Thalidomide 50 Years On

The archive of the Thalidomide Society (SA/TSY) and the papers of Professor Richard Smithells (PP/SML) have been catalogued and are now available to researchers at the Wellcome Library. Thalidomide was developed by the pharmaceutical company Grünenthal in Germany in 1957, and was used as a painkiller and tranquillizer. It was also effective in treating morning sickness during pregnancy, and many scientists believed that this drug would not harm the developing baby. However this was found not to be the case, and over 10,000 children in 46 countries were born with deformities such as phocomelia. The drug was licenced in Britain in 1958, marketed as Distaval, and was withdrawn in late 1961. Between 1959 and 1962 approximately 2,000 babies were born with deformities due to the drug, and only 466 survived. 2012 is a landmark year concerning thalidomide: it is just over 50 years since withdrawal of the drug Distaval and is the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Thalidomide Society.

The Thalidomide Society (originally called the Society for the Aid of Thalidomide Children) was formed by a meeting of four parents in August 1962, at the Dolphin Hotel in Southampton. Their aim was to set up a national society devoted to the aid of their own and other children affected by the drug thalidomide. The inaugural meeting took place on 20th October 1962, with forty-four parents attending. A draft constitution was created (SA/TSY/A/1) which states that the Society would not only include children affected by thalidomide but those with similar disabilities. Branches of the Thalidomide Society were set up, due to the wide geographic range of the parents. They would meet regularly and operated with local organisations that could help the families.

The Society worked closely with the Lady Hoare Thalidomide Appeal until 1974, to raise money to help the families affected, and increase awareness of their cause, this was helped by several national newspapers (see extensive press coverage represented in SA/TSY/G). There were a variety of fundraising schemes, general donations and offers of help (SA/TSY/C/1) and car competitions (SA/TSY/C/3). The money raised from these was used to support thalidomide families with social workers, research into new technologies (such as prosthetic arms and wheelchairs), a holiday home, and went towards the Oxford Centre for Enablement and the Chailey Heritage Craft School and Hospital. The Society is now a user led organisation; the majority of the council is made up of thalidomide affected people. The archive of the Thalidomide Society contains documents on its creation, (SA/TSY/A/1), fundraising schemes (SA/TSY/C), publications (SA/TSY/D), and of their recent events such as the annual AGM and conferences (SA/TSY/A/3).

Distillers (the company that distributed thalidomide: it is now owned by Diageo Ltd) and the parents of the children affected by thalidomide finally reached a settlement in 1973, after years of negotiations. From this the Thalidomide Children’s Trust (now the Thalidomide Trust) was set up to distribute the payments fairly amongst those affected. Professor Richard Smithells, a renowned consultant paediatrician, worked closely in these negotiations and provided medical testimony. Smithells became involved with thalidomide as a clinician on the Liverpool Registry of Congenital Abnormalities that was formed in 1960, where he began studying the links between prescription drug use during pregnancy and birth defects. Along with several other physicians he discovered the teratogenicity of thalidomide in 1961, and subsequently became a leading expert on thalidomide diagnostics. Much of his work concerning thalidomide and congenital malformations is reflected in the new catalogue PP/SML. These papers include a copy of a book for children he created for the NSPCC, Alphabet Zoop (PP/SML/A/3), correspondence and reports working with the Thalidomide Trust (PP/SML/C) and various textual resources he collected over the years regarding the drug (PP/SML/E). He became the Chair of Paediatrics and Child Health at the University of Leeds in 1968, and he served on the Thalidomide Trust advisory council from 1974, then as a trustee from December 1976.

The collections of the Thalidomide Society and Professor Smithells are part of the Wellcome Library’s Archives and Manuscripts collection. The catalogue can be searched on our online catalogue using the references SA/TSY and PP/SML respectively. Please note that due to the subject and nature of the material a significant proportion of the documents in these two collections have been closed for various fixed periods, for data sensitivity reasons.

Author: Morwenna Roche

Remembering and Honouring the Children of War

In St Paul's Cathedral below the dome is this art installation created by Ted Harrison to draw attention and remember children who have been conscripted and fought in adult wars.
At ground level the work appears as a white disc onto which poppies appear to have been scattered at random. From above the poppies form an image of three armed children. A boy from the first world war, a boy from recent conflicts in Africa and a girl from Asia.

