Guest Post: Wellcome Film added to the Medical Heritage Library

A collaboration among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, the Medical Heritage Library (MHL) promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Our goal is to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live.

The MHL is therefore delighted to announce the Wellcome Library as a new content contributor, with the news that Wellcome Film has been added to the MHL’s online content.

An online digital collection of moving images from the collections of the Wellcome Library, Wellcome Film chronicles the history of medicine over the last hundred years and has been freely available in Internet Archive since 2010. The content of Wellcome Film includes rare footage of Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) filmed at the archaeological digs he funded in the Sudan in 1910s, alongside films exploring the development of medicine in the twentieth century, including specific surgical techniques and drug treatments.

As a content provider, the Wellcome Library becomes the latest historical institution to make its collections available through the MHL. The MHL was established in 2010, with funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation via the Open Knowledge Commons, to digitize 30,000 rare medical books. Now, over two years later, nearly 40,000 books, videos, and audio recordings are freely available online, with content provided from many of the leading history of medicine libraries (a full list of our content providers is available on our website).

Author: Michael North, Head of Rare Books & Manuscripts, National Library of Medicine

Guest Post: Bathing with Sheeps' Heads: The Sick Child in Early Modern England

Dr Hannah Newton is a Wellcome Trust Fellow at the University of Cambridge. Here, she provides insights into the treatment and experience of childhood illness in the early modern period, and overturns three enduring myths about the history of childhood.

In the late-seventeenth century, the London gentlewoman, Katherine Jones, described how to make ‘A Good Bath…for Children that have the Rickets’. She instructed, ‘Take five sheeps heads and livers, bruise them and boyle them in water a whole day’. Next, add a handful of ‘Rosemary, Bays, Wormwood, Fatherfew, Smallage, Mallows, knotgrass and red fennel’. When these were ‘boyled enough…put it into the Bathing tub, and let the child stay in as long as it can Endure according as you think fit’. She warned, ‘When the child comes out of the Bath, put it to bed and have a great care it take no cold’.

I encountered this recipe whilst leafing through the fragile pages of Katherine Jones’ collection of culinary and medicinal recipes, now housed in the Wellcome Library, and available for digital download from the website. It sparked a series of questions in my mind. How might Katherine’s child have felt about taking a bath bobbing with the heads of dead sheep? Were children’s medicines the same as those of adults? How did young patients respond emotionally to illness and the prospect of death? What role did mothers and fathers play in the care of ill children? These questions are addressed in my new book, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720. At this time, the illness or death of a child was common – almost a third of the young died before reaching the age of fifteen – and yet historians have rarely touched upon this subject. Taking the perspectives of doctors, parents, and children themselves, my book investigates the perception, treatment, and experience of childhood illness in England between approximately 1580 and 1720. It exposes three myths in the history of early modern childhood, outlined below.

Myth 1: Children were miniature adults.

According to popular legend, there was no concept of ‘childhood’ in medieval or early modern societies. In old paintings, children resemble little adults, dressed in the style of their elders. This view, which has largely fallen out of favour amongst historians, has seeped into the history of medicine – it is assumed that before the late nineteenth century, children and adults were treated using identical medicines. However, an examination of medical texts, recipe collections, and doctors’ casebooks, sheds doubt on this notion. The medical author ‘J.S’, declared in 1664, ‘children are to be cur’d in a different manner in them then they are in other Ages’. Their bodies resembled ‘soft wax’ – they were weak, warm, and full of moisture. This unique physiology meant that ‘a special regard is to be had to the Methods and Medicines, for Children by reason of the weakness of their bodies, cannot undergo severe methods or strong Medicines’. Instead of using the usual remedies of the time – vomits, purges, and bloodletting – children were to be treated with milder medicines, such as topical ointments and baths, and non-evacuating internal medicines. Of the 482 medicines for children that were listed in the collections of manuscript culinary and medical recipes that I analysed in the Wellcome Library and British Library, less than 4 percent were for emetics and bloodletting, and only about 15 percent were for purges and enemas. Evacuative treatments were to be avoided because they were ‘unpleasing, ful of pain and molestation to Children’, stated the physician Francis Glisson in 1651. Of course, there were occasions when these treatments were used – older children were more likely to be given vomits and purges than infants, and when the child was gravely ill, practitioners were sometimes prepared to risk administering a more aggressive remedy on the grounds that it might save the child’s life. But on the whole, gentler treatments were preferred.

As well as giving children different treatments, doctors and laypeople thought it was necessary to ‘limit…the strength, quality and quantity of the medicine’ by adapting the treatments in various ways. Doses were lessened for children, and the more powerful ingredients were often omitted. Mary Poppins’ technique of ‘adding a spoonful of sugar’, was another common practice. Francis Glisson noted that he sought to make the medicine ‘grateful & pleasing to the sick Child, & such as trouble not its Pallate’. The recipe book of Anne Glyd suggests that a medicine for ‘chin cough’ should be put into ‘hon[e]y’ or ‘what ever the child likes best’. Doctors knew that ‘children will not take bitter things’, and therefore either left these ingredients out, or disguised them by putting them into the child’s normal food or drink. To persuade children to submit to treatment, bribery was sometimes used. John Yorke complained that his nephew James ‘is…so refractory [about] taking what is proper for him’, that ‘[it is] a hard taske to govern him’. Yorke had to ‘use all my perwasion’ to get the child ‘to take what the Dr order’d’. Eventually through promising him a copy of Robinson Crusoe, the child agreed to take the medicine.

