The Treasure of Rain

As today is the UN World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, we thought we would draw attention to some of the many ways people have sought to cope with drought and its consequences, as found in our collections.

The illustration to the right is from a page in a Chinese Shiwu Bencao, a dietic herbal of the Ming period (1368-1644). It depicts two figures, one sweeping snow from the ground and the other storing it in a jar, during the last lunar month of the year. This month was known as layue, a time of offerings to the spirits and gods, and the snow that fell then was called laxue, or final month snow. It had sacred qualities and, carefully sealed and stored in a dark place, retained a potency for many years. Crops that were covered in final month snow were thought to resist drought, and the care with which these figures collect the snow in the cold still season reflects a concern for the uncertainties of agriculture and the civilisations that depend upon it.

These uncertainties have formed a close bond between farmers and their crops, and there are few places where this is more apparent than in the high desert mesas of northern Arizona. Here, the Hopi people have sustained an agriculture growing corn in a harsh, meagre environment for nearly a thousand years. For the Hopi, corn is not only sustenance but a ‘ceremonial object, prayer offering, symbol, and sentient being unto itself’ [1], and Hopi farmers intimately nuture each seedling, singing to the growing plants to aid the work of the sun. Relying almost solely on precipitation and run-off water in a predominately arid climate, care and attention go hand in hand with prayer and supplication, as shown in this photograph of a ceremonial corn planting. Such ceremony - embodied in late winter katsinas dances - is a vital support for this tenuous agriculture, and an entreaty to the spirits of the earth, the sky, and the clouds to bring rain and continued life.

The experience of drought in our own mostly grey and wet land has at various times inspired similar entreaties to the sky. During a long dry period in 1615, Samuel Page, incumbent of St Nicholas church in Deptford, observed in a sermon that ‘the heavens above us’ were now made ‘as brasse, and these have locked up the treasure of raine’. He went on to decry:

The earth is sensible of this calamitie, the face of it is discoloured, the grasse is burnt up, the fruits faile, the greene hearbe is withered, the earth openeth her mouth wide, and gapeth for thirst, and no clouds but of dust, have for a long time rained upon us: the beasts of the field have felt this woe, who have wanted their necessary food: only wee who know the cause of all this, and are too blame for all this, for whose sins, the earth, the beasts of the field suffer, wee doe not change garment, or countenance for the matter, the drunkard drinkes not a draught the lesse, nor comes to Church the more for it; the wonton abateth nothing of his delights, nor the worldly man of his desires: but aske the Rich man of the earth, will all the wealth which they have heaped up buy us one shower of raine now in this our extremest necessite: I say not to quench the great thirst, but to lay the dust thereof?

Though Samuel Page acknowledged ‘there be natural causes, which produce drought, and the learned Students in the Bookes of ceslestiall bodies, give good accompt often of these accidents’, he called for his congregation to pray for their sins, as ‘the Medicinall Antidote against miserie’. Given that the title of his next sermon was ‘A Thanksgiving for Raine’, he may well have felt his words were well heeded.

For those of us with less faith in the expediency of prayer, Frank Rowntree, Health Education Officer for Sheffield in the 1970s, offers practical advice on the steps needed to keep drought at bay in modern Britain, advice that is still pressingly relevant some forty years after it was first broadcast as one of his regular health features for BBC Radio Sheffield.

[1] Virgil Masayesva and Dennis Wall, 'People of the Corn: Teachings in Hopi Taditional Agriculture, Spirituality, and Sustainability', American Indian Quarterly, vol. 28, nos. 3 & 4 (2004).

A grim day in Minnesota

Wellcome Library no. 677114i

This colour lithograph (click on image to enlarge) was recently found in a drawer in the Wellcome Library containing personalia of Henry S. Wellcome, the founder of the Library. It shows the hanging of 38 Sioux or Dakota leaders in Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862. There is an impression of it in the Library of Congress (as one would expect, for deposit in that Library was a necessary condition for registration of copyright in the USA), and a few other impressions are also documented, but the significance of the Wellcome Library impression is that it had belonged to someone who was actually caught up in the massacre by the Sioux for which their leaders were hanged –- the event portrayed in in the lithograph.

