May item of the month: English manual of practical chiromancy or palmistry, 1648

Ever wished you had the ability to accurately judge a person’s character from their appearance? Perhaps you want to know when your baby will be born? Or what message your new beard is giving to strangers? Well, you’re in luck. The Wellcome Library Archives and Manuscripts department have just the thing for you!

MS.8727 is a newly catalogued manual of practical chiromancy or palmistry, dating from 1648. The manuscript also includes sections on physiognomy and metoscopy, or the reading of lines on the forehead.

Using this manual, we learn that long, white fingernails are found on sickly, feverish people, whilst those with short, crooked nails are proud people who “delight in superfluity.” People with white or grey hair are slippery with “evill manners.” Narrow eyebrows of pale gold which consist only of short hairs demonstrate that a person is “one of good nature, apt to everything, fearful, but given to revenge.”

Even a person’s facial hair can be used to judge their personality. The man in the picture above, with his handsome beard, is apparently “melancholique. Also ingenious, sincere, cordiall, constant, resolute and valiant.” The manual suggests he would make a good soldier. However, if you are unable to grow such an impressive beard, remember that a lack of facial hair will lead people to believe you have “an evill nature."



Expectant parents are given very specific advice on how to calculate exactly when a baby will be born by reading their own palms. For example: “if that line ends in the plaine of Mars it is borne in March or October upon a Tuesday; if the crosses or lines go towards Mercury and end there, they are borne in May or August Wednesday.”

Palmistry can also be used to amaze your friends by correctly guessing a stranger’s birth date: “if that line end toward the hill of Luna and it have a crosse, sure he or she was borne on 10th June on Monday.”

If you are interested in finding out more about the subject of face reading, the Wellcome Library Insights session on Fascinating Faces is next being held on Thursday 16 June at 3 O'Clock. More information about this and other events can be found on the Wellcome Collection website.

Bank Holiday Weekend Closures

There will be a number of changes to our opening hours coming up, due to the combination of Easter, the Royal Wedding and two Bank Holiday Weekends in May.

Details of our opening hours and the closures can, as ever, be found on the Library website

Wellcome Collection opening hours will also be altered slightly over the holidays. If you're planning to pop in to see the latest exhibition Dirt: The filthy reality of everyday life, make sure you check the opening hours over the holiday weekends.

Image: The British Museum: the Zoological Gallery, crowded with holiday visitors. Wood engraving, 1845 (Wellcome Library no. 38466i)

Last chance to see: 'High Society'

Wellcome Collection's current temporary exhibition, High Society, closes this Sunday (27th February), meaning there's not much time left to sample its stimulating wares.

High Society draws upon a range of intoxicating material from the Wellcome Library - a small sample though, of our extensive holdings relating to mind-altering substances in all their shapes and sizes.

So, if the closure of the exhibition leaves you seeking more mental stimulation, a trip to the Wellcome Library may well be in order...

Image: Two wealthy Chinese opium smokers. Gouache painting on rice-paper, 19th century (Wellcome Library no. 25052i)

Wellcome Library Insight - Addicts and Apothecaries

To accompany Wellcome Collection's High Society exhibition, this week's free Wellcome Library Insight session - on Thursday 24th February - highlights some of the dealers and dopers, addicts and apothecaries, who reside in our collections. Discover too, how our understanding and uses of drugs have altered from antiquity to the present.

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.

This Thursday's session starts at 3.00pm, and tickets are available from the Wellcome Collection Information Desk from 1.30pm onwards. The event will also be British Sign Language (BSL) interpreted. For more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Image: An absinthe addict eyeing three glasses on a table; advertisement for film "Absinthe". Colour lithograph, ca. 1913 (Wellcome Library no. 638681i).

The Wellcome Library – A Picture Researcher’s Point of View

One of our Historical Picture Researchers, Rachael Johnson, is leaving the Wellcome Library for pastures new. Before she departs, she's offered us an insight into a typical day in Wellcome Images...

Wellcome Images researchers currently supply around 3,000 digital images every month to a wide client base, from academic scholars and lecturers to newspapers, book publishers, television and even design companies. No two days at Wellcome Images are ever the same, but here are some of the things we find ourselves researching.

I’m at my desk (with a cup of tea) by 9.30am and can begin by going through the email enquiries. On an average day, most are from academics requesting permission to use Wellcome Images pictures as part of their journal article, monograph or scholarly publication. I ascertain whether these clients are requesting contemporary biomedical material (which we hold as part of our contributor collections), or historical images, photographed in-house from items held in the Wellcome Library.

As well as the academic orders, we also receive numerous email requests from commercial companies, wanting to publish or broadcast our pictures. Although we are happy for academic clients to use many of our images free of charge, we do charge reproduction fees to commercial clients. A recent example is our collaboration with a Japanese TV company, who want to broadcast three of our images showing Jenner and his first vaccination. It’s enjoyable working with broadcasting companies, as we often get to see our images ‘in action’ in popular programmes including the BBC's Who Do You Think You Are?, The Great British Bake-Off and Victorian Pharmacy. We have recently been approached by two production teams working on upcoming feature films, wanting to use some of our images as set dressing: unfortunately the titles of both films are still a closely guarded secret, but do watch this space for more information once they hit the cinemas. One of the most unusual recent uses of our pictures was as part of the Grolsch beer website, illustrating a timeline of historical (non-beer related) events.

