Brain Season on Radio 4

This week sees the beginning of BBC Radio 4's Brain Season.

The centrepiece of the season will be a new 10-part series, A History of the Brain, presented by Dr Geoff Bunn. The series airs at 1.45pm, Monday to Friday, for the next two weeks with an omnibus edition on Friday evenings at 9pm. The series will also be available as a podcast. Audio clips of the series are also available on the Radio 4 website, accompanied by an array of historical imagery from our picture libray, Wellcome Images.

Also airing today at 8pm will be The Lobotomists, which explores the controversial history of the lobotomy. As part of the research for the programme, Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist, Wellcome Library, spoke to the makers of the documentary about the Watts-Freeman lobotomy instruments we hold in our collections (the image above shows Dr Hall brandishing one of these tools).

The Lobotomists, A History of the Brain and the rest of the Brain Season will available for listeners in the UK to listen to after broadcast through the BBC iPlayer, for the next seven days. Listeners outwith these shores are able to listen live through the Radio 4 website.

A short post about long service

This summer marked the 35th anniversary of William Schupbach, Curator, Paintings, Prints and Drawings, starting work with what was then the Wellcome Institute. Since then, William and colleagues have undertaken a mammoth cataloguing task, to allow access to the illustrative works in our holdings. William has also spoken widely,
published extensively on medical portraiture, and was integral to the launch and success this year of the John Thomson exhibition in China.

Today also marks the 30th anniversary of Dr Lesley Hall starting work with the Wellcome. Since 1979, Lesley has been at the forefront of the Library’s work in acquiring and cataloguing the papers of twentieth century scientific societies and scientists of distinction. She is also one of the world’s leading historians of sexuality, with books including Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain (2000) and Outspoken Women (2005), and is a regular contributor to history programmes on both BBC radio and television.

Libraries are about people as much as they are about collections, and at the Wellcome Library, both our readers and fellow members of staff, have been extremely lucky to draw on William and Lesley’s knowledge and expertise.

Forthcoming events

News of a pair of forthcoming public events, which draw on the expertise and skills of two members of Wellcome Library staff.

On Thursday 24th September, Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist, is speaking at ‘Sex: A Victorian Mystery’, a Wellcome Collection event to tie in with the Exquisite Bodies exhibition. The evening aims to bring together visual, historical and literary perspectives, in order to illuminate Victorian contradictions to sex and sexual health.

And on Thursday 22nd October, William Schupbach, Curator, Paintings, Prints and Drawings, will give a lecture entitled ‘Physicians and scholars: libraries and learning in 17th century medical portraits’, at an evening event at the Royal College of Physicians, 'Secrets of 17th Century Portraiture’.

The Politics of Celibacy

Radio 4's Woman's Hour discussed the topic "Why do people choose to become celibate?" this week. The Wellcome Library's Senior Archivist Dr Lesley Hall offered historical context to the question, discussing both self-determined celibacy in the tradition of Aristophanes' Lysistrata as well as enforced celibacy throughout the ages.

The programme is available to UK audiences via iPlayer for a week after the broadcast date (21 August)

Scouting for Boys

BBC4 repeated last week the documentary Scouting for Boys, which describes the story behind Robert Baden-Powell’s best-selling book, which kick-started the Boy Scout movement.

The documentary places the book in the context of its time, describing the social questions which dominated Edwardian thinking, and includes an interview with Dr Lesley Hall of the Wellcome Library, on concerns over the sex education of boys during this period.

More details on the BBC iplayer.

Lesley Hall on Women's Hour

Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist at the Wellcome Library, appeared on Radio 4's Women's Hour yesterday (Wednesday 18 March), talking about anatomical knowledge of the female reproduction system, including William Hunter's pioneering Anatomy of the Gravid Uterus (1774).

You can listen again through the Women's Hour pages on the Radio 4 website, or from the BBC iplayer.

'Archivist, Historian and Trailblazer'

The first issue of new history magazine HerStoria, includes a feature on Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist at the Wellcome Library, the title of which we've quoted above.

The article rightly hails Lesley's work as both an archivist and historian:

"If you are a Radio 4 listener, Lesley Hall's name may be familiar. Over the past year or so her voice has been heard regularly over the airwaves, including on the Archive Hour programme 'Love at the Lighthouse' about Marie Stopes and on Case Notes, talking about the history of abortion. Lesley has also cropped up on on Women's Hour several times where she explored various aspects of the history of women's health such as medical attitudes to childbirth and the treatment of women's cancers.

As well as being an archivist at the Wellcome Library in London, Lesley is also one of the UK's leading historians of sexuality. Her books include Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain (2000) and Outspoken Women (2005) an anthology of women's writing on sex between 1870-1969.

Lesley's contribution to the development of women's history as a discipline, and to bringing it to a wider audience, has been tremendous. She has achieved this in part by encouraging people to look at history from a fresh perspective and discover different histories. Some ten or so years ago Lesley was one of the first to set up a website that explored and reflected on issues in women's history (almost 'blogging' even before the term was invented)".

The article also describes and is illustrated by some of the many sources for women's history available at the Wellcome Library. The issue of Herstoria also includes a Women's History Walk around Bloomsbury, designed by Lesley (and still available through her website).

The after-effects of Vril

Dr Lesley Hall of the Wellcome Library was one of the contributors to a recent BBC Radio 3 documentary discussing the curious afterlife of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Vril.

"Matthew Sweet finds out about Vril, the infinitely powerful energy source of the species of superhumans which featured in Victorian author and politician Edward Bulwer Lytton’s pioneering science fiction novel 'The Coming Race'. Although it was completely fictional, many people were desperate to believe it really existed and had the power to transform their lives".

One of these people was a Harley Street doctor, Herbert Tibbits, who along with a handful of aristocrats, tried to promote the notion of electrical cures and the possibility of a "coming race" in a bizarre bazaar at the Royal Albert Hall.

Another believer was Arthur Lovell. In the documentary, Dr Hall describes his work The Breath of Life, which claimed to offer practical advice on how to breathe your way to a higher state of human evolution.

The Wellcome Library holds a copy of this book, and other works by both Tibbits and Lovell. The documentary is available here until 11 January 2009.