Hess DBE, pianist famous for morale-boosting free concerts during World War II…and more…

Image: Sir Thomas Barlow, undated caricature by Spy from Vanity Fair (in Wellcome Library Iconographic Collections, visible at Wellcome Images as image L0008407)

Camberwell House Asylum

One of the fastest-growing categories of Wellcome Library users in the past ten years has been family historians. Many people, of course, have medical practitioners among their ancestors: doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, opticians, vets… But the Library’s holdings for family historians go further than this: they also provide sources for those of us (which realistically, in the United Kingdom, will be everyone) whose ancestors have passed through the medical system as patients.



In recent years the family history community has become aware that the Wellcome Library’s holdings are not confined to high-level abstract thought on medical history, but contain a huge amount of nitty-gritty information on named individuals. (The Library’s sources for family historians are summarised in a downloadable sources guide here, and described in a talk on “Hunt the Ancestor” which is repeated regularly). The difficulty, of course, is to identify the relevant records from the library’s catalogues. Census records, for example, may identify that an ancestor was a patient in a particular institution, but it may then be a matter of working through the records of that institution in search of a particular name.



To assist in this process, the Library’s archive department has recently enhanced the catalogue records relating to its casebooks from Camberwell House Asylum. Among family historians working with London records, this institution is something of a cause célèbre: it was set up in the mid-nineteenth century and accepted patients – many of them “paupers” referred by the relevant Poor Law authorities – for over one hundred years, but only three of its casebooks are known to survive. One is held at the Royal College of Psychiatrists and the other two at the Wellcome Library, as MSS.6220-6221. Those held here describe patients admitted between 1847 and 1853, but continue to document those patients throughout their time in the asylum, some still being there as late as 1887. As a result, for a family historian who knows that an ancestor was in that asylum in, for example, 1870, there is a chance that the ancestor may be documented in our casebooks; but it is a slim chance, and there is a strong likelihood that he or she might make a journey to London, or hire a research assistant, only to find no mention of the name needed (constraints on staff time, unfortunately, mean that the archivists here have not been able to carry out searches for researchers).



The enhancements to the catalogue mean that this no longer applies. Over a period of some weeks, in little pieces of time here and there, one of our Library Services Assistants has compiled an index of patients’ names in our two Camberwell House volumes, and these have been added to the catalogue records to make them available through the normal search interface. The results can be seen here and here. A researcher looking for any of the unfortunate patients listed there – for Mary Ann Binstead, Alfred Hobday, Christopher West… - can now simply enter the name in the “Any Text” box on the archive catalogue search page (making sure to click the And option in the “Word Options” below, as this finds the names in whatever order they are given – both “Christopher West” and “West, Christopher”) and find out immediately whether their ancestor is one of the lucky few whose details survive.



Many of the patients, as noted above, were extremely poor; many were admitted with severe depression or other causes of unhappiness. At this distance in time we can do nothing to help them; but this work on the catalogue makes it a little likelier that at the very least they can be remembered.



Images: both of MS.6220, which documents patients admitted 1847-1850.

The cataloguer's conundrum

The Wellcome Library is very pleased to announce that the third and final batch of Francis Crick's scientific papers is now fully catalogued and available for research. The entire archive has recently been imaged as part of the library's Wellcome Digital Library project 'Modern Genetics and its Foundations', and from late 2012 the archive will be available both in the original and as a digital version online. In the meantime, you are very welcome to consult the archive in the library.



The newly-catalogued batch of papers largely comprises Crick’s notes, drafts and correspondence from the late 1990s until his death in 2004, notably his research papers for two major pieces of work: 'A framework for consciousness', his 2003 paper with Christof Koch, which many colleagues saw as Crick’s roadmap for the study of consciousness after his death [footnote 1]; and 'What is the function of the claustrum?' [footnote 2], again written with Koch, a paper which Crick was busy working on only hours before he died.



As Crick’s cataloguer, I have mixed feelings about the completion of his archive catalogue – pleasure that this rich collection is now fully available for researchers, tempered by sadness that I have to leave Crick behind. My own virtual relationship with him started in 2003, quite a year to come to the project, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of his co-discovery of the structure of DNA.