We always ask clients using our images in publications to send us a copy: we have recently featured on the cover of the Annals of Royal College of Surgeons, as well as History Today magazine.

We receive a steady stream of picture requests via the Wellcome Trust Press Office. As Wellcome Images hold pictures of all of the gallery exhibits in Wellcome Collection, we are frequently asked for images by publications such as What’s On and Time Out, so that they can entice their readers into our exhibitions with interesting pictures (including the image below, recently used in our recent Skin exhibition).
We receive a daily trolley delivery of items and requests from readers within the Wellcome Library. As we have an in-house studio and photographer, we can accommodate most requests for new photography, from miniature portraits to manuscripts and rare books. The most unusual item that I have ever asked to be photographed was an oil painting of the First World War, measuring almost 4 ½ metres square, which had to be photographed from above as it lay on the floor. As soon as any new photography has been completed, we catalogue the pictures and add them to our Wellcome Images website.

Although most of our clients have already seen the pictures they would like to order, we do also receive many speculative requests, where clients contact us in the hope that we can find them something rare, unusual or (in some cases) even impossible. I try to save these more involved requests for the afternoon, after I’ve been fortified with an excellent Wellcome Trust lunch.

A recent request came through for a selection of pictures showing the history of childbirth, for a publishing client. This involved searching through illustrations of birthing instruments, such as forceps, midwifery through the ages, foetal development and of course, labour itself. By the end of the day I have successfully found 53 great images for my birthing client and another 20 for a television documentary on the Plague.



The day normally ends at about 5.30pm, (unless I receive a telephone call from one of the national newspapers, who always seem to phone with an urgent request at 5.29) and I can head home, wondering what I’ll be searching for tomorrow.

Images:
1/'Wound Man', MS. 290
2/ Front cover of History Today (featuring image of William Price of Llantrisant (1800-1893) MRCS, LSA, medical practitioner, in druidic costume, with goats, Wellcome Library no. 45771i), May 2009.
3/ Rubber beauty masks, worn to remove wrinkles and blemishes (Wellcome Library no. 565924i)
4/ A birth-scene. Oil painting by a French (?) painter, Åbo, Sweden (later Turku, Finland), 1800 (Wellcome Library no. 4469i).

Author: Rachael Johnson

Hands

This Friday (26th November) sees an all-building evening event in Wellcome Collection: Hands. Through a series of activities, talks and installations, the event will focus on the myriad ways our hands can sense, communicate and create.

Hands will be examining items from the Wellcome Library's collections from a number of different angles. Activities in the Library Reading Room will focus on handwriting: a selection of handwritten letters from our archives and manuscripts will be on display, along with an analysis of each by graphologist David Bennett, who will also be on hand (no pun intended) during the evening to analyse visitors' handwriting.

There will also be an opportunity to try Arabic calligraphy with Soraya Syed, and European calligraphy with Patricia Lovett. Visitors will also be able to find more about the art of palaeography with Professor Michelle Brown from the School of Advanced Studies, University of London.

Meanwhile, the evening also sees the launch of a new temporary exhibition at Wellcome Collection, featuring pictures exclusively from Wellcome Images.

This exhibition, in the Lightbox on the first floor of Wellcome Collection, features seven themes exploring hands throughout history, each offering a different perspective on how hands are linked with identity, communication and medicine. These are illustrated with images from the Wellcome Library’s collections, traversing a wide range of materials, including books, manuscripts, oil paintings and letters.

Highlights of the exhibition include the story of Valentine Greatrakes (shown above), an Irish faith-healer who claimed to cure scrofula or ‘the kings evil’ just by laying his hands on the patient. There is also a section on palmistry and what the lines on your hands might foretell, and a section on graphology, examining the handwriting of Lord Nelson, David Livingstone and Anthony van Leeuwenhoek.

The Hands event takes place this Friday eveing at Wellcome Collection. The 'Hands' Lightbox exhibition will run from 26th November 2010 until mid-February 2011.

Authors: Eleanor Lanyon and Rachael Johnson

Image: Valentine Greatrakes. Oil painting. (Wellcome Library no. 45644i)

Photography awards for Dave Sayer and Ben Gilbert

The Wellcome Library’s photographer, Dave Sayer, has won a Gold award at the Institute of Medical Illustrators (IMI) annual awards, for his photograph of George Nuku at Wellcome Collection’s Skin exhibition.

Dave captured George, an artist, with the Maori display case he created for the exhibition. The case is a representation of Rarohenga, the underworld and realm of the spirits in Māori mythology. Rarohenga is home to Niwareka, who, with her husband Mataora, is depicted on the sides of the case.

