Easing the way for literature

16th June 1904: a young Dubliner goes on a first date with the woman who will become the mother of his children and (much later) his wife. Eighteen years later – that is, in 1922, ninety years ago – he will publish a book that, as well as encapsulating all literature, will capture Dublin as it was on the day of that first date, so that, as he was to say, if Dublin were destroyed it could be rebuilt from the information in that one volume. The young man is James Joyce, his date Nora Barnacle and the book Ulysses. Bloomsday, as 16th June is known to Joyce enthusiasts, is celebrated every year, but readers in Britain will be aware of extra coverage this year, as the BBC marks 90 years since the book’s publication with various events culminating in a dramatization of Ulysses spread across Radio 4 throughout Bloomsday, whilst in Ireland RTÉ's arts programme The Works will be devoted to Joyce.

A character resembling Joyce does feature strongly in the book – the rather humourless, priggish Stephen Dedalus, whom readers first met on a journey from childhood to young manhood in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – but a quite different figure is at the centre of Ulysses, the middle-aged Jewish everyman Leopold Bloom. From the moment that he appears, at the start of the fourth chapter, Bloom is never far from the book’s action and it is his interior monologue that features most strongly as he navigates the city: hence, of course, the name Bloomsday.

Ulysses exists on multiple levels – as high conceptual art and meta-fiction, a discourse about literature via literature, picking up, pastiching and parodying various forms and tropes; but also on a more down-to-earth level as an experiment in rendering experience via language as completely as possible. This for Joyce means a focus upon the detail of basic, quotidian experience, observed closely and rendered faithfully and without judgement. Moments after Bloom’s first appearance, the brilliant ear Joyce brought to this project is summed up in one line from Bloom’s cat –

The cat walked stiffly round a leg of the table with tail on high.
-Mkgnao!

- which captures perfectly a particular sound to the extent that it is hard, having read it, not to hear all cats in future as saying “Mkgnao!” rather than the conventional Miaow. The focus on the quotidian however, also leads Joyce with some relish into areas often considered offensive or taboo. On the very first page Stephen Dedalus’s friend Buck Mulligan borrows Dedalus’s handkerchief and goes into flights of verbal fancy over the colour “snotgreen” – gazing out over Dublin Bay, he embarks on a verbal riff about “The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.” Joyce’s characters, unlike many in literature, have bodily fluids and bodily waste: snot, urine, menstrual blood, farts, semen and excrement are all produced by one or other of them in the course of the eighteen hours tracked by the novel.

Human beings as part of the physical world, of course, are the stock in trade of the Wellcome Library, with Sir Henry Wellcome’s collecting vision of the history of medicine being (inter alia) a history of humankind’s physical side. It is, therefore, particularly appropriate that Wellcome, or rather one of his products, has a walk-on part at precisely one of those moments in the book. Bloom first appears early in the morning, frying breakfast and making tea (some of the meat is begged by the cat we met earlier, whilst a cup of tea is taken to his half-asleep wife). Like many of us, we suspect (but we won’t pry), he finds that after a short while up and about, his bowels kick into action and he has to go off to the privy at the end of the garden, where he muses on defecation during the act and provides a little endorsement for a Wellcome product:

..his last resistance yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read, reading still patiently, that slight constipation of yesterday quite gone. Hope it’s not too big bring on piles again. No, just right. So. Ah! Costive one tabloid of cascara sagrada.

Cascara sagrada was a widely used natural laxative, derived from the dried bark of a species of Buckthorn - a routine element in the materia medica of the time. “Tabloid”, however, makes the mention more specific: this was (and is) a Wellcome trademarked word and at this time Wellcome was assertively litigious in defending his intellectual property, so there is no question that when Joyce has Bloom think of a product delivered in “tabloids” it is a Burroughs Wellcome item. (An image of Burroughs Wellcome Cascara Sagrada can be found in the Science Museum's Science and Society picture library.) Wellcome rarely missed a trick when it came to publicity and was keen to make sure his products were prominently placed in, for example, accounts of polar exploration. We suspect, however, that he was unaware of this bit of product placement in a notoriously “dirty” and long-banned book, and if he had known he might well have been rather too prudish to enjoy it.