While some scientific archives can be dry and technical, Crick’s records were never dull to work on, his forceful and compelling personality shining out through his letters and papers. Take his refreshing approach to organisational hierarchies. When addressed as ‘Dr Crick’ in the early 1960s by a young grad student at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Crick told him to ‘stop that nonsense’ and call him by his first name on the grounds that distinctions based on rank reduce communication and are inimical to progress. [footnote 3]



Crick’s archive unsurprisingly centres around his research on DNA and consciousness, inevitably touching on such massive questions as science’s ethical responsibilities towards society as a whole, and the relationships between science and religion. For lighter relief, Crick’s fan mail reveals his impact on the non-scientific public, as in a letter from the science fiction author Jack McDevitt, who in 1994 asked permission to write Crick a cameo role in his stargate novel Ancient Shores (Crick refused, rather slyly suggesting ‘Why not ask Jim Watson?’). [footnote 4]



But it’s the fate of archive cataloguers to be serial monogamists, and after all these years I’m moving on to the next project. So now it’s over to you to explore Crick’s papers - what kind of virtual relationship with his ideas and legacy will you develop?



Footnotes:

1. File reference PP/CRI/L/1/8/13

2. File reference PP/CRI/L/1/8/27

3. File reference PP/CRI/J/1/8/12/1

4. File reference PP/CRI/J/1/4/12/1

Dream a little dream…

In May 1940, Birmingham schoolteacher and army reservist, Kenneth Davies Hopkins, was captured by the Nazis in France, and sent to a succession of Prisoner of War camps in Germany. Whilst interned he had the idea of recording the dreams of his fellow POWs in order to later analyse them. His interest in psychology had been awakened in the 1930s when his MA Education dissertation had been supervised by C. W. Valentine, who, like Hopkins, was interested in the psychology of dreams

Over the next two years, Hopkins meticulously kept records of the dreams reported to him, using only a pencil and the rough paper he had available to him in the camps. This provides an exceptional record. As Valentine said to Hopkins in a letter dated 8th November 1940 "it would be a unique contribution, as far as I know, to have reports on dreams of prisoners of war while entirely separate from their normal environment", before going on to suggest that Hopkins look out for "wish-fullfilment dreams, fear dreams based upon war experiences, regression to childish memories, and symbolism in dreams" (PSY/VAL/4/6).

If it wasn’t for this letter, we would never have known of this important resource. In 1945, Major Hopkins’ dream research notebooks were found abandoned in a liberated camp. The letter to Valentine was with them, so the camp liberators forwarded the books to him in the hopes that he could reunite Hopkins with his notes. Unfortunately, Kenneth Hopkins had developed bronchial asthma and emphysema in 1942 whilst interned near Hildburghausen in central Germany, and had died there.

The notebooks remained in the possession of Professor Valentine until they were donated to St. Martin’s College Library, Lancaster, who deposited them on permanent loan with the British Psychological Society. In September 2008, Valentine’s papers were deposited with the Wellcome Library, along with other collections from the British Psychological Society History Centre.

In addition to the Hopkins material, the C. W Valentine archive held by the Wellcome Library includes notebooks created Valentine during observational studies of the infant psyche, drafts of his works Psychology and its Bearing on Education and The Psychology of Early Childhood, both of which are held by the Wellcome Library, along with notes from his university days.

Picture credit: The dream of a patient in Jungian analysis: left, a rocky wall; right a swirling wave; at the end, six people. Drawing by M.A.C.T., January 1971. Iconographic Collections, 658096i

Archives and manuscripts cataloguing, June 2011

This month’s new cataloguing bulletin from the Archives and Manuscripts department releases a large tranche of material for researchers to work upon: five collections of twentieth-century papers, totalling over 230 archive boxes of material or over 1000 new database records. Our congratulations to the cataloguers! All this material is now not merely catalogued in the online database, but also enabled for online ordering so that researchers can, should they wish, browse the catalogue, click the ordering link and have the material ready to view on Monday.

Although the records’ date is similar – twentieth-century, with a bias towards the latter half - the subjects documented span a wide range, from institutional documentation to personal papers, from hard-core laboratory science to the social implications of health and welfare. The largest and smallest collections are both records of organisations concerned with public health and with communication (in both directions) between citizens and their health-providers.