With this photograph, Dave has illustrated the creative process involved in the design and sculpting of one of Skin’s many exhibits. The portrait relates George, with his work and his ancestral facial tattoos, to the display of Maori imagery in the exhibition. The judges at IMI gave Dave a Gold award in recognition of his exceptional use of technique, understanding and interpretation of George and his work.

Another of our photographers, Ben Gilbert, was presented with a Bronze award for his striking photograph of a 19th century wax embryo, in recognition of his excellent application of technique. The wax model was created under the direction of anatomist Alexander Ecker and used as a teaching aid around 1850. Dave was also given a Bronze award for this chilling photograph of an engorged female sand fly, the vector for visceral leishmaniasis - a potentially fatal tropical disease.

The range of these images show the breadth of the work undertaken by the Wellcome Library’s photographers. Congratulations to them both.

Author: Louise Crane

Last Chance to See: 'Skin'

This weekend offers your last chance to see 'Skin', Wellcome Collection's current temporary exhibition.

The exhibition draws strongly upon a wide range of material from the Wellcome Library: manuscripts, books, paintings and advertising material. A small sample then, of the Library's enormous holdings on this theme.

If a visit to the exhibition inspires you to seek out more on the topics covered in the exhibition, we may be able to help...

Image: Male écorché figure, of whom only the right side of his body has been flayed. Engraving by G. Bonasone, 16th century (Wellcome Library no. 99i)

Talking Nutrition

As previewed on this Blog, ‘Nutrition and History in the Twentieth Century’ was held last week (15 September) at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). This one-day conference, organised by the School’s Centre for History in Public Health and their Archives department, was a great success, attended by over 50 people.

The LSHTM’s nutrition collections were recently catalogued through a grant from the Wellcome Trust. Browse their online catalogue here.

The archive collections of the LSHTM and the Wellcome Library both complement and overlap in many areas, particularly in the field of nutrition. This was illustrated in conference talks by the archive departments of both organisations which focused on the history of nutritional science, diseases of malnutrition, nutrition and war time and nutrition propaganda during the twentieth century.

This first session was followed by recollections and analysis by former staff and students of the School. Their experiences of working at the institution over the last few decades were recorded for the archive’s oral history collection. The two afternoon sessions were devoted to a variety of papers on historical aspects of nutrition, including a summary of UK food policy since the 1970s presented and discussed by Professor Tim Lang of City University.

Amongst some of the collections highlighted in the paper on ‘Nutrition Archives in the Wellcome Library’ were those of Harriette Chick, Edward Mellanby, Robert McCance and Elsie Widdowson, Robert McCarrison, Surgeon Captain ‘Peter’ T L Cleave, Cicely Williams, Frederick Le Gros Clark, the Society of Medical Officers of Health, the British Medical Association and Francis Avery Jones. Details of these and our other archive collections on nutrition can be browsed via our Sources Guide on Nutrition or through the links to our online Archives and Manuscripts catalogue given above.

The papers of the London Food Commission (LFC), founded by Tim Lang, were also discussed. This collection is held by the Wellcome Library and cataloguing is due to commence in October 2010, with the papers becoming available to researchers before Summer 2011. The LFC archive will undoubtedly provide valuable insights into food issues and policy in the 1980s and 1990s, including food labelling, safety, composition and standards, and the school meals campaigns.

As one of the Wellcome Trust’s five research challenges, ‘Connecting environment, nutrition and health’, nutrition is a hot topic on Wellcome Library’s outreach menu. Early in 2011 a new Insights session will be held, focusing on various aspects of the Library’s diverse and vivid primary and secondary source collections on food, diet, nourishment and health. Keep an eye on the Wellcome Collection website - and the Wellcome Library Blog - for details of this session.

A taster of the wealth of our resources can be instantly experienced by searching the Wellcome Images website. Amongst its holdings are a wide range of historical and contemporary images on nutritional matters, such as those which have illustrated this post.

Images:
1/ Health and Beauty in Wartime (Ministry of Food leaflet) (GC/198/B/2/1)
2/ Page from from McCance and Widdowson’s Food Analysis research notebooks (GC/97/A/7)
3/ Community health worker in rural Jamaica showing a mother a leaflet promoting good nutrition

Author: Amanda Engineer

Exploring Wellcome Collection: A Social History of Madness in Europe

What did it mean to suffer mental health problems in the past? How was madness understood and how were patients treated? Drawing on the rich holdings both in the Library and Wellcome Collection, this short course looks at the history of madness in Europe.

Operated in conjunction with our colleagues at Birkbeck College, the course will focus on different ways of classifying and treating insanity, as well as looking at the difference that gender and class made to treatment and diagnosis.

Topics explored include madness in medieval and early modern Europe; 'moral treatment' in the eighteenth century; the asylum age; hysteria and neurasthenia, degeneration and mental deficiency. This module also includes a special case study on alcoholism and madness.

More details can be found on the Birkbeck website.