Myth 2: Parents did not love their children in the past.

It is often suggested that high rates of death in the early modern period discouraged parents from investing too much affection in their children. Fathers in particular, have been depicted as unemotional, aloof figures at this time, who spent little time with their children, and rarely showed much grief at their deaths. Contemporary diaries and letters provide a very different picture. During illness, fathers and mothers tended their children with devoted care. In 1679, the Anglican clergyman Isaac Archer recorded that he ‘sate by’ his six-year-old daughter Frances with his arm around her, and ‘helpt it all night’, offering her words of comfort. Witnessing one’s child suffer pain, grow weak and pale, and eventually die, provoked the most painful passions imaginable in parents. In 1647, the Yorkshire gentleman Ralph Verney nursed his eight-year-old daughter Pegg, who was suffering from a cancerous ulcer. He told his uncle, Dr Denton, ‘Poore childe you doe not know what miserie she hath endured’: she was so weak she ‘she cannot turne her selfe in her Bed’. He concluded his letter, ‘oh Dr I am so full of affliction that I can say noe more but pray for us’. When death finally arrived, the grief of parents was often so intense that they found it difficult to express. When Ralph Verney’s wife Mary found out that Pegg had died, she told him, ‘I am nott able to say one word more but that at this time there is nott a sadder creature in the world than thine own Deare M’. It appears that both mothers and fathers loved their children with the same intensity that we expect from parents today.

Myth 3: It is impossible to access the child’s experience.

It is notoriously difficult to investigate the experience of childhood in the seventeenth century. Children rarely left written records. However, there is one context in which their voices do survive: illness. Acutely aware of the likelihood of death, parents recorded the thoughts, words, and actions of their sick children in detail. The resulting evidence provides rare and intimate insights into the lives and deaths of early modern children. At eight o’clock one October evening in 1625 when Grace Wallington was washing the dishes, her three-year-old daughter Elizabeth asked her, ‘What doe you heere?’ Later that night when she was in bed, she said to her father Nehemiah, ‘Father I goe abroode tomorrow and bye [buy] you a plomee pie’. The reason these everyday sentences were recorded by Elizabeth’s father was that, ‘These were the last words that I did heere my sweete child speeke’, for the next day, she died. Some forty years later, John Vernon recalled the words of his dying son, twelve-year-old Caleb: he had spoken of his pet bird, saying ‘I will give it to my Sister Betty, who hath none, for Nancy [another sister] hath one already’.

Although these accounts may have been edited and censored by their parents, they do nonetheless shed light on children’s preoccupations. Children’s words also reveal their feelings for their parents. In the 1670s, six-year-old Jason Whitrow took his mother ‘by the hand, and said, Mother, I shall dye, oh that you might dye with me, that we might both go to the Lord together’. Daughters’ feelings for their fathers could be similarly deep. Thomas Camm described how his eight-year-old daughter Sarah lay in his arms during her illness in 1682, and told him ‘Oh! my dear Father, thou hast been very tender and carefull over me, and hast taken great pains with me in my Sickness…we shall meet in Heaven’. Christian beliefs about heaven were a source of unquantifiable comfort to all family members. While children rarely left written records, some sources do survive. When I was reading a recipe book in the Wellcome Library, I came across something very exciting: a child’s picture. It shows a woman cooking, perhaps boiling herbs for a medicine. Virtually indistinguishable from a modern child’s drawing, it brings the past to life.

Images:
- Katherine Jones, Lady Ranelagh, Collection of medical receipts, c. 1675-1710, Wellcome Library, MS.1340, 114v.
- Collection of cookery and medical receipts: written mainly by two compilers, c.1685-c.1725, Wellcome Library, MS.1796, 125v.

The Sick Child in Early Modern England, 1580-1720 (OUP, 2012) is available now. More information on the Wellcome Library's digitised recipe manuscripts is available through the Wellcome Library website.

Author: Dr Hannah Newton

Papers of Carlos Paton Blacker to be digitised

As part of our programme to create a Wellcome Digital Library, we are pleased to announce that we will be digitising the papers of Carlos Paton Blacker. This will include the surprise addition to his papers received in March. The collection will be digitised in full and made freely available online, subject to Data Protection and privacy issues as set out in our access policy. These images will enable readers to access large amounts of archive material remotely from anywhere in the world.

Blacker’s papers reflect his long and active career in psychiatry (including as psychiatrist at the Maudsley Hospital and as an Adviser to the Ministry of Health), and his activities with a number of organisations interested in population and birth control, including the Birth Control Investigation Committee, the Population Investigation Committee, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and the Simon Population Trust. Blacker was also Secretary to the Eugenics Society between 1931-1961. His activities as Secretary are documented in his own papers as well as in the papers of the Eugenics Society, which are also being digitised. Through the Wellcome Digital Library Blacker’s correspondence and papers in these separate collections will be digitally united.