The records received from the Royal Society for Public Health and its predecessor bodies (SA/RSP) total well over 100 archive boxes and span the widest date-range of any released this month, going back to the foundation of the Sanitary Institute in 1876. The organisation’s history is complex. The Sanitary Institute amalgamated with the Parkes Museum of Hygiene in 1883 (and opened a School of Hygiene), changing its name in 1955 to the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health (the shorter form Royal Society of Health was also used. The Royal Institute of Public Health was founded in 1886 (simultaneously, the same founders set up the College of State Medicine which merged in 1892 with the laboratory founded by the British Institute for Preventive Medicine and eventually became the Lister Institute: see that organisation’s records held as SA/LIS). The third major strand in the organisation’s history is that of the Institute of Hygiene, which was founded in 1903, and merged in 1937 with the Royal Institute of Public Health to form the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene. In 2008 the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health merged with the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene to form the Royal Society for Public Health, bringing all these bodies together. The archives document some strands in the history better than others: the main body of records of the Royal Institute of Public Health and Hygiene were held at its headquarters in the 1990s and surveyed by the Wellcome Library’s archivists then, but had gone elsewhere by the time the newly-unified society presented its historic papers to the Library in 2009. When the missing records are located, they will join the archive here. The collection is, however, already a rich source and includes minutes, examination registers relating to the various qualifications awarded by the societies, publications, financial, legal and administrative material, photograph albums and property records and was first described in an earlier blog posting a few days ago.

A far smaller collection is that of Health Concern (SA/HCN). This body was founded in the mid 1980s with the primary aims of 'campaigning for more resources, co-ordinating comment on Government plans for the NHS and exchanging information on research.' – it was a broad alliance of various member organisations who shared the aim of supporting the NHS by promoting its basic principles and mounting an educational programme on healthcare and treatment. Although non-party in its remit, it clearly operated at a time when the whole concept of socialised healthcare versus the market was a political hot issue (and indeed was founded by Lord Ennals, who had been a Labour minister under Harold Wilson) so its activities were inescapably political in their context. The papers, dating from the 1980s, document its founding and administration during these crucial years.

Turing to personal papers, the records created by Professor Tim Lang and held as PP/TLA are also of major importance regarding public health issues. Tim Lang’s work has been in the field of public understanding of the food supply chain and the issues raised by what we eat and how we get it. His archive, totalling seventy boxes, documents his extensive involvement and role in the field of food policy, nutrition, environment and public health from the late 1970s up until 2000, and also provides a significant record of the development of food policy as a topic for discussion, notably in the UK, during this period. Organisations such as the London Food Commission, Parents For Safe Food, the National Food Alliance and the Sustainable Agriculture Food and Environment (SAFE) Alliance are documented, as well as Tim Lang's wide-ranging writings on food; subject files cover some of his interests such as meat production standards, a school meals campaigns in Lancashire (early 1980s) as well as the national school meals campaigns in the 1990s, low income and food poverty, the Food Safety Act 1990, the salmonella and the listeria 'scares' in the late 1980s, and the impact of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) reform and the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the food trade, health and safety, the environment and the developing world.

Finally, two collections relating to laboratory scientists conclude this month’s round-up. The papers of Robert Race and Ruth Sanger relating to their work on blood groups (PP/SAR, complementing the organisational records held in SA/BGU) were described in a separate blog posting earlier today. Like Race and Sanger, Dr Shirley Ratcliffe (PP/SRA) was involved in work at a Medical Research Council Unit, in this case the Edinburgh Cytogenetics Unit Study of Long Term Outcomes for Children Born with Sex Chromosome Abnormalities which in 1967 embarked on a longitudinal study of children born with these abnormalities, to establish the conditions’ incidence and long-term prognosis. The study – which also looked at a control group of children without these conditions – ran until the mid-1990s, but Dr Ratcliffe’s papers on the subject continued to be generated until 2010, the very year in which they were transferred to the Library. Much of the material, clearly, is made of clinical patient data that for the moment is closed under the Data Protection Act; however, there is much material on the conditions in general that is available for consultation now, with more to come of course as the years pass.