Although Britain no longer sends anyone under the age of 18 to war many other countries do. An estimated 250,000 children worldwide are currently under military orders. Some as young as 9 years old. One third are girls.

As the new school year begins…

One might suppose that interest in child study must have been a twentieth century development, probably arising between the wars with the development of psychology as a discipline. In fact, a number of child study organisations, whose records are now among the archives of the British Psychological Society in the Wellcome Library, were set up during the 1890s arising out of concerns evoked in the wake of the introduction of universal free elementary education.

This spread of education to all children had revealed that many were ‘incapable of benefiting by the ordinary education’ and thus remained ‘practically untrained’ within a system designed for ‘average or normal children’. There was need of an investigation to establish the dimensions of the problem and propose actions. This led to the establishment of a Childhood Society for the Scientific Study of the Mental and Physical Conditions of Children, with the aim of promoting the study of educational methods and the school environment best suited to mental and physical development, both of the normal and ‘those whose conditions are abnormal, or who are feebly gifted mentally’.



They were not the only organisation interested in developing a systematic approach to the study of children and childhood. In 1894 a British Child-Study Association was established, by teachers, rather than doctors, a federation of a number of small local societies with similar aims:

[T]o interest parents, teachers and others in the systematic observation of children and young people, with a view to gaining greater insight into child-nature and securing more sympathetic and scientific methods of training the young

It may be noted that this body was more interested in the ‘normal’ child, rather than exercised about the ‘feeble-minded’ or otherwise disabled, and was primarily concerned about the implications for education of their findings, although a number of doctors joined the Association. By 1901 it had 8 branches, and was producing a journal, The Paidologist.



The degree of common interest between these two bodies led to their amalgamation in 1907 to form the Child Study Society, later Association. Their records reflect the fascinating intersection of educational and medical concerns about children at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain, a time of considerable anxiety about national fitness. They also reflect the development of child psychology: in 1948 the Child Study Society transferred its membership and its assets to the British Psychological Society Education Section.



Further collections on issues of health and welfare of children and adolescents in Archives and Manuscripts are the subject of a thematic sources guide: many of these bear on education and the school environment. A number of collections also deal with infant and child observation from a psychoanalytic perspective.

Parking Space

No sign of the rider but I felt certain she would be wearing a pink dress.

Dream a little dream…

In May 1940, Birmingham schoolteacher and army reservist, Kenneth Davies Hopkins, was captured by the Nazis in France, and sent to a succession of Prisoner of War camps in Germany. Whilst interned he had the idea of recording the dreams of his fellow POWs in order to later analyse them. His interest in psychology had been awakened in the 1930s when his MA Education dissertation had been supervised by C. W. Valentine, who, like Hopkins, was interested in the psychology of dreams

Over the next two years, Hopkins meticulously kept records of the dreams reported to him, using only a pencil and the rough paper he had available to him in the camps. This provides an exceptional record. As Valentine said to Hopkins in a letter dated 8th November 1940 "it would be a unique contribution, as far as I know, to have reports on dreams of prisoners of war while entirely separate from their normal environment", before going on to suggest that Hopkins look out for "wish-fullfilment dreams, fear dreams based upon war experiences, regression to childish memories, and symbolism in dreams" (PSY/VAL/4/6).

If it wasn’t for this letter, we would never have known of this important resource. In 1945, Major Hopkins’ dream research notebooks were found abandoned in a liberated camp. The letter to Valentine was with them, so the camp liberators forwarded the books to him in the hopes that he could reunite Hopkins with his notes. Unfortunately, Kenneth Hopkins had developed bronchial asthma and emphysema in 1942 whilst interned near Hildburghausen in central Germany, and had died there.

The notebooks remained in the possession of Professor Valentine until they were donated to St. Martin’s College Library, Lancaster, who deposited them on permanent loan with the British Psychological Society. In September 2008, Valentine’s papers were deposited with the Wellcome Library, along with other collections from the British Psychological Society History Centre.

In addition to the Hopkins material, the C. W Valentine archive held by the Wellcome Library includes notebooks created Valentine during observational studies of the infant psyche, drafts of his works Psychology and its Bearing on Education and The Psychology of Early Childhood, both of which are held by the Wellcome Library, along with notes from his university days.

