'Monkeyana' and the book that never was

As we come to the close of the year, 2011 saw not one but two films concerned with attitudes to our ancestors - Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Project Nim. Fiction, as well as legislation, has a long history of interest in interspecies relations and the Library contains some classic examples, including The Island of Dr Moreau and Tarzan. Many of these works show the influence of Charles Darwin's notion of evolution and importantly its antithesis - devolution or degeneration.

If humans had developed from apes could some of us occasionally revert to our primitive former selves? This theme lies behind such titles as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (see previous post) and The Time Machine. More recently, films of the 20th century continued to refer to the idea of reverting to a more bestial type (atavism), including Cat People which I have to confess, is one of my favourite movies. The original, by Jacques Tourneur, features a quote in its opening sequence from 'The Anatomy of Atavism' by Dr L. Judd:

Even as fog continues to lie in the valleys, so does ancient sin cling to the low places, the depressions in the world consciousness.

Alas, any search for this intriguing tome will prove fruitless as it, like Dr Judd, the psychiatrist in the film, never existed. Judd, played by Tom Conway lives on in film history because with his pipe, cigarettes and urbane charm he is a great example of early filmic portrayals of this profession. Here are two film clips: one from Cat People in which Judd archly smokes at a wedding party, and this trailer for the sequel Curse of the Cat People which has a Christmas theme (albeit one with threats of infanticide).

Film fans may appreciate our new e-book Icons of Grief (available to registered readers) which examines the work of Val Lewton, writer of both Cat People and the equally wonderful 'I Walked with a Zombie' (a re-working of Jane Eyre set on a tropical island). Lewton was a Russian emigree and the nephew of Hollywood star Alla Nazimova who allegedly coined the term 'sewing circle' to describe the clandestine affairs of tinsel town's bisexual and lesbian actresses.


For books that do exist concerning current legislation readers can see Marie Fox's chapter 'Legislating Interspecies Embryos' inside our new acquisition The Legal, Medical and Cultural Regulation of the Body. Fox highlights how tricky it is coining the right term to express what many consider a contestable area of research: mixing the cells or gametes of human and non-human animals. Terms like 'chimera' and 'hybrid' are often used by journalists and authors as they sound more dramatic.

Illustrations: Fantasy - human-fish hybrid. Fantasy artwork of swimming chimeras with fish heads with human legs. Credit: Diane Harris, 2002 Wellcome Images B0004399
'Monkeyana' satirical cartoon from Punch, 18 May 1861, p.206 Wellcome Images L0031419
A group of cats dressed as gentry dining in a restaurant. Watercolour. Wellcome Images V0021521

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.

Our identity at our fingertips?

Here’s a challenge to mark the opening of the new Wellcome Collection exhibition Identity: Eight rooms, nine lives.

What can you deduce from these handprints about the identities of their authors?



If you need to brush up your palm-reading skills, try dipping into the archive of Dr Charlotte Wolff, a German psychotherapist and sexologist who in the 1930s embarked on a mission to place chirology (the study of hands) on a firm scientific basis.

Wolff was born in 1897 in West Prussia and for a while practised medicine in Berlin, but as a Jewish lesbian with a rebellious streak she was destined for Nazi harassment and had to flee Germany in 1933. She initially earned her living in France and England by reading hands (her 1936 book Studies in Hand Reading reads like a celebrity A-list), but in 1937 became a permanent resident of England and practised as a psychotherapist in various psychiatric institutions.

Here she developed her own theories of psychological diagnosis based on the features of the hand. By conducting comparative researches into hands of 'normal' and ‘mentally defective’ children and adults, she came to believe that the hand is the most reliable means of gauging temperament, character and intelligence - in other words, that our hands can be decoded as the ‘DNA’ of our mental states.

The language used in Wolff’s research is shocking nowadays - The Hand in Psychological Diagnosis (1951) routinely describes her subjects as ‘feeble-minded’, ‘high / low grade imbeciles’ and ‘idiots’. The arrangement of her personal archive also produces some uncomfortable juxtapositions. Her 1938-1940 series of handprints, for example, is grouped into Boxers, Chimpanzees, Children with Down’s Syndrome, and Primates.

We have to remind ourselves that Wolff was using the formal terminology of her times, and that her research into identifying the ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ reflected widespread contemporary concerns about mental degeneracy, and increasing attempts by the state to care for and control children with mental impairments.

But Wolff’s classifications worry us today because they are so suggestive of the ways in which Charles Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection became horribly tangled up with social policy over the course of the 20th century. One can’t help wondering how many individuals were consigned to psychiatric interventions on the basis of her theories.

And the identities of the three handprints above?

· Top left: The writer Aldous Huxley, 1936

· Top right: Andrew, a 19 month old chimp from London Zoo, 1938

· Bottom: E- B-, a ‘mentally defective’ 11 year old boy (described by Wolff as ‘a little animal, coming from a very degenerated and …primitive family’), 1930s