Image: a man with Klinefelter Syndrome, in which an extra X chromosome is added to the normal male XY pairing; the work of Shirley Ratcliffe looked at children born with this type of chromosomal abnormality, among others. In this picture, taken from Wellcome Images, the subject - who has undergone testosterone replacement therapy to enable development of male secondary sexual characteristics such as development of muscle bulk - is working out to avoid the development of osteoporosis, a common problem in males with his particular Syndrome.

Fighting the Filthy Reality of Everyday Life

The archives of the Royal Society for Public Health are now available at the Wellcome Library. Whilst the current Wellcome Collection exhibition, Dirt, shows the filthy reality of everyday life, this collection demonstrates how people have worked to combat dirt, in its many forms, over the years.

Originally founded following the Public Health Act of 1875, the Society works to educate people about health and hygiene. The society offers courses leading to qualifications in subjects such as food hygiene, and health and safety, as well as advocating for improvements in public health. In the past, they ran courses of public lectures on subjects as diverse as meat and food inspection, birth control, and forensic medicine, as well as running a number of laboratories and the Parkes Hygiene Museum. The museum, which closed in 1962, was used for teaching and demonstrations, allowing public health workers and the public to see examples of different public health solutions, and examine their construction and defects.

Over the years the society has responded to the needs of the time, becoming involved in the design of respirators to protect the public in the event of a gas attack in World War I, for example. A gradual decline in membership throughout the 20th century has recently been reversed, as events such as the recent E. coli outbreak demonstrate that public health education and advocacy is just as important today.

The papers of the Royal Society for the promotion of Health are part of the Wellcome Library's Archives and Manuscripts collection. The catalogue can be searched via our online catalogue, using the reference SA/RSP.

Picture credit: Neil Leslie, Wellcome Images, B0003318

Archives and manuscripts cataloguing, May 2011

May was, for the most part, a month of steady progress in the Archives and Manuscripts department, with several collections in train but the majority carrying on into June rather than being completed within the month. Nearly 400 records were added to the online database before the month's end. The majority remain invisible for the moment, awaiting the completion of the projects to which they belong, but May did see the release of several noteworthy sets of papers, now available for study in the Wellcome Library.

Our long-running project to repackage and make available material deposited here by the British Psychological Society passed another milestone, with the papers of Charles Wilfred Valentine (1879-1964) (PSY/VAL) being made visible in the database. Valentine was a specialist in educational psychology (and a life-long friend and colleague of Cyril Burt) and many of the papers relate to child development. In some tests, for example, he tracked the reactions of infants from birth to the age of three, monitoring such things as whether the sound of a ticking watch obtruded on their attention enough for them to stop feeding and whether this changed over time. He also wrote on the psychology of aesthetics, and on dreams. One particularly interesting section of the collection comprises notes kept by his one-time research student, Kenneth Davies Hopkins (d.1942). Hopkins, a Birmingham teacher, studied for an MA in Education under Valentine's supervision in the 1930s. A Territorial Army officer, he served in the Second World War and was captured in northern France in 1940. Whilst interned as a Prisoner of War, he embarked on a project to record his dreams and those of his fellow PoWs, with Valentine's encouragement. (Prisoners of war, with all too much time on their hands, undertook many scientific projects during the Second World War: much pioneering work on bird behaviour, for instance, dates from this time.) Sadly, Hopkins died of a lung condition in a PoW camp in 1942; his notebooks were found when the Allies took control of the vacated camp in 1945, and sent to Valentine. The Library is pleased to make them available now, as a small tribute to Major Hopkins' determination to continue scientific work under the most unpromising of circumstances.

War is a leitmotiv of this month's new material: another major tranche of papers relates to the Strangeways Research Laboratory's work during the Second World War. The papers form part of the existing SA/SRL collection of papers from the laboratory (SA/SRL), described as a new section M. The Laboratory spent the war researching substances that might be used in chemical warfare, and agents that might counteract them, in collaboration with the War Ministry's Porton Down Laboratory. An earlier blog post has described these papers in some detail.