Henry S. Wellcome was only nine years old at the time. The state of Minnesota had been created in 1846-1858 out of lands that were an enclave within unceded Sioux territory. It passed to the United States under compensation promises that were never fulfilled owing to some conditions in the small print that overruled them in favour of competing compensation promises in favour of white interests. The non-payment of the compensation became a runnning grievance for the Sioux, who regarded the white settlers in the Minnesota Valley in much the same way as Hamas today regards the Israeli settlements on the West Bank of the River Jordan.

Settlers fleeing the Dakota, Minnesota 1862. Published by Whitney's Gallery, St. Paul, Minn.

Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

As in the Middle East, a series of barbarous tit-for-tat murders and massacres ensued. In August 1862, anticipating an all-out attack by the settlers, the Sioux started a general uprising, attacking ferociously some outlying settlements and even townships such as the one in which the Wellcome family lived, Garden City, Minn. The boy Wellcome assisted his uncle Jacob, the town surgeon-apothecary, in treating the wounded. Casualties among the settlers would have been greater but for the protection of another Native American tribe, the Winnebago.

The United States did indeed respond in kind, defeated the Sioux in battle, and tried the prisoners. Three hundred and three were found guilty of savage crimes of whom all but 38 were pardoned by President Lincoln. The 38 walked to the scaffold in Mankato on 26 December 1862 in warpaint and feathered headdresses, to be hanged simultaneously on one massive set of gallows.

Henry S. Wellcome did not attend the hanging but he kept this print of it, and later described the Sioux uprising (rather undramatically) as "the most interesting event of my life". Though he might have been expected to have lost his respect for the Native Americans, in fact he reacted in the opposite way. He recognized the historical reasons for their hostility to the settlers, appreciated their culture from the anthropologist's point of view, and -- from a room in the Arlington Hotel in Washington, D.C. -- worked tirelessly in later life to prevent further injustices.

Left: Wellcome Library no. 45889i

The series of pastel portraits which he commissioned from the artist W. Langdon Kihn in the 1920s demonstrate his interest in preserving their vanishing culture. The example shown here retains its original frame: a Jazz Age record of Native American decoration.

Acknowledgment: Robert Rhodes James, Henry Wellcome, London 1994, pp. 23-29

Wellcome Library Insights: June - July

Our popular Insight sessions offer visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. These free sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections.

The next series of Insights begins this Thursday afternoon (3rd June) at 3pm, exploring how Native American cultures have been recorded, celebrated and misrepresented, using examples from the Library’s collections. You can pick up your free ticket for this event from the Wellcome Collection Information Desk from 13.30 on the day. Tickets are issued on a first-come, first-served basis: for more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Our other Insights sessions for June and July are:

The Quest for Perfect Skin - 17th June, 6-7pm

From Deviance to Diversity – 15th July, 3-4pm

For more details on attending the sessions, please follow the links above to the appropriate pages on the Wellcome Collection website.

Wellcome Library Insights: April - May 2010

Our popular Insight sessions offer visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. These free sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

The Spring 2010 series of Insights begins this Thursday afternoon (8th April) at 3pm, exploring how Native American cultures have been recorded, celebrated and misrepresented, using examples from the Library’s American collections. You can pick up your free ticket for this event from the Wellcome Collection Information Desk from 13.30 on the day. Tickets are issued on a first-come, first-served basis: for more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Our upcoming Insights sessions for April and May are:

Caricatures and Cartoons - 22nd April, 3-4pm

Anatomies of London – 29th April, 6-7pm

Fascinating Faces – 6th May, 3-4pm

The Occult - 13th May, 6-7pm

Madness - 20th May, 3-4pm

For more details on attending the sessions, please follow the links above to the appropriate pages on the Wellcome Collection website.