The collection will be digitised between 23rd July 2012 and 5th November 2012. In order to develop this world-class digital resource access to the collection will be affected. Please see the archives digitisation schedule for full details. We regret that we are unable to make any exceptions to allow individual readers access to material, and encourage readers to contact the Archives and Manuscripts team beforehand at arch+mss@wellcome.ac.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7611 8899 to ensure that material will be available for consultation.

The creation of the Wellcome Digital Library is due to be completed later this year. Other Library collections included in this phase of the project are the substantial Francis Crick archive, the papers of Fred Sanger, Arthur Ernest Mourant, Sir Peter Medawar, the Medical Research Council Blood Group Unit, and Honor Fell.

Image: C. P. Blacker receiving the Galton Medal from C. G. Darwin, in 1957 (SA/EUG/O.17)

Author: Toni Hardy

Sensitivity assessment: the finer points of archives digitisation

As work progresses in line with the Library's Digitisation programme, Content And Metadata Officer Rada Vlatkovic discusses her work assessing the sensitivity of modern archive collections due for digitisation.

On their journey from the library stacks to digitised images, archive collections undergo several phases of processing. The members of the digital services team work on different tasks to make sure that all levels of digitisation are done to the highest standards.

Making archive collections available online requires thinking of many issues one of which is considering how to balance the access needs of researchers, while at the same time handling personal data contained within the archives responsibly. Depending on the content and type of personal data, records can be open, restricted access, or may not be viewed at all. Only materials over 10 years old, and classed as open for viewing in the Wellcome Library are digitised and will be made available online.

Each archive collection is checked for sensitive material prior to online publication. A sensitivity assessment takes place on two different levels. Assessment for the whole collection is done by the archivist who identifies high-risk material and determines which areas of the collection, or individual items need the most detailed check. The appropriate level of risk (low, medium or high) is applied to all series of records in the collection. A judgement on the level of risk is made using criteria such as how old the record is, whether it relates to living individuals, how the information is structured, and how detailed the catalogue description is.

Once the collection is digitised and the higher level assessment has been completed, the sensitivity reviewer examines the records image by image for sensitive personal data as listed in section 2 of the Data Protection Act 1998 as well as for other types of data that is sensitive in general terms (click image to enlarge):

Information falling into any of the above categories is carefully considered by the reviewer and, on an image by image basis, it is determined whether access to the information should be restricted or withdrawn. Data should be withdrawn only in cases where open access to the information would be unfair or unlawful, or would be likely to cause distress or damage to any individual.

Personal data can take various forms: personal and reference letters, photographs, medical records on physical or mental health, notes on patients, scientific papers with blood type records, fingerprints and many more. Some of the data might look sensitive but the information could already be in the public domain (e.g. biographies or publications). To make a judgement on sensitivity, the reviewer has to have a good knowledge of the collection and the basic information on key people represented in it; for instance whether they are alive or dead, or whether their religious/political views or health problems are already well known.

Two crucial documents for guidance for both the archivist and the sensitivity reviewer in this process are the Wellcome Library Access to Archives policy (PDF) and access guidance from The National Archives. Despite all these safeguards, if a sensitive letter/document appears online being hidden somewhere among apparently non-sensitive material, then it will be immediately removed from online display.

Sensitivity assessment takes the reviewer to the finer parts of collections, where the letters and documents reveal people’s lives, their thoughts and private affairs. Although such personal material enriches collections, the Library has a duty of care to living individuals and considers it of a great importance to safeguard their interests.

Author: Rada Vlatkovic

Archives from the pioneers of modern genetics to be brought together for the first time

More details have been announced today of the Wellcome Library's groundbreaking digitisation project, 'Modern Genetics and its Foundations'.

Tens of thousands of notes, letters, sketches, lectures, photographs and essays, produced by the key players in the discovery of the structure of DNA and the development of genetics - including Francis Crick, James D Watson, Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins - will be made freely available online.

These vast collections contain iconic documents, everyday exchanges, complex research notes and personal ephemera and highlight the extraordinary networks of insight and inspiration behind pivotal moments of scientific discovery. The material will be released in phases from autumn 2012.

Working in partnership with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, USA, The Churchill Archives Centre, the University of Glasgow, King's College London and UCL (University College London), the archival papers of James D Watson, Rosalind Franklin, Sydney Brenner, Lionel Penrose, J B S Haldane, Guido Pontecorvo, James Harrison Renwick, Malcolm Ferguson-Smith and Maurice Wilkins will be digitised. They will join material from the Wellcome Library's own holdings, including the papers of Francis Crick, Fred Sanger, Arthur Ernest Mourant, the MRC blood group, Hans Gruenberg and Gerard Wyatt.

The material will offer a comprehensive picture of the complex relationships between the scientists unlocking the secrets of the structure of DNA, in their own words, and give researchers and curious minds access to the personal and professional thoughts, blind alleys and breakthroughs of the circle of brilliant minds whose ideas transformed our understanding of the matter of life.

