New on the website: British Medical Journal video tutorial

We recently blogged about the launch of a new section of our website: Guides and Video Tutorials - which offers introductions to our online catalogues and full-text resources.

Another video tutorial has now been added to this section: so, joining videos on how to make the most of the Library catalogue, the Archives and Manuscripts catalogue, and Wellcome Images, is a video on how to access the British Medical Journal historical archive, from 1840-2008.

The video demonstrates how to access this online archive using PubMed Central. It also shows you how to browse for specific articles when you have a citation and also find obituaries, advertisements and biannual indexes.

Image: Plate from Augustus D. Waller, Introductory address on the electromotive properties of the human heart. British Medical Journal, Volume 2 (1449), 1888, pp751-752

Graphic Medicine

I’m not a great aficionado of comics or graphic novels. I know who Alan Moore and Stan Lee are; various (male) friends and family have raised my awareness of Marvel and DC Comics; I’ve read the odd issue of Swamp Thing, but the term graphic medicine was new to me. I came across it when a list of recommendations for the Library’s Medicine & Society Collection landed on my desk. They all came from the Graphic Medicine website created by Dr Ian Williams. This excellent website identifies and reviews graphic novels relating to all aspects of health and medical culture. Since the Medicine & Society Collection is all about exploring key medical and health themes in contemporary society, graphic medicine seemed like a perfect fit.

Definitions
A quick aside here: The distinction between graphic novels and comic books is imprecise, but graphic novels tend to come in bound book format and are usually a single continuous narrative, they can be fiction, biography or non-fiction. The term ‘comic books’ is generally used for single unbound pamphlets that serialise a story in weekly issues traditionally bought from newsagents. The Wellcome Library also has a selection of comic books, most of which are public health information pamphlets.

Variety
Having had a chance to examine some of the graphic novels in more detail, I’ve been impressed by the range of topics covered and by the diversity of authors working in this relatively small field:

There are patient accounts of illness and treatment, such as Cancer made me a shallower person by Miriam Engelberg and Spiral Cage, Al Davison’s autobiographical account of living with spina bifida.




There are views from inside the health care system such as Psychiatric Tales by Darryl Cunningham who worked as a health care assistant in an acute psychiatric ward, and Couch Fiction, an account of a therapy session from the points of view of both the patient and the therapist.



Perhaps surprisingly, there were quite a few accounts of carers and family members’ experiences of living with a sick person, such as Epileptic, a memoir of growing up with a brother who has epilepsy, and Blue Pills, a love story about a man’s relationship with a woman and her son, both of whom have HIV.



There are also more traditional comic formats such as the manga style Monster, a thriller about a hospital doctor tracking down a serial killer. The manga novels offer an extra challenge to readers in English because, although they are translated from the original Japanese, they still read from right to left, which can take some getting used to.



The authors are a mix of ages and sexes, and come from Japan, the United States, France and the UK, and there are almost as many different and styles and techniques as there are authors.

Medical education
Along with the development of medical humanities, literature and arts are proving to be useful tools in medical education and patient care. Patient narratives can give health care professionals a valuable insight into the patient’s point of view, but a recent BMJ article on graphic medicine suggested that by using techniques such manipulation of scale, text and image, graphic novels have “the ability to convey visceral understanding in ways that conventional texts cannot” [i]. Their ‘unreal’ quality can also make it easier for trainee health practitioners to discuss difficult or complex issues of ethics or interpersonal communication. In the increasingly global field of public health, they can be particularly useful for reaching young people or non-native speakers.

Pay attention here’s the library bit...
All the titles can be found at the same location in the Library, a specially created classification for graphic novels in the Medicine & Society Collection: HHLC. This allows readers to see the variety of themes amongst the graphic novels and directly compare their different styles. Library catalogue users can also search by genre for ‘graphic novels’ to see what is available across the collections.

As an emerging genre, graphic medicine offers a vivid representation of how illness, disability and health issues can touch people in so many different ways: personally, professionally, directly and indirectly. They are an exciting addition to the Library collections, and one that I look forward to expanding in the future.

[i] Green, Michael J. and Myers, Kimberly R.; Graphic medicine: use of comics in medical education and patient care in BMJ Vol. 340 Iss. 7746, 13 March 2010

Author: Lalita Kaplish

Edward Jenner and his moving statue

Broadcast tonight in the UK on BBC1, will be the latest episode of Doctor Who, in which the time traveller with the medical title meets again with the 'Weeping Angels', creatures with the appearance of statues but who can move in the blink of an eye. Timely, given a less frightening example of a moving statue (or really, a statue whose position has changed) has caught our attention in recent weeks.

Here's the statue in question: it's of Edward Jenner (1749-1823), the pioneering vaccinationist. This photograph was taken between the wars in Kensington Gardens in London and in 2010 it's where you'll still find the statue.

However, when it was erected by its sculptor William Calder Marshall in 1858, the statue stood a couple of miles or so east in Trafalgar Square. And as discussed in a recent edition of the British Medical Journal, a campaign has begun to return the statue to the Square.

A detailed account of the movement of Jenner's statue, is given in an article written by John Empson for the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine in 1996 (and now freely available through PubMedcentral). The article illustrates where in Trafalgar Square the statue stood, and that Prince Albert (a keen supporter of vaccination) presided over the inauguration of the statute on the site in 1858. It also states how opinion soon turned against Jenner's statue and how this medical figure appeared not to be in keeping with the militaristic nature of the Square's other statues.