Item of the Month - November 2009

The journals of Arthur Wellington Clah (1831-1916) – Christian missionary and First Nations hereditary Tsimshian chief – are perhaps one of the more unexpected treasures of the Wellcome Library. Written over fifty years, from 1859 to 1910, they comprise a uniquely personal meditation of social change drawn from the tumult of European imperial adventure.

Clah grew up on an islanded bay on Canada’s northwest coast. Dense forests of cedar and pine massed behind, cut through with rivers that flowed from the glaciers of the mountain interior. These were the heartlands of the Tsimshian people, who had first come into being when the trickster, Raven, stole the light of the world from the Great Chief of the Sky and lifted darkness from the land. They grew rich on the natural wealth of their forests and waterways, and developed astounding artistic and ceremonial traditions. However, by the nineteenth century, this wealth had begun to attract the attention of European traders and in 1831 – the year of Clah’s birth – the Hudson's Bay Company founded a trading station in the bay where Clah came to live. Named Fort Simpson, its arrival transformed the Tsimshian.

The above painting by Frederick Alexcee, a Tsimshian contemporary of Clah, shows Fort Simpson as it was three or four decades after the arrival of the Hudson's Bay Company. Around the Company’s white fort the large wooden houses of the Tsimshian cluster, each decorated with painted fronts and carved totem poles. The majority of Tsimshian tribes had soon moved to Fort Simpson, to take advantage of the trade opportunities close proximity offered. Groups that were scattered now competed for social position. The greatest status was granted to those who could give away or destroy the most goods in public feasts named potlatches, and in the clamour for position increasingly extravagant potlatches came to be held. Victorian observers, shocked by such apparent waste and perturbed by lavish ceremonies involving the manifestation of animal spirits, decided the higher blessings of civilization should be called upon. And so in 1857 a young English missionary named William Duncan arrived, eager to bring the Word of God to the benighted of the world.

Clah became a native language instructor to Duncan and, in turn, Duncan taught Clah to read and write English. Clah was one of the first converts of Duncan’s hugely successful mission, which was to lead to the founding of a separate Tsimshian Christian community in Alaska named Metlakahtla that still exists to this day. Clah took up missionary work himself, preaching to villages deep in the forests of Canada and far north in the Alaskan tundra. Such ventures are recorded in his journals, which take the form of a highly personal history of the Tsimshian people. Everyday observations of the weather and of town life in Fort Simpson and Metlakahtla sit alongside reflections upon his faith and the transformation of the beliefs and practices of the Tsimshian. He writes of the banning of the potlatch and traditional winter ceremonies, and of the interweaving of these customs with the newly adopted Christian religion. Indeed, the old and the new entwine in his words – the light of God carrying the echo of Raven’s wing, the traditional spirit quest robed in the search for salvation – as he seeks to find a place for the Tsimshian in a world unravelled and created anew. [1]

After his death, Clah's journals were purchased by Henry Wellcome, founder of the Wellcome Library. Wellcome had been a committed supporter of Metlakahtla and regarded Clah's journals as something of a protogenic testament to literate cultural progress. What is certain is that, in the words that Clah set down, the great changes the Tsimshian experienced are given powerful and lasting voice.

[1] Susan Neylan, The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), p.174.

Wellcome Library Insights

Our Insight sessions offer visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. Sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

The autumn series of Insights begins this Thursday afternoon at 3pm, exploring items in our collections relating to the cultures of Native American peoples.

Information on later Insight sesssions:

Caricatures and Cartoons - 17th September

Medi-Cinema – 1st October

Conservation in Action – 15th October

Entrance to an Insight session is free, and there is no need to book (though spaces are limited).

Stories from Silence

A free storytelling event for children and adults by the Wellcome Library.

Saturday 18 July, 14.00-15.30
Sunday 19 July, 14.00-15.30

A Native American in full war dress armed with bottles of prairie medicine, an exploding bucket, Japanese demons, and a voice from plague-ridden London in 1665 all feature in a live storytelling event to be held at Wellcome Collection on 18-19 July.

Four specially commissioned storytellers will use performances, Japanese story boards and live demonstrations to tell their stories, each inspired by one of four different objects in the Wellcome Library.

Story lovers of all ages will be transported to London during the Great Plague of 1665-66, to the magical land of Japanese spirits and demons, to Clapham Common in the 1890s - where assistants dressed as Native Americans (or 'Red Indians' as the Victorians knew them) touted Sequah medicines while volunteers had their teeth pulled - and taken on a school trip to San Diego in the mid-1990s to hear Francis Crick's colourful personal account of his early youthful, and at times explosive, experiments.

These four stories, spanning different countries and centuries, bring to life four fascinating items in the Wellcome Library - the world's greatest collections of books, manuscripts, pictures and films relating to the history of medicine.

Families and adults are welcome at this free event, which also includes audio description of the four central objects, as well as speech-to-text live subtitles (on Saturday 18 July) and BSL (on Sunday 19 July).

To book your free tickets, visit the Wellcome Collection website.

Edward S. Curtis in the Wellcome Library

A recent post on the BBC News Viewfinder Blog draws attention to the remarkable work of Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952), a legendary American photographer, writer, and pioneering ethnographic filmmaker.

The Wellcome Library holds thirteen first generation prints of the outstanding photographs Curtis produced of Native American peoples. Remarkable both as artworks and ethnographic studies, they are a vital record of traditions that were fast being eroded and transformed.

Fearing that Native Americans were ‘a vanishing race’, for nearly thirty years Curtis travelled throughout the American West, documenting over eighty tribes to ensure that some trace of their traditional ways remained. Funded by the financier J. Pierpont Morgan, and with the support of President Theodore Roosevelt, his work culminated in the publication of his twenty-volume study, The North American Indian, which contained some 2, 232 photographs with accompanying text.

Curtis sought to record all aspects of the native traditions he encountered. When he did not come upon such traditions naturally, Curtis would attempt to accurately recreate them, as was the accepted ethnographic practice of his day. In the photograph to the right, three Navajo gods, or Holy People, are given earthly form in a Navajo ceremony, the Yeibichai, or Night Way. Wakened and compelled by the reiteration of ritual words and acts - fixed rhythms it would be perilous to break - the mysterious and powerful Holy People are called upon to restore harmony to the universe, unbalanced by the actions of man, the cause of sickness and decay. Curtis was with the Navajo in the spring, rather than in the winter months when such a ceremony would usually have been performed. Unperturbed, he recruited various individuals, including the sons of a non-Navajo trader, Charlie and Sam Day, to recreate the costumes of the masked Holy People and to pose for him in them. Represented here are Tonenili – the rain god, a storm of foliage – and the Hero Twins, Monster Slayer and Child of the Water, war gods who played roles in most Navajo ceremonies.

Though his work was celebrated in his day, Curtis lost the rights to The North American Indian and died in poverty owing to the great costs he accrued pursuing his exhaustive project. Thanks to the determined vision of Curtis, his work remains as one of the most important records of Native American culture undertaken.

The Curtis prints held by the Wellcome Library are available to be viewed freely in the library. Reproductions of a number of these prints can also be seen in the Medicine Man gallery of Wellcome Collection.

Wellcome Library Insight - Native Americans

Next week's free Wellcome Library Insight session, explores the cultures of the native populations of North America, as represented in our collections.

Book your place at the session online.

Wellcome Library Insights

Our Insights sessions offer visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. Sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

Previous Insights have been held on such topics as Henry Wellcome, Healing Herbs, our film digitisation project and face reading.

Details on our forthcoming Insights:

Francis Crick: DNA and beyond - 19 March

Madness – 2 April and 7 May

Native Americans – 16 April

Caricatures and Cartoons – 21 May

Entrance to an Insight session is free but tickets must be booked in advance.