To tie in with this news, Radio 4's Today programme broadcast yesterday a feature exploring the project. The feature - presented by BBC Health Correspondent Fergus Walsh - is available to listen to online (scroll down to 0846).  Walsh has also written about the project on his BBC blog, asking the question ‘The most important photo ever taken?  The Today programme’s website also displays some of the images from the papers of Francis Crcick held in the Wellcome LIbrary that will be made available online as part of the project.

Image: Sketch of the DNA double helix by Francis Crick (PP/CRI/H/1/16).

Colouring in the last bits: the end of an era

Exactly ten years ago, on April 26th 2002, one of the Library's archivists sat at a PC and started our archive catalogue programme, went through various options to set up an import of data, selected the source file and clicked OK...
...and a matter of seconds later, our archive database had received its first load of converted catalogue data and we had set out on a journey from paper to digital, a journey completed a few days ago with the conversion of our last paper archive list.

It is hard, now, to think back to those early days, so accustomed are Library users and staff to the archive database. The complexities of rendering a hierarchical archive catalogue on the screen - plus, for a long time, a lack of agreement as to what an archive catalogue should actually do [1] - meant that good catalogue software for archives developed more slowly than that for libraries, and it was only in the 1990s that a move to database catalogues gained some momentum. (Happily, this took place at the same time as the explosion in use of the World Wide Web, so archive catalogues when they did arrive were able to jump straightaway to giving readers web access, rather than forcing them to work with pre-web technologies such as Telnet.) Up till that time, the reader wanting to use our archives and manuscripts sources was confronted by six meaty published volumes of manuscript cataloguing, and some two hundred spiral-bound word-processed lists of twentieth-century archive collections.

For the reader wanting a particular organisation or individual's papers, this worked, and usership was steady. For the reader wanting thematic access across the collection, however, life was much harder. Some topics, of course, came up repeatedly, and for these we compiled sources guides describing material relating to particular themes or areas: many of these, radically recast and updated, are still to be found on our website. For the reader with a new, unusual or quirky topic, however, rather than one of the staples such as shell-shock or abortion, it could be difficult to know where to start. A few years ago, for instance, a user of the Rare Materials Room wanted to know about our sources relating to Marmite: the sort of question that would have been virtually impossible to answer before the database. [2]

The database was to revolutionise all this, and to democratise access to archives and manuscripts profoundly. It enabled readers to ask the questions that they wanted to have answered, not simply the ones we had managed to predict; and by opening up the database to a wider range of enquiries, saw some hitherto quieter areas of the collection, such as the American manuscripts, receiving heavier use than ever before.

First, though, we had to get the data into it. The turn of the Millennium saw a large number of collaborative exercises launched to get archive data onto the web, and it was from one of these that our first converted catalogues came. Access to Archives, or A2A, was a programme dedicated to converting archive catalogues to web-readable form and mounting them on the National Archives website, enabling a web presence for those many repositories which, at that stage, did not have their own site. One strand of the project worked to convert documents relating to London's contacts with the wider world, through exploration, trade and colonism, and it was material submitted to this which came back to us as a digital file in early 2002 and was loaded on that fateful April 26th. Among the items made available to readers in that first tranche were the journals of naval surgeon Fleetwood Buckle (MSS.1395-1404 and 5656), the papes of Sir James Cantlie, the tropical medicine specialist (MSS.1456-1499, 6931-6941 & 7920-7941), the diaries of the Tsimshian Native American Arthur Wellington Clah (WMS/Amer.140)... we were up and running.

From that point onwards, the process of retroconversion (to use the appropriate jargon) never stopped. We experimented with cutting and pasting word-processed catalogue into the database but the process was so complex (most of the old lists had been laid out on the page with copious paragraph markers and tab-stops, all of which needed to be removed) that it worked out quicker and cheaper to re-key catalogues. A dedicated project officer started work that year, working entire days at marking up catalogues in coloured pens (each colour corresponding to a database field) before posting the results to New Delhi, from which a spreadsheet of rekeyed data would appear with terrifying speed in the inbox. Little by little, several thousand records at a time, the database grew; little by little the profits of a particular stationers' on Cleveland Street, which boasted the best selection of coloured markers in Fitzrovia, swelled. At the end of this project, well over 75% of our data was in there. In the time since then, members of the archives department have converted the remaining catalogues in spare half-hours here and there (evening and Saturday duties have been particularly fertile times). Now, that era has ended. After a little under ten years, the final catalogue has been converted and loaded: the catalogue of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy's papers, which had drawn the short straw and ended up last of all, was converted and loaded last week. You have only to go to Wellcome Images and search for the phrase SA/CSP to get an idea of the sort of things now described online: we expect the scrapbooks on the "massage scandals" that led to the CSP's formation to notch up a large number of hits all on their own...

2012, then, sees the end of an era: all of our archive catalogues online at last. It comes, as luck would have it, just as a new set of technical developments needs work: the wholesale digitisation of archive holdings, among other library materials, and the need to make catalogue records and images link up in as smooth and seamless an experience for the reader as we can manage. The archivists, needless to say, are not putting their feet up at this particular moment; it is, however, time for a few minutes of retrospect and quiet satisfaction as a long-running project comes to a close.

[1] For those who are interested, the breakthrough came in 1997 when the International Council on Archives set out the snappily-named ISAD(G) - the International Standard on Archival Description (General).
[2] It turns out that we have quite a few.

Images:
1/ The import screen for our CALM archive catalogue programme (backstage client): further information from the manufacturers here.
2/ Napoleon's tomb, St. Helena, from MS.1395, one of the papers of Fleetwood Buckle that were among the first items to be loaded to the database.
3/ Some of the actual pens used in retroconversion, kept for posterity.

Medical Officer of Health reports to be digitised

The Wellcome Library has received JISC funding towards the creation of a major free online dataset covering public health in London from the mid-19th century to the late 20th century.

This project is based on the reports of the Medical Officers of Health (MOH) in Greater London between 1848 and 1972. Of all the collections in the Wellcome Library the MOH reports have the greatest research potential for the study of public health history in 19th and 20th century Britain, and are one of the most heavily consulted collections at the Wellcome Library. Online access to this resource will vastly increase their impact on research and would be invaluable to public health researchers, epidemiologists and practitioners, as well as medical and social historians.

The Medical Officers of Health systematically monitored and oversaw the provision of disparate services that contributed to the well-being of local populations. The Officers – individually and as a group – were one of the most influential agents of social and medical reform in Britain over a period of more than a century. Their reports contain a wealth of information (especially statistical data) and there is a long pedigree of advanced research using MOH reports as primary source materials for a wide range of subjects including (but not limited to) food and food safety; maternity and child welfare; housing; pollution; manufacturing (e.g. the inspection of workshops); shops and offices; sanitation; social care; civil liberties; demography; engineering and meteorological conditions.

Digitising these extensive holdings will not only improve access to an important body of research material, but will offer opportunities for new approaches to text and data mining. Digitisation and text encoding will be carried out in 2012, and will be made freely available on the Wellcome Digital Library website in early 2013. For more information you can read the project plan on the JISC website.

Papers of the Eugenics Society to be Digitised

We are delighted to announce that with the kind permission of the Galton Institute, and as part of our programme to create a Wellcome Digital Library, we will be digitising the papers of one of our most popular archive collections; the papers of the Eugenics Society. The collection will be digitised in full and made freely available online, subject to Data Protection and privacy issues as set out in our access policy (pdf). These images will enable readers to access large amounts of archive material remotely from anywhere in the world.

In order to develop this world-class digital resource access to the collection will be affected. The collection will be digitised in batches between 21st November 2011 and 26th September 2012. Please see the archives digitisation schedule for full details. We regret that we are unable to make any exceptions to allow individual readers access to material, and encourage readers to contact the Archives and Manuscripts team beforehand at archs+mss@wellcome.ac.uk or telephone +44 (0)20 7611 8899 to ensure that material will be available for consultation. Microfilm copies of material in the Eugenics Society collection will not be affected and will remain available for consultation. Access to this collection whilst it is being digitised will continue to be granted only once prior written permission from the Galton Institute has been obtained.

The creation of the Wellcome Digital Library is due to be completed in late 2012. Other Library collections included in this phase of the project are the substantial Francis Crick archive, the papers of Fred Sanger, Arthur Ernest Mourant, the Medical Research Council Blood Group Unit, Honor Fell, and Carlos Paton Blacker. The aim is to provide a documentary record of modern genetics, not only from a scientific perspective, but also from political, economic, technological, social, cultural and personal viewpoints. It will throw open the doors of the Wellcome Library and its unique collections to a worldwide audience, and provide a global resource for the study of the history of medicine and modern bioscience.

Image credit: Photograph of Eugenics Society stand at the Exhibition of Health and Housing, c.1935. Reproduced from the Eugenics Society collection (SA/EUG/G.40) with the kind permission of the Galton Institute.

Author: Toni Hardy

Happy 3rd Birthday Wellcome Library Blog!

As we've marked our previous birthdays, we thought it would be rather amiss not to mark our third birthday with a post summarising our activities over the last 365 days.

The Library Blog still follows the path we set down back on 28th October 2008: aiming to summarise current activities of Library staff and flag up interesting material from our collections. As in previous years, we've shown the breadth of our collections by tying into anniversaries and special days and weeks: for instance, we marked National Curry Week with an 18th Century Botanist, travelled with a doctor to 19th cenury North American for World Tourism Day and followed a particular 'Victorian paper trail' for World Toilet Day.

Insights into our current digitisation work have also been proffered, drawing out stories from the papers of scientists such as Peter Medawar and Arthur Mourant. Whilst thoughts on the Conservation implications of digitisation projects have also been aired along with the announcement of the launch of Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts Online.

Our Items of the Month have again highlighted the breadth of our collections and the blog has also highlighted major acquisitions, none more important this year than a portrait by Pierre Chasselat of the French surgeon Ange-Bernard Imbert-Delonnes. We're also delighted to have featured more guest posts on the Blog, particularly those by both Dr Duncan Wilson and Dr Vanessa Heggie, describing how they utilised our resources for their recent publications.

Thank you very much to all the people who have contributed their time and energies to the Blog over the last year. The writers of the Blog posts, but more importantly, everyone's who's spared the time to read what we've written. Here's to another year of Wellcome Library Blogging!