Perhaps in relation to Prince Albert's death in 1861, Jenner's statue - now lacking its most prominent supporter - was moved in 1862 to Kensington Gardens. But as Empson's article states, Kensington Gardens does have some ties to smallpox: the development of the Gardens arose from William III building Kensington Palace, and it was from smallpox which William's mother, father and wife all died.

Related to this question of the proper site to memorialise Jenner is an item from the Wellcome Library's collections, which discusses the matter in verse. Written in the nineteenth century by Edward Jenner's great nephew Stephen, this poem is illustrated with a sketch of Calder Marshall's Jenner statue. Should the statue be in Trafalgar Square with military heroes or perhaps:

a farmer's yard should be thy place
among the milkmaids and the cow herds race
And if not there I'll fix another site
And send thee off to Cowes the Isle of Wight

After cow-based puns (based upon, of course, Jenner first vaccinating using lymph from a cowpox pustule), we'll conclude with the poet's final words on Jenner's fame:

Then fame where art thou? - where's thy honour'd boon?
All that is precious ripens in the Tomb
From dust supremely, glory must arise
To join the bliss eternal in the skies

Opening of the Wellcome Historical Medical Library

As we often celebrate anniversaries on this Blog, it seems only fitting that we draw your attention to a short article from the British Medical Journal, 10th December 1949 (and freely available through PubMedCentral).

The piece reports on the formal opening of the Wellcome Historical Medical Library, at 183 Euston Road, London, at a luncheon given by the Directors of the Wellcome Foundation, on 2nd December 1949. It offers a brief overview of the Library’s collections, noting their diversity (“alchemy, occultism, veterinary medicine and folklore...”) and their scale (“200,000 books, pamphlets, and journals, 5,000 manuscripts, and 100,000 autograph letters”). The image accompanying the article - also shown above - shows how much the Library's Reading Room has changed since 1949.

As the luncheon took place on the 2nd, all available evidence suggests the Wellcome Library opened to the public the next day, the 3rd, 60 years ago today.

So - Happy Birthday to us!

(For more details on the development of the Library – both before 1949 and after – a brief history is available on our website).

Open Access Week 2009

This week is Open Access Week 2009. The aim of which is to broaden awareness and understanding of Open Access - the principle that all research should be freely accessible online, immediately after publication.

As such, we thought we'd take the opportunity to flag up United Kingdom PubMed Central (UKPMC), a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. Based on PubMed Central (PMC), the US National Institutes of Health free digital archive, UKPMC provides a stable and permanent online archive of full-text peer reviewed research publications.

Titles freely available through UKPMC include Medical History, British Medical Journal, Journal of Anatomy, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (which we've previously posted about).

For a more in-depth guide to UKPMC and other free web resources, see 'Free for All: History of Medicine on the Web', one of the Wellcome Library's Workshops.

(Image above from the British Medical Journal, 26th January 1889, from a report describing a patient with an artificial cheek and eye).

Was Freud Really "The Father of Psychoanalysis?"

The place of Sigmund Freud in history is assured. However, this was not always the case. In 1930 Freud regularly found himself facing accusations that he had stolen all his valuable ideas about psychoanalysis from Pierre Janet, a fellow pupil of Charcot at the Salpêtrière. Janet and his supporters accused Freud of plagiarising his ideas and slightly altering the terminology, so “psychological analysis” and “restriction of consciousness” became “psychoanalysis” and “repression”. Freud strongly denied these accusations, pointing out that the two men had never met, and claiming that he had arrived at his ideas independent of those of Janet. In 1930, Freud wrote to Dr. E. A. Bennet following a medical meeting where he had been forced to defend himself yet again. In this letter, Freud says that his ideas were inspired not by Janet, but by “the ideas of Breuer, on which I built further”. He also points out that whilst Janet made his observations earlier “they became publicly known much later”.

The letter to Dr. Bennet, recently catalogued in the Wellcome Library as MS.8677, was included in an exhibition on the history of psychotherapy held at the Wellcome Historical Medical Library in 1964. During the exhibition, which was timed to coincide with the International Congress of Psychotherapy, the letter aroused so much interest that it inspired an article in the British Medical Journal the following year (“The Freud-Janet Controversy: An Unpublished Letter,” BMJ, 1965;1:pp. 52-53).

BMJ archive (1840 - ) online and free

To celebrate the launch of the BMJ archive - digitised under the auspices of the Wellcome Library's Medical Journals Backfiles project - an editorial in today's BMJ offers readers a prize of £1000 for the most interesting use of the archive.

For an introduction to the archive, the BMJ have produced a series of videos, featuring the former head of Britain’s Medical Research Council, Colin Blakemore, that focus on some of the important subjects and people that have appeared in the journal’s pages.

The first of these looks at James Simpson's paper in 1847 , which showed that chloroform was a better form of anesthesia than ether.

Future "From our archive" videos will feature John Snow, David Livingstone, Joseph Lister, Arthur Conan Doyle, Florence Nightingale, William Osler, Richard Doll, Alice Stewart, Amartya Sen, and Joseph Stiglitz.

The full archive is available at bmj.com, PubMed Central and UK PubMed Central.