Picture credit: The dream of a patient in Jungian analysis: left, a rocky wall; right a swirling wave; at the end, six people. Drawing by M.A.C.T., January 1971. Iconographic Collections, 658096i

Who wants to go into the Edible Gingerbread House?

Roof tiles made of chocolate, a cupcake garden, the chimney is popcorn, a marshmallow pond. Who wants to go into the gingerbread house? ME.
Lily Vanilli will show you how to make and decorate your own gingerbread house. Storytelling, singing and dancing.


What fun if you're a kid. The gingerbread house was installed at the Brunswick centre in Bloomsbury over the weekend. All to raise awareness and funds for the Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity.

Archives and manuscripts cataloguing, May 2011

May was, for the most part, a month of steady progress in the Archives and Manuscripts department, with several collections in train but the majority carrying on into June rather than being completed within the month. Nearly 400 records were added to the online database before the month's end. The majority remain invisible for the moment, awaiting the completion of the projects to which they belong, but May did see the release of several noteworthy sets of papers, now available for study in the Wellcome Library.

Our long-running project to repackage and make available material deposited here by the British Psychological Society passed another milestone, with the papers of Charles Wilfred Valentine (1879-1964) (PSY/VAL) being made visible in the database. Valentine was a specialist in educational psychology (and a life-long friend and colleague of Cyril Burt) and many of the papers relate to child development. In some tests, for example, he tracked the reactions of infants from birth to the age of three, monitoring such things as whether the sound of a ticking watch obtruded on their attention enough for them to stop feeding and whether this changed over time. He also wrote on the psychology of aesthetics, and on dreams. One particularly interesting section of the collection comprises notes kept by his one-time research student, Kenneth Davies Hopkins (d.1942). Hopkins, a Birmingham teacher, studied for an MA in Education under Valentine's supervision in the 1930s. A Territorial Army officer, he served in the Second World War and was captured in northern France in 1940. Whilst interned as a Prisoner of War, he embarked on a project to record his dreams and those of his fellow PoWs, with Valentine's encouragement. (Prisoners of war, with all too much time on their hands, undertook many scientific projects during the Second World War: much pioneering work on bird behaviour, for instance, dates from this time.) Sadly, Hopkins died of a lung condition in a PoW camp in 1942; his notebooks were found when the Allies took control of the vacated camp in 1945, and sent to Valentine. The Library is pleased to make them available now, as a small tribute to Major Hopkins' determination to continue scientific work under the most unpromising of circumstances.

War is a leitmotiv of this month's new material: another major tranche of papers relates to the Strangeways Research Laboratory's work during the Second World War. The papers form part of the existing SA/SRL collection of papers from the laboratory (SA/SRL), described as a new section M. The Laboratory spent the war researching substances that might be used in chemical warfare, and agents that might counteract them, in collaboration with the War Ministry's Porton Down Laboratory. An earlier blog post has described these papers in some detail.

On a lighter note, MS.8767 takes us travelling in nineteenth-century Italy. It comprises an account of a journey undertaken in 1855 by C.J.W. Bosanquet, whose identity remains unknown. Starting in Milan, Bosanquet takes us eastwards to Como and the Lakes, then into Switzerland and via Geneva to Lyon; he records sights seen, the weather, his experiences with officials when crossing borders, and religious reflections inspired by all of these. Drinkers of bottled water may be a little unsettled by his note that "We slept at a dirty little place called Evian." We can only applaud his taste, however, in how he opens the journal: its first words are "There are some very curious manuscripts in the Library." There are indeed; and several more are now available to be seen in the reading room.

Image: the travel journal of C.J.W. Bosanquet, 1855, showing geological formations near Geneva (MS.8767).

If Walls Could Talk

Last week, Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist, Wellcome Library, appeared in an episode of BBC4's new history series, If Walls Could Talk: The History of the Home.

In the series, presenter Dr Lucy Worsley uncovers the history of familiar domestic spaces. In the most recent episode, devoted to the bedroom, Dr Hall discussed that space as the site for childbirth, pre-nineteenth century.

To illustrate this, Drs Hall and Worsley toured Wellcome Collection, taking in the birthing chair in the Medicine Man gallery and the Wellcome Library's copy of Jane Sharp's Compleat Midwife's Companion (1724).

If Walls Could Talk is currently available to watch for viewers in the UK through the BBC iPlayer.