The ‘Spare-part biologist’: Sir Peter Medawar

"He was a big man. That was the first thing that struck you as he strode into the room. A big man - tall and vibrant with life. His sheer presence communicated a sense of power: not political power, not domination, but physical power, above all intellectual power... It was difficult not to be awe-stricken in the company of Peter Medawar" (1)

Such descriptions of Sir Peter Medawar, the Nobel-Prize winning zoologist whose archive has just been digitised, make browsing through his personal papers somehow more tangible. Not all biologists get to appear in Vogue as Medawar did in 1971 (2).

It is a tragedy that Medawar was plagued by persistent strokes later on in life. First struck down dramatically mid-speech in Exeter cathedral in 1969, he persevered through ever disabling health issues to continue to write seven books until his death in 1987. (3)

Some of the most poignant material from Medawar’s papers is those letters that relate to his strokes: correspondence from 1970 includes a series of self-portrait drawings illustrating his recovery from his seizure: one image is marked 'PBM body image 9 July 1970, Pablo Medawar pixit' with spiky fingers and elongated ears.



Other drawings dated ‘May 16’ shows him with enlarged hands and feet and another dated ‘May 26’ with a third leg (possibly a crutch) and just one overgrown ear like protrusion from his head.





Such drawings were part of his traumatic recovery process as explained in his autobiographical work Memoir of a thinking radish (p.157, Oxford University Press, 1986) and revealed, to Medawar at least, an ‘eye defect’ brought on by the stroke. His confidence in his recovery never abated it seems – despite his evident disability, it is a relief to read a note from '9 May' stating repeatedly 'I am feeling better' (4)

The archive will be available to view from 2012. Further details of the digitisation programme can be obtained from the Wellcome Library digitisation project pages.

References:
1. Dipak Nandy, p.1 of an article for p.1 The Runnymede Trust, 1988, file ref: PP/PBM/F.58

2. The article features a shot of him musing at a desk with a cat out of focus in the front, File ref: PP/PBM/D55

3. A full listing of all books authored by Medawar held in the Wellcome Library.

4. File ref: PP/PBM/A.43

Images:

- Photo of Medawar was apparently intended for use in article by Medawar in "Lying Truths" according to pencil inscription on verso ("Lying truths : a critical scrutiny of current beliefs and conventions, Ronald Duncan and Miranda Weston-Smith, Pergamon Press, 1979.

- Self-portrait drawings are dated 1970 from file ref: PP/PBM/A.43

Conservation for digitisation: recent experiences at the Wellcome Library

Beginning in July of this year, the Wellcome Library began to scan the first of some 15,000 early printed books in collaboration with the information provider ProQuest and the French data capture specialists Diadeis (a detailed outline of the project can be found here).

The reason that digitisation is being pursued at the Wellcome Library, and all over the world, is to enhance access to collections and provide new alternative research possibilities. Within reasonable limits, the conservation department is dedicated to ensuring that as many books as possible are digitised. The safety of the collection during these processes is paramount; it is critically important to establish safe working practices from the outset, particularly when using external contractors who are unfamiliar with the collection.

When conserving an object the intention is - as nearly as possible - to maintain for posterity the object’s original attributes. The suitability of each object for digitisation requires a pragmatic approach, taking the particular object’s condition into account.

Consider the following example: In the course of a survey of a batch of books (around 200 per month are surveyed) one was found to have loose covers hanging by a thread, and another a loose spine. Ordinarily both these books would be flagged for conservation and removed from circulation. However, even though it would be inappropriate for these books to reach a reader in their deteriorated condition, they were both included in the digitisation process, and sent on for careful scanning.

Why is this? Because even though the condition of a book may be degraded as a result of both physical (handling) and chemical (acidity) deterioration, paradoxically the deteriorated condition can in some cases actually facilitate the digitisation process. The opening of a book may be easier if the spine is detached; where covers once awkwardly hung by a thread and when handling in this state would cause further damage, the thread can be cut and the boards released to allow for easier imaging of the text block. Covers and spines can of course be repaired after imaging.

In summary, three key points may therefore be highlighted:

1. Prioritising throughput. With good planning, large collections can be safely digitised. As noted above, a pragmatic approach to the condition of the object and stabilizing it in accord with good conservation practice means that most objects can be included in the project. In the end, the online results from digitisation projects at the Wellcome Library have done much to showcase the large volume of work that the conservation department undertakes.
2. Withholding where necessary. While the emphasis has been on facilitating the scanning process where possible, some books may nevertheless need to be withheld. This is often for research reasons, when treatment or other preparation for digitisation will compromise the original attributes of the individual object and thus its research value.
3. Paying attention to possible deterioration during the actual process of digitisation. The Wellcome conservation team maintains a daily dialogue with our scanning contractors to clarify our expectations on book handling, and to learn from them about their equipment and workflow. We have also included training in the use of basic conservation tools and straightforward tasks that save everyone’s time, such as unfolding the corners of pages. With good training and communication, the scanners too can raise conservation concerns and communicate them back to the conservator.

Images:
1/ Repairing torn pages with strips of Japanese tissue.
2/ A book before and after conservation.
3/ Imaging a book using an Atiz Bookdrive.

The cataloguer's conundrum

The Wellcome Library is very pleased to announce that the third and final batch of Francis Crick's scientific papers is now fully catalogued and available for research. The entire archive has recently been imaged as part of the library's Wellcome Digital Library project 'Modern Genetics and its Foundations', and from late 2012 the archive will be available both in the original and as a digital version online. In the meantime, you are very welcome to consult the archive in the library.



The newly-catalogued batch of papers largely comprises Crick’s notes, drafts and correspondence from the late 1990s until his death in 2004, notably his research papers for two major pieces of work: 'A framework for consciousness', his 2003 paper with Christof Koch, which many colleagues saw as Crick’s roadmap for the study of consciousness after his death [footnote 1]; and 'What is the function of the claustrum?' [footnote 2], again written with Koch, a paper which Crick was busy working on only hours before he died.



As Crick’s cataloguer, I have mixed feelings about the completion of his archive catalogue – pleasure that this rich collection is now fully available for researchers, tempered by sadness that I have to leave Crick behind. My own virtual relationship with him started in 2003, quite a year to come to the project, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of his co-discovery of the structure of DNA.



While some scientific archives can be dry and technical, Crick’s records were never dull to work on, his forceful and compelling personality shining out through his letters and papers. Take his refreshing approach to organisational hierarchies. When addressed as ‘Dr Crick’ in the early 1960s by a young grad student at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Crick told him to ‘stop that nonsense’ and call him by his first name on the grounds that distinctions based on rank reduce communication and are inimical to progress. [footnote 3]



Crick’s archive unsurprisingly centres around his research on DNA and consciousness, inevitably touching on such massive questions as science’s ethical responsibilities towards society as a whole, and the relationships between science and religion. For lighter relief, Crick’s fan mail reveals his impact on the non-scientific public, as in a letter from the science fiction author Jack McDevitt, who in 1994 asked permission to write Crick a cameo role in his stargate novel Ancient Shores (Crick refused, rather slyly suggesting ‘Why not ask Jim Watson?’). [footnote 4]



But it’s the fate of archive cataloguers to be serial monogamists, and after all these years I’m moving on to the next project. So now it’s over to you to explore Crick’s papers - what kind of virtual relationship with his ideas and legacy will you develop?



Footnotes:

1. File reference PP/CRI/L/1/8/13

2. File reference PP/CRI/L/1/8/27

3. File reference PP/CRI/J/1/8/12/1

4. File reference PP/CRI/J/1/4/12/1

Historic Arabic medical manuscripts go online

The Wellcome Library is pleased to announce the launch of Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts Online, a digital manuscript library created in partnership with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and King's College London Department of Digital Humanities.

From the official press release:

Arabic medicine was once the most advanced in the world, and now digital facsimiles of some of its most important texts have been made freely available online. The unique online resource, based on the Wellcome Library's Arabic manuscript collection, includes well-known medical texts by famous practitioners (such as Avicenna, Ibn al-Quff, and Ibn an-Nafis), lesser-known works by anonymous physicians and rare or unique copies, such as Averroes' commentaries on Avicenna's medical poetry...

Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, expressed his enthusiasm for the project: "Providing global access to our collections is at the heart of our mission to foster collaborative research, and we are delighted to see these particular treasures become freely accessible online. We are grateful to the Library of Alexandria and Kings College London, whose partnership in this project has enabled us to extend the availability of these rare materials to the countries of their origin."

Funded by the JISC and the Wellcome Trust, the Wellcome Arabic Cataloguing Partnership (WAMCP) was initiated in 2009 with the aim to make the Wellcome's Arabic manuscripts available and to establish a standard in Arabic manuscript cataloguing and display.

This began with the creation of the "cataloguing tool". A schema was adapted from the existing ENRICH schema to allow for non-Western manuscript description. The tool, the repository, and the website was developed by the Bibliotheca Alexandrina with direction from the Wellcome and King's College London team members.

Although the cataloguing tool has been in use for many months now (with over 450 manuscript records now completed or in progress), the website was only released to the public today, with a sample of around 120 manuscript records available to view. The remaining manuscript records will be made available online throughout the summer.

Image: WMS Arabic 529 - Anonymous book of magic spells

Digitising our early European printed books

As part of the Wellcome Digital Library pilot project, we’re joining forces with ProQuest to digitise over fifteen thousand volumes from our rare book collection. They will be made available through ProQuest’s new Early European Books (EEB) database – a sister project to the long-established and successful Early English Books Online.

As its name suggests, EEB will trace the history of printing in continental Europe from its origins up to 1700. A number of other libraries have already contributed to the project, including the Kongelige Bibliotek in Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze. We’ll be contributing our entire collection of pre-1700 non-English printed books – including many rare or obscure texts on subjects ranging from alchemy to zoology, as well as some of the most spectacularly illustrated books of the period. Landmark works include the first edition of anatomist Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica (1543), the complete works of surgeon Ambroise Paré (c.1510-1590), Rabanus Maurus’s encyclopedia De sermonum proprietate (1467) (the medical section of which is sometimes called the first printed medical book) and a beautiful colored copy of Hartmann Schedel’s Liber chronicarum (‘The Nuremberg Chronicle’, 1493), formerly owned by the artist William Morris (1834-1896). In addition, the project will also provide access to important continental editions of works by famous English medical authors, such as William Harvey’s seminal work on the circulation of the blood, De motu cordis (1628), which was first published in Germany.