It is a quirk of Joyce’s works, perhaps a function of the years each took to write, that by the end of each they tend to be turning into the next. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man brings Stephen Dedalus from infancy to the priggish young man who appears on the first page of Ulysses, whilst as the latter progresses its balance shifts from intense focus on everyday experience and interior monologue towards a more purely literary nature, working through various literary genres and parodies in an “unrealistic”, meta-fictional mode. This foreshadows Finnegans Wake and its attempt to bundle all of human experience and all human language into a tale of one archetypal family told in “night-language”, the slurred language of dreams in which concepts collide and coalesce in an endless series of puns, some serious and some joyfully smutty. We cannot, alas, say whether Wellcome or his products appear in the Wake, although its professed aim of encompassing all human experience means that they might well be in there somewhere. Perhaps Joyce missed a trick: in the first pages of Finnegans Wake we find ourselves inside the Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park, enlarged and transformed into a museum - “Now yiz are in the Willingdone Museyroom” – and he would surely have loved to include the Wellcome Museyroom, and to use the founder’s name as the opportunity for a smutty double entendre. Wellcome’s tense relationship with his more easy-going partner Silas Burroughs, too, is reminiscent of the Wake’s "Tales Told of Shem and Shaun", the stories of personality clash between two contrasting brothers (based on Joyce and his more strait-laced brother Stanislas) that include the fable of the Ondt and the Gracehoper. The beauty of Finnegans Wake is that, containing multitudes, it lends itself to application in all sorts of ways: if Wellcome, or indeed anyone one wishes, does not appear in it explicitly one can still find some sort of analogue. Another of its beauties is that having mentioned it one is immediately absolved from bringing a blog post to any sort of conclusion; like Finnegans Wake itself, one can start anywhere and just end in mid-

Illustration: James Joyce's grave in Fluntern Cemetery, Zürich. Copyright, Lars Haefner, made available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license via Wikimedia Commons. Fluntern Cemetery is high on the rounded top of the Zürichberg and backs onto Zürich Zoo: when she buried her husband there Nora Joyce commented that he would be able to hear the lions roaring and would like that.

Sarah Bakewell on Montaigne: Free Medicine & Literature Event

How do you get on well with people? How do you respond to violence, pain, bereavement or illness? How do you make sense of others’ behaviour? How do you stop worrying about death and pay attention to life instead? These are among many medical and psychological questions to fascinate Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), winegrower, personal essayist, and arguably the world’s first truly modern writer. Montaigne's biographer Sarah Bakewell will explore his work and ask whether reading him helps us to understand the art of physical and mental well-being in the 21st century.

Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: a life of Michel de Montaigne (Vintage, 2011) won the Duff Cooper Award 2010 and the U.S. National Book Critics’ Circle Biography Prize 2011, and was shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Award in biography. She has written two previous books, The Smart (2001) and The English Dane (2005), and until 2002 was the Wellcome Library’s Assistant Curator of Early Printed Books.

Sarah's talk will be taking place in the Library Reading Room on Wednesday 29 June. The Reading Room will be open from 6.45pm and the talk will run from 7pm-8.15pm.

The event is free and there are just a few spaces left. Tickets must be booked in advance and are available here.

New event: Was Jung a mystic?

We will be hosting another Medicine and Literature event on Wednesday 2 February, 19.00-20.15. Join us to hear author Gary Lachman investigate the life of psychologist Carl Jung.

Gary's talk will chart the development of Jung's ideas, look into the reasons behind his early reticence and later advocacy of the paranormal, and finally ask, was Jung a scientist or a mystic, or perhaps something else?

The event is free and tickets can be booked on the Wellcome Collection website.

Image: The dream of a patient in Jungian analysis: a railway tunnel, a train in the distance, and three people walking along next to the right-hand track. Drawing by M.A.C.T., 1971. (Library no. 658097i)

Wellcome Trust Book Prize - And the Winner Is...

Last night at a ceremony in Wellcome Collection, this year's Wellcome Trust Book Prize was awarded to The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot.

The book tells the story of a poor tobacco farmer whose cancer cells, taken without her knowledge, became one of the most important tools in medicine. Skloot took a decade to research and write the book, which weaves together Lacks's family story, the first culturing of HeLa cells (as they became known) to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans and the birth of bioethics.

As mentioned on this Blog, you will find copies of all the shortlisted books for the Prize in the Wellcome Library. We also have a huge array of titles on the theme of Bioethics and our archive holdings on the wider theme of Medical Ethics are summarised in two Sources Guides. Previous posts on this Blog have also shown HeLa cells from Wellcome Images and discussed the cells scientific and cultural impact.

Tickets are also still available for our next Library Medicine and Literature event on the 17th November, which will discuss writing about medicine through time. More details are available here.

For more details on the Book Prize announcement, see the Wellcome Trust's website.

Wellcome Trust Book Prize - Shortlist announced

The shortlist for this year's Wellcome Trust Book Prize was announced today.
The selected titles are:

• So Much for That by Lionel Shriver
• Grace Williams Says it Loud by Emma Henderson
• Medic by John Nichol and Tony Rennell
• Teach Us to Sit Still by Tim Parks
• The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
• Angel of Death: The Story of Smallpox by Gareth Williams

All of the books are available in the Wellcome Library (catalogue details are given above) and the winner will be announced at an awards reception at Wellcome Collection, London, on 9 November 2010.

For more details - including a short film of Book Prize judges Clive Anderson, Maggie Gee, Dr Michael Neve and Dr Alice Roberts discussing the six shortlisted books - see the Wellcome Book Prize website.

Wellcome Library workshops: Autumn 2010

The new Autumn programme of free Wellcome Library workshops begins at the end of this month on 26th October. Further details can be found on the Library website.

The workshops provide training on research and resources in the Library, and are aimed at the general public.
The programme includes:
- thematic workshops on Science in the News, Medicine and Literature and the History of Medicine
- training on specific resources such as PubMed Central, and Nineteenth Century Newspapers Online
- and introductions to the Archives & Manuscripts collection, the Wellcome Images database, and genealogical research resources.

All workshops are free and available to library members (library membership is free and open to all). To book a place, please use the online booking facility on the library website

Author: Lalita Kaplish

A novelist's bicentenary

Elizabeth Gaskell, the novelist, was born 200 years ago today, on 29th September 1810.

The huge success of the BBC’s version of Cranford (which added several of her other short stories to the adaptation) and, a few years before that, a high-quality version of North and South, have made her name a familiar one to a modern audience. For many years, however, she seemed destined to be treated as a footnote to other people’s stories. For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, she was known as a novelist basically for Cranford: for all its charm, this is perhaps one of her minor works and certainly made it possible to see her as a milder, more demure figure than the reality. In addition, as feminist critics rightly pointed out, the tendency during this time to refer to her as “Mrs Gaskell”, without a forename, tended to reduce her individuality (it also made it hard to distinguish her from similarly-named lesser writers such as Mrs Oliphant or Mrs Humphrey Ward). During her years of neglect, the other one of her works to enjoy continued currency was her biography of Charlotte Brontë: again, this gave her prominence but only as the friend and biographer of Brontë (whose biography, being first in the field, would often be attacked ritually by anyone seeking to justify the need for their own subsequent work).

From the 1950s onwards, her novels exploring the social consequences of the industrialisation she saw around her in Manchester – Mary Barton and North and South – were given more and more prominence, but again at the cost of lumping her into a literary-historical moment, treating these works as part of a collective whole called “The Condition of England novel”, in which Gaskell, Kingsley, Disraeli and others formed a rather undifferentiated supporting cast to Dickens’ Hard Times. It has taken the determined rediscovery and re-excavation of women’s writing from the 1970s and 1980s onwards to bring her to prominence on her own merits as an accomplished and varied writer: not as someone else’s wife or biographer, or a bit-part player in literary history, but as Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (née Stephenson), novelist.

We might not think of her instantly as a writer who explores medical themes (although anyone who saw the TV adaptation of Cranford will have vivid memories, maybe too vivid, of Philip Glennister as Mr Carter having a leg amputated without anaesthetic). However – as any visitor to the Wellcome Library can vouch – what is “medical” can be defined very broadly, and many broad social or scientific issues turn out to be grist to the medical-historical mill. The industrial revolution involved huge social and scientific changes, very many of which had medical implications, and Gaskell’s works demonstrate a vivid eye for this changing world around her. Science and industry impinge on her novels frequently, even in those not explicitly to do with “the condition of England”: the rural idyll of Cranford, for example, is invaded by the newly-invented railway, and in her last novel Wives and Daughters the central male character, Roger Hamley, is a naturalist whose commitment to scientific rigour and clarity mirrors his personal qualities of honesty and uprightness. Most notably, of course, it is in those novels that explore the social consequences of industrialisation, and take the reader into the same Manchester slums that Engels described, that the public-health consequences of the Industrial Revolution are all around us, the ill-lit and ill-drained slums where the poor sleep surrounded by filth. The presentation of Gaskell as a meek, dove-like figure whose works were limited to a female world of charm and manners, which predominated in the early twentieth century, is a long way from the truth.

With that in mind, it should perhaps come as no surprise that Elizabeth Gaskell is represented in the archives collection of the Wellcome Library. Our MS.7141 comprises a letter from Gaskell to a friend named Ann Scott (the wife of the principal of Owens’ College, which would evolve into Manchester University), written around 1854, in which she discusses the medical case of a Mrs Glover of Bury. Mrs Glover is suffering from a uterine cancer and, it is clear, her prognosis is not good. Gaskell explains that there is a possibility of her being operated upon by Dr Protheroe Smith at the Women's Hospital in London; however, she makes it clear that she thinks that this is unlikely to heal her and that there might be no point in subjecting Mrs Glover to the pain and stress of unnecessary surgery. (Dr Smith, she indicates, has a track record of pressing ahead in such circumstances to an extent that she feels might amount to positive cruelty.) The alternative, she suggests, might be to experiment with reducing pain by using mesmerism: a concept that had been around since the start of the century, and which - despite the lack of an agreed model explaining it – had been used to perform pain-free operations in the place of anaesthetic. (Coincidentally, active in Manchester at the same time as Gaskell was the general practitioner James Braid, whose work on these phenomena was to explain them in terms of actions upon the mind of the subject rather than the nebulous physical explanations centring on a “magnetic fluid” that had been favoured by mesmerism’s inventor Franz Anton Mesmer: it was Braid who gave these phenomena their modern name, “hypnotism”.)

It is a suggestive vignette, pointing us in various directions: demonstrating Gaskell’s interest in medical issues and a willingness to think beyond the box of orthodoxy in looking at therapies, opening discussions on male practitioners’ treatment of the female body and of women’s illness, echoing modern concerns about medical invasiveness versus palliative care for the terminally ill. The letter is discussed in detail in an article in Medical History (Christopher Hilton, "Elizabeth Gaskell and Mesmerism: An Unpublished Letter", Medical History, 1995, 39: 219-235), published not long after the Library acquired it; the article - including a transcript of the letter - is freely available here. Although it is our only Elizabeth Gaskell item, it fully earns its place in our holdings: it links to all sorts of issues discussed elsewhere in the collection and demonstrates another way in which this intelligent, aware woman engaged with the changing world around her. Two hundred years on from her birth, we salute her: Elizabeth Gaskell, nobody’s footnote.

Images, from top:
1/ Elizabeth Gaskell, c.1851, from Wikimedia Commons.
2/ Manchester soup kitchen, mid-19th century, from Wellcome Images (image number L0004800).
3/ Manchester workers' dwellings, mid-19th century, from Wellcome Images (image number L0004801).
Images made available under Creative Commons licence.

Behind the Scenes: Outreach and events

Our Behind the Scenes topic this month is cross-departmental, focusing on the outreach and events programme. Although many staff in the Library have duties that involve public-facing work, there are a handful who spend a large proportion of their time planning, managing and carrying out the organised outreach activities.

Tours, Insights talks, and Library Workshops are held on a regular basis at the Library, and these can be booked in advance. Ross Macfarlane (Research Officer) manages tours specifically centred around the Special Collections, and Danny Rees (Assistant Librarian) focuses on the library User Services tours. Strongly focused around our academic audiences, these tours are tailored to meet the interests of each tour group and to ensure that we are giving people a good sense of how the Library’s holdings and services are relevant to them.

Insights talks are managed by Eleanor Lanyon (Library Outreach Officer) currently on secondment to the Wellcome Trust Events Team. The Insights talks are held on a weekly basis (usually on a Thursday), focusing on specific topics relevant to the Library and its holdings such as “The Occult”, “Fascinating Faces” and “Madness”.

Workshops are held a couple times a week and provide a forum for our users to learn more about how to use the Library’s resources more efficiently, to highlight the services that we provide, and to provide more information on research topics. These are managed by Lalita Kaplish (Assistant Librarian) and draw on expertise across the Library staff. Examples include “Wellcome Images” and “Plants and Medicine” among others.

Library also runs one-off or annual events that are geared toward particular audiences and help to raise the profile of the Library in the History of Medicine world and beyond. Phoebe Harkins (Assistant Librarian) is involved in the planning of these including the Medicine in Literature series, where authors who have used the Library collections for their working talk about their research processes. Authors including Phillip Hoare and Mike Jay took part in the launch of the series last year, and Michelle Lovric will be presenting her latest work “The Book of Human Skin” (Bloomsbury 2010) in July.

In order to coordinate all these internal events, a committee including key staff as well as Tracy Tillotson (Library Administrator) meet on a weekly basis. This ensures that there is good cross-departmental communication on all aspects of the events, and assures a high level of quality and relevance for the Library’s users. Tracy is the hub of much of this activity, liaising with the Trust Events team to make sure that Library events are coordinated with the rest of Wellcome Collection and the wider Trust as appropriate.

The Library is not, however, limited to its own four walls – externally-located events are also part of its outreach agenda. Events such as the Midsummer Picnics, activities in schools around medical humanities, and others are planned and managed by Eleanor, targeting a more general audience and younger groups.

The Library’s holdings are also displayed for public consumption in exhibitions. Wellcome Collection exhibitions usually incorporate a number of items, and items are loaned to external museums, galleries and libraries. Rowan De Saulles (Library Exhibition Liaison), manages all aspects of these loans, and is currently working on material to be used in the “Skin” exhibition coming up in Wellcome Collection in June.

Although it is impossible in the space of a blog post to detail all the work that goes into the Library’s outreach activities, it can be seen that there is a dedicated programme, and staff with time dedicated to supporting, promoting and contributing to them. These events add great value to the service the Library provides to its users, allowing our holdings to be used and understood creatively, and leading to a broader and deeper understanding of the subject of the History of Medicine across a wide range of audiences.