On a lighter note, MS.8767 takes us travelling in nineteenth-century Italy. It comprises an account of a journey undertaken in 1855 by C.J.W. Bosanquet, whose identity remains unknown. Starting in Milan, Bosanquet takes us eastwards to Como and the Lakes, then into Switzerland and via Geneva to Lyon; he records sights seen, the weather, his experiences with officials when crossing borders, and religious reflections inspired by all of these. Drinkers of bottled water may be a little unsettled by his note that "We slept at a dirty little place called Evian." We can only applaud his taste, however, in how he opens the journal: its first words are "There are some very curious manuscripts in the Library." There are indeed; and several more are now available to be seen in the reading room.

Image: the travel journal of C.J.W. Bosanquet, 1855, showing geological formations near Geneva (MS.8767).

Archives and manuscripts cataloguing, April 2011

It’s (almost) all in the mind: the focus of this month’s completed cataloguing is largely on the mind, on psychology and psychiatry. As has been mentioned in previous blog posts, the archives of the British Psychological Society have been deposited at the Library and there is a long-running project making these available: the material is being repackaged in acid-free folders, and the catalogue records updated to take account of its new format. Last month we highlighted several collections from this source that had been released and this month another became available: papers relating to the behavioural psychologist Edward Chace Tolman (1886-1959) (PSY/TOL). Tolman’s papers are described in detail in their own blog posting; of particular interest are the items relating to his work on rats learning in mazes and, in complete contrast, those on his political stance during the McCarthyite period in the USA, when in the interests of academic freedom he took legal action against the imposition of a Loyalty Oath.

Remote on the spectrum from Tolman’s behaviourism is the work of Roger Money-Kyrle (PP/RMK), a leading Kleinian psychoanalyst with personal links to many other figures already documented in our holdings (for example, Melanie Klein herself, and Henry Dicks whose papers were recently released and described in another blog post). Money-Kyrle’s papers have been described here; the bulk of them consist of case histories and his development of these into writings.

Turning from the mind to the brute physical facts of war, this month the archives and manuscripts department acquired and catalogued a fascinating memoir of service by a woman doctor in the Second World War. Dr Muriel "Molly" Newhouse is primarily remembered for her work in occupational health and in particular establishing the connection between asbestos and mesothelioma: however, like many other medical men and women she found herself in 1942 (having qualified in 1936) called up into the Royal Army Medical Corps. Her unit followed the D-Day forces into Normandy and, as is described in a blog post, she found herself called upon to treat the sick, carry out surgery and on at least one occasion plunge into midwifery, delivering the baby of a local farmer’s wife. In her time in Normandy she never went more than seven miles inland: subsequent postings took her further afield, to India and to Singapore, where she cared for prisoners recently released from the horrific conditions of Japanese PoW camps. A blog post has described her memoir, and the item itself can be viewed in the catalogue as MS.8766.

Image: Fowler's phrenological head, from Wellcome Images (image number L0057592).

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing, March 2011

Last month's archive cataloguing saw the release of three complete archive collections, as well as various manuscripts and supplementary items. The highlights are described below.

John Wilson Boag (1911-2007), radiation physicist and peace campaigner: papers of the influential radiation physicist and peace campaigner Jack Boag (1911-2007) were transferred to the Library last month thanks to the good offices of his colleague, G. Gordon Steel, the National Cataloguing Unit of the Archives of Contemporary Scientists and the Centre for Science Archives @ The Science Museum. With radiation hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons recently, it is timely that the Library is releasing a new archive collection on this topic, which takes its place beside our other archive resources on radiology, radiotherapy and radiobiology. Although a rather patchy representation of Boag’s career, the eight boxes of his papers do contain interesting material relating his early work at the Radiotherapeutic Research Unit, Hammersmith Hospital in the 1940s-1950s, and later research, including at the Institute of Cancer Research; in addition, material relating to lectures and papers that Boag gave during the 1990s on the history of x-rays and radiation dosimetry. (PP/JWB)

Captain George Blair, RAMC (1917-1979): material mainly relating to Blair's service in World War II and period as a prisoner of war of the Japanese: letters to and from family members, friends and relatives, personal documentation, photographs, and bound copy of a typescript thesis by Blair on malnutrition among PoWs in the Far East. The letters from him to his family give some details of his experiences, though some correspondence takes the form of preprinted formulaic postcards. His family and friends' letters give details of life on the home front and in other parts of the world. His sister Lydia's letters often mention her experiences as a Kitchen Supervisor at King's Cross Hospital, Dundee. (PP/GBL)

Otto Neubauer (1874-1957), German biochemist: papers relating mainly to his experiments on liver and kidney function prior to his leaving Nazi Germany for Britain. (GC/207)

Sir John Robert Vane (1927-2004), pharmacologist: two audio visual items were added to Vane’s papers, both recordings on CD: namely, a 1960 Ciba Foundation symposium (PP/JRV/F/8), and the speeches made in 1955 at Sir Henry Dale's 80th birthday dinner, 1955 PP/JRV/F/9), which include numerous anecdotes on the history of physiology and physiologists.

Adolf Stempel (fl.1868-1882): gymnastics notebook, giving highly detailed and numbered instructions on gymnastic excercises, movements and floor routines to be performed, and information on various events and competitions in London (including at the Orion gymnasium and the Bow and Bromley Institute). The notebook also includes several intricate diagrams for the excercises. (MS.7981)

Anna Maria Meysey of Shakenhurst Hall, Worcestershire: domestic recipe book including medical and culinary material and also instructions for household tasks (including one how to wash silk stockings). Late 18th – early 19th century. (MS.8685)
8685)

German Household Remedy Book: 17th century medical recipe book and herbal including recipes for cures for common illnesses and for veterinary medicine; also various remedies for the plague. The herbal section includes information on the properties of quinces, lemons, lime, aloe and sage, as well as herbs from the New World such as sarsaparilla. (MS.8454)

“Chyromancy or Palmestrye. Also Physiognomy and Metoposcopie”: an English manual of practical chiromancy or palmistry dated 1648, which will be described in more detail in a future blog post. (MS.8727)

In addition, as noted previously, work continues on the retroconversion of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists catalogue (SA/CSP). Finally, in an earlier posting we flagged up the impending release of the final tranche of Francis Crick's papers (PP/CRI). There has been a slight change of plan here: the catalogue is completed but rather than release them at once the opportunity is being taken to digitise the papers immediately, bringing them forwards in our digitisation schedule, which means that there will be no need at a later date to take them out of circulation again for 2-3 months, as has been the case for the other Crick material to be digitised, and thus once this material is finally opened to the public it will stay opened. As soon as photography is completed these papers will be released, and an announcement will be made on this blog to herald the end of this long-running project.


The image of the X-ray warning sign at the head of this posting comes from Wellcome Images, image no.C0022404.

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing: February 2011

February was a month of sustained activity in the archives and manuscripts department, with a lot of cataloguing projects but most of these still ongoing. Some 243 new records went into the database, but of these only a tenth became visible to the public before the month's end. Only one major collection was released to the public this month, but it was an important one: the papers of the Population Investigation Committee. The PIC was founded in 1936 as a research body to gather data about issues relevant to the population of the United Kingdom and its then colonies, the major issue at the time being a falling birth-rate. In the years since that the PIC has investigated a wide variety of issues: vital statistics, foreign population policies, birth control, marriage, fertility, maternity services, social mobility, and the health and development of children. A more detailed description of the collection by its cataloguer can be found in a recent blog post. A wide variety of research topics are therefore opened up by this significant addition to our collections; the full catalogue can be browsed in the catalogue at SA/PIC.

Last month we trailed the forthcoming release of the final tranche of the papers of Francis Crick (PP/CRI). Physical processing of these papers – rearrangement, rehousing in acid-free packaging, and so forth - is now complete, and the vast majority of the work on fine-tuning 900 database records is done. Since the Crick papers will be at the heart of the Library’s project to digitise material significant to the history of genetics, it is intended to digitise the papers immediately and release them for use in the reading rooms once this is done; the expanded catalogue will probably be available some time before this.

As noted at the head of this post, a lot more has gone into the database this month than is visible immediately: next month will see some of this other ongoing work completed and the database records released to public view on the net.

The image at the head of this post is from Wellcome Images and is a copyrighted image made available under Creative Commons License.

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing: January 2011

A new year, and more new material made available for research. During January, nearly four hundred new database records were created for archive material, one hundred and fifteen becoming visible online during that month. As the disparity in numbers indicates, much work went on behind the scenes on collections that are not yet ready for release but which will appear in their entirety in due course. (And, as has been noted before, outside the database retroconversion work continues on the catalogue of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists (SA/CSP).)

Two complete collections were made available this month (and described in a recent blog post): they comprise data gathered by ESDS [Economic and Social Data Service] Qualidata at the University of Essex, which acquires digital data created during the course of qualitative research across a wide range of social science disciplines.

'AIDS-relevant cognitions in Dundee and Kirkaldy' (GC/252), consisting of transcripts and tapes of interviews with children and students in those towns, 1988-1990, to elicit their understanding of AIDS and their attitudes towards it.

'Project SIGMA (Socio-sexual Investigations of Gay Men and Aids)' (GC/260), meanwhile, is mostly made up of microfiche copies of anonymised diaries in which gay and bisexual men recorded their sexual behaviour during 1987-1994. The diarists recorded any sexual activities every day for a month – details including partner/s involved, day, time and setting, and the precise details of what happened to whom in what order.

Both these collections of course document material that is potentially highly controversial. Controversy stalks another figure in this month’s statistics: MS.8758 comprises a letter by Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (1721-1765), ordering the release of funds to an army surgeon under Cumberland’s command in the Low Countries. “Butcher” Cumberland, second son of George II, is of course still a highly controversial figure for his role in the 1745-6 Jacobite rising, in which the Jacobites were killed in huge numbers at the Battle of Culloden and captured stragglers were subjected by Cumberland to “military execution” or extra-judicial shooting.

Maybe our most significant cataloguing highlight, however, is one that is still invisible: the final tranche of our catalogue of the papers of Francis Crick (PP/CRI) will be released in the next month and considerable work is going on behind the scenes to prepare this, both physically (boxing up the material in appropriate, acid-free containers) and intellectually (over 900 database records requiring fine-tuning). There will be more to report on this in the next cataloguing summary, a month from now.

Image: a detail from MS.8758, showing the flowing hand of an Army clerk and the slightly less fluent signature of the Duke of Cumberland.

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing statistics: December 2010

In the weeks before Christmas work proceeded on various long-running projects within and outside the online database. As mentioned last month, behind the scenes retroconversion work continues on the catalogue of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists (SA/CSP), completion of which will bring all our archive catalogues onto the database after ten years' work. We are also coming close to the end of a project to fine-tune the catalogue of the Royal Army Medical Corps collection (one of our most heavily-used) and make it suitable for online ordering: we hope to say more about this next month. The highlights of new cataloguing for this month, however - that is to say, cataloguing completed and made available to the public, as opposed to work proceeding on longer-term projects - all come from the manuscript collection.

The image at the head of this posting (from Wellcome Images) is of James Braid (1795-1860), the Manchester surgeon and general practitioner to whom we owe our modern understanding of hypnosis (and indeed the very word). Franz Anton Mesmer had described the phenomenon in the late 18th and early 19th century, but had ascribed it to disturbances in a “magnetic fluid” that surrounds us all, created by the mesmeric operator waving their hands, having a physical impact on the subject. Braid re-examined the phenomenon and described it in terms of a neurological state brought on by concentration, placing it in the field of psychology rather than physics. Newly visible in the database is a letter by Braid (previously part of the old Wellcome Library Autograph Letters Sequence, and thus only accessible using a card index in the reading room), in which he discusses another late 18th century concept by this stage relegated to the fringes of crankdom, namely phrenology. (MS.8756)

Turning to fiction, we made available two unpublished works of fiction (or lightly fictionalised autobiography) by Colonel Frederick Smith, CB, CMG, DSO (1858-1933) of the Royal Army Medical Corps. There are versions of a novel set in Sierra Leone - "The White Man's Grave"- in 1898 (the year of the Sierra Leone Rising against the imposition of a hut tax following declaration of British Protectorate status), and an account of service as a medical officer in France in the early months of World War I. The papers are described in more detail in a recent blog posting. (MS.8701)

Finally, we also made available some papers relating Professor Cyril Keele, FRCP (1905-1987), pharmacologist, and his research on pain. (MS.8755)