Unlike other parts of our project, which are being fully funded by the Wellcome Library, this partnership will involve a significant investment from ProQuest. In return for access to our collection, ProQuest will make the entire collection freely available to all UK-based users, and to users in the HINARI group of developing countries. Wellcome Library members will of course have free access to the collection from anywhere in the world. In addition, ten percent of the collection – about 1,500 books – will be selected by the Wellcome Library to be made freely available to any user worldwide via the Wellcome Digital Library portal. There will be other benefits too: as part of the project, we are taking the opportunity to make sure that previously uncatalogued (and hence unavailable) material is also included, giving the new database complete coverage of our pre-1700 European holdings.

Why choose to work with a commercial partner? Well, for one thing we recognise that for some parts of our holdings, high-quality research access will depend on material being made available within bigger collections of related material. Our early European books are not only of interest to historians of medicine but also to a wider scholarly audience, for whom the ability to search across a comprehensive database rather than a subject-specific portal is important. We also recognise that a one-size-fits all approach to book digitisation isn’t always best. By partnering with ProQuest, we hope that users of our collection will benefit from the ability to see works in a broader historical context, and from the development of tools such as text recognition that are adapted to the challenges of early European printing – benefits that we are unlikely to be able to replicate, at least in the short term, within our own digital library.

As the project develops we’ll tell you more about how it’s going, announce new content as it comes online and be inviting some input from our users and the wider research community to help us select items to be included in the 1,500 books we make freely available from the outset.

Author: Simon Chaplin

New issue of Wellcome News

Published four times a year, Wellcome News contains up-to-date articles highlighting the Wellcome Trust's wide-reaching science and public engagement activities, grant schemes, policies and more.

The latest issue's 'From the Archive' feature, highlights one of our digitised recipe manuscripts (MS.7113), compiled by Lady Ann Fanshawe in the 17th century.

The issue also contains an extra supplement, Wellcome News 1936, to tie in with the Trust's 75th anniversary. The supplement imagines how Wellcome News might have looked in the year of the Trust's founding, and is inspired by material from the Library's collections.

Both Wellcome News - and its 1936 supplement - are available to download from the Wellcome Trust's website.

An unstoppable team in blood grouping: R. R. Race and Ruth Sanger

The archives of Robert Russell Race and Ruth Sanger have recently been made available for consultation in the Wellcome Library (ref. PP/SAR). Race and Sanger are best known for their contribution to the understanding of blood groups, in particular Rh antigens and antibodies, and the genetic mapping of the X chromosome.

Robert Race was born in 1907. After qualifying in medicine in 1933 he became an assistant in a pathological laboratory. In 1937 he was appointed assistant serologist to Professor Ronald Fisher at the Galton Laboratory, University College London, as part of the laboratory serum unit. During the Second World War the unit moved to Cambridge with the duty of preparing blood grouping serum for transfusion purposes.

In 1946 the unit was reconstituted at the Lister Institute for Preventative Medicine in London as the Medical Research Council Blood Group Research Unit, with Race appointed Director. The MRC Blood Group Unit acquired an international reputation in the field of haematology, receiving blood samples from all over the world, and, in 1965, it extended its work into the genetics of blood groups. One of the unit's important contributions was the discovery of the Xg antigen in the 1960s.

Ruth Sanger was born in Australia and first came to England in 1946 to work with Race and complete her PhD. After completing her studies in 1948 she briefly returned to Australia, and then rejoined the staff of the unit in 1950. From this point the work of Race and Sanger becomes intertwined, with most major papers being written together. The first edition of Blood Groups in Man was published in 1950 and quickly became the standard reference text. Race and Sanger married in 1956, and upon the retirement of Race as Director of the Unit in 1973, Sanger became Director until her retirement in 1983.

The collection contains personalia, research notes, newspaper cuttings and photographs relating to honours and awards received, correspondence and papers relating to societies that Race and Sanger were associated with, programmes and photographs of conferences and visits, and reprints of articles written by Race and Sanger. At the heart of the collection is a series of 115 typescripts of lectures given by Race and/or Sanger between 1939-1977. These lectures reflect their research activities and relate to many other parts of the collection.

Complementing the personal papers of Race and Sanger are the archives of the MRC Blood Group Unit. Although progress reports for the unit are in the papers of Race and Sanger, the organisational records of the unit are a separate collection (ref. SA/BGU). Together these collections provide a detailed insight into the work of Race and Sanger.

Both collections will be digitised later this year as part of the Wellcome Digital Library programme, which is currently focussed on the theme of 'Modern Genetics and its Foundations'. Other notable collections being digitised include the papers of Francis Crick, Fred Sanger, Arthur Mourant, and Sir Peter Medawar. For further details see the archives digitisation pages.

Author: Toni Hardy

Image: Sanger and Race together in August 1978, from file PP/SAR/F/6/5. The location is unknown, possibly their office at the Lister Institute; readers may like to amuse themselves trying to match the titