Spilsbury notecards to be digitised

In the New Year, the Wellcome Library's recently acquired collection of notecards from the archive of Sir Bernard Spilsbury will be available online.

The digital images will be accessible via the Archives and Manuscripts catalogue records as PDFs. Images can be downloaded and reused under a Creative Commons license.

Please note: the notecards will be digitised in November and December 2009, and will be unavailable for consultation in the Library until 4 January 2010.

More Spilsbury case cards

Last November we reported on the acquisition via a sale at Sothebys of nearly 4000 index cards of notes of Sir Bernard Spilsbury's autopsies.

This collection has proved highly popular with readers since it has become available.

We are now delighted to report that as a result of the publicity around this important acquisition, a further 3000+ case cards have been received as a gift to the Library.

These cards clearly follow on from the sequence previously received, covering the years 1933 to 1946, although there are still some unaccounted for gaps. There are no cards at all from the years 1939 and 1940, some breaks in the sequence for other years, only three cards from 1945 and a single specimen from 1946. As with the previous accession, the cards reflect the extremely wide range of Spilsbury's routine investigations of sudden and unexpected death from all causes, not merely his notorious high-profile involvement in murder cases.

This new accession of cards has now been catalogued: to see the catalogue, go to the Archives and Manuscripts catalogue and put PP/SPI in the Reference field of the search interface. Click on the blue numerals in the lefthand column of the resulting hitlist for the detailed descriptions. The cards are available for research subject to the usual conditions of access to archive material.

One hundred years since the ‘Magic Bullet’

In 1909 Paul Ehrlich, working with his Japanese student Sahachiro Hata at the National Institute for Experimental Therapeutics in Frankfurt, discovered that the 606th substance tested in their attempts to discover a specific chemotherapeutic agent to cure syphilis, the arsphenamine compound named ‘Salvarsan’ did in fact destroy the spirochaete, treponema pallidum, which caused syphilis.

In the early years of the twentieth century this sexually-transmitted disease was a major public health problem: it had long-term lingering effects on the infected individual, and was also the cause of much disability in their offspring.

The discovery of Salvarsan was also an important breakthrough in the development of specifically targeted chemotherapeutic agents. It was rapidly taken up by the medical profession, replacing the previous much less efficacious treatment with mercury.

Its history is reflected in a number of archival collections in the Wellcome Library: the Paul Ehrlich transcripts include his work on arsphenamine, case-notes among the papers of Surgeon-General Knapp, RN (GC/85) show the early use of salvarsan trreatment in the Royal Navy, while Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s index cards of autopsies include some early deaths from toxic side-effects while dosage levels were still being worked out. These are also documented (with other material on Salvarsan) in the papers of Frederick Parkes Weber.

At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 the supply of Salvarsan (and the later developed Neosalvarsan) was cut off since they were produced in Germany. Substitutes – Kharsivan and Neokharsivan - were developed and manufactured by Burroughs Wellcome and Co Ltd. Further information can be found in the company records.

Contemporaneously, the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases (1913-1916) was hearing evidence on the best and most effective ways to bring this radical new treatment and sufferers together. Its reports and minutes of evidence are held in the Library.

Other items of relevance in the Wellcome Library, besides numerous printed works, include the 1974 BBC educational film The Search for the Magic Bullet as well as the famous Hollywood movie, starring Edward G Robinson (better known his gangster roles) as Ehrlich, Dr Ehrlich’s Magic Bullet (1940).

Although it was replaced in the 1940s by penicillin, a treatment which took much less time and had far fewer dangerous side-effects, Salvarsan and its clones played a major role in the reduction of syphilitic infection in the UK between the two world wars.

Spilsbury Case Reports in The Times

Our recently catalogued case reports of Sir Bernard Spilsbury, received further promotion through a recent article in The Times.

Ben Macintyre writes:

“The archive offers a unique insight into the British way of death in an earlier age, but it also casts fresh light on the rise and fall of a scientist whose gruesome expertise solved some of the most famous crimes in British history”

Read the rest of the article here.

Sir Bernard Spilsbury case reports now available

Archives and Manuscripts, Wellcome Library, are delighted to announce that the Sir Bernard Spilsbury material purchased at Sothebys earlier this year has now been catalogued and is available to researchers subject to the usual conditions of access to archival and manuscript material. The catalogue can be viewed via the online database: detailed descriptions can be found by clicking on the collection reference and the individual item numbers.

The collection consists of notes on index cards of 3658 pathological investigations performed by Sir Bernard Spilsbury, 1905-1933. They do NOT include many of his most famous cases as witness for the Crown in cases of murder or manslaughter (the cards relating to several of these are now held at the Galleries of Justice, Nottingham). They do, however, include a significant number of cases in which death was the result of a criminal action: besides several instances of murder and manslaughter, Spilsbury reported on numerous cases of illegal abortion and suspicious infant death, and investigated many cases of suicide (at that period a crime). However, the majority deal with sudden or unexpected deaths through natural causes or accidents. Spilsbury also performed a number of autopsies on the victims of judicial execution.

The collection is of much wider interest than merely forensic medicine. For example, Spilsbury examined a significant number of deaths from work accidents or occupational diseases, including the TNT poisoning of munitions workers during the First World War. There are instances of deaths from medical accidents, or hastened (in Spilsbury’s view) by the patient’s resort to alternative therapies.

These cards form a rich resource for the social, as well as the medical, historian. Queries should be addressed to archs+mss@wellcome.ac.uk