Image: Frontispiece of the Compleat Midwife's Companion, including a scene of a woman who has recently given birth, being attended to by midwives.

Unflowering fuchsia: the date of "No walk today"

"No walk today" by Sophie Anderson is a classic of Victorian genre painting, but it has not always been appreciated. The painting's last owner paid only 14 guineas for it after it had failed to reach its reserve of 15 guineas at auction. That auction was held about 1926 in the London rooms of Robinson, Fisher & Harding (a firm much frequented by Henry S. Wellcome), and the buyer was the Foreign Office official David (later Sir David) Montagu Douglas Scott (1887-1986).

As a lover of both Victorian art and gardening, Sir David particularly admired the precision with which the painter had indicated the time of year (July) through the flowers—jasmine in bloom, fuchsia not yet in bloom. After Sir David died at the age of 99, his pictures passed to his widow, and after her death they were sold by Sotheby's to benefit the Finnis Scott Foundation. Sotheby's sale on 19 November 2008 was accompanied by a huge and scholarly catalogue enlivened with photographs of the Scotts' home showing the paintings hanging in corridors, kitchens and sitting rooms, with perceptive hand-written labels stuck to the walls.

"No walk today" is reproduced in standard works on Victorian art and has been lent to several exhibitions, including the Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition in Washington, DC, in 1985. Its subject is the disappointment of a little girl dressed up for a walk which has been cancelled because of rain. Through the window dripping with raindrops we can see that her costume includes some of the very worst materials to wear in wet weather: velvet, ostrich feathers, silk and lace. If her family had the money to dress her up like that, couldn't they have afforded to give her an umbrella or a waterproof coat? The latter rather depends on the date. It was one thing to have the idea of mixing rubber with cloth, as Charles Macintosh did; it was quite another to turn the results into something pleasant to wear, and the technology of waterproof clothing was gradually adapted to the aesthetics of costume throughout the century. But even a macintosh could not protect against cold and wet miasmas which might engender, especially in children, a fever leading to lethal pneumonia.

In any case, what exactly is the date of "No walk today"? It bears no date, but the back is inscribed with the artist's address, 21 Merton Road, Kensington. Sotheby's say "The picture was presumably painted in the late 1850s as Anderson had moved to Lincoln's Inn Fields by 1863. The work's early history is not known."

There is in fact an early document for "No walk today", which suggests a date for its creation.
The Wellcome Library has a print of the painting, lettered with the title "No walk today" and the credit line:
Photographed by Lebbeus Colls from a painting by Mrs Anderson. Engraved on copper by voltaic electricity & printed in the ordinary manner. Published March 1857 by the Photo-Galvano-Graphic Comp.y .

There is also a series statement: Photographic art treasures
(To read the original lettering, please click on the image.)

What does all this mean? It means that this is one of a small number of prints made in London by "a very delicate and complicated process … ambitiously far ahead of its time", patented in 1854 and called photogalvanography by its Austrian inventor, Paul Pretsch [1]. Pretsch, who came to London in 1851 to see the Great Exhibition, was one in a long line of people who wrestled with the problem of turning a tonal image such as a watercolour or photograph into something that the printing press could print [2]. In his process, the image was projected from a negative on to gelatin, and thence replicated on a copper plate by a process using electrolysis (described in the print as "voltaic electricity"). The small number of prints using this process presumably follows from the difficulty of making the plate. Pretsch started the "Photographic art treasures" in December 1856. If this "photogalvanograph" was published in March 1857, and the painting was started at the season identified by Sir David from the unflowering fuchsia, the painting must have been painted between July 1856 and March 1857.

The photographer is named as Lebbeus Colls. He was a London art dealer already in business in New Bond Street by 1852, and was also an early photographer. In both activities he was sometimes associated with his brother, the painter Richard Colls, one of many people sued by Henry Fox Talbot over photographic patents. It is striking that within a year of its production Sophie Anderson's painting was already being described as an "art treasure". Present day opinion agrees, for in 2008 "No walk today" fetched the highest price in the David Scott sale: £1,038,050 (including the buyer's premium). Even after the lapse of 82 years, that must be a good return on a painting bought for 14 guineas.

[1] Bamber Gascoigne, How to identify prints, London 1986, chapter 36

[2] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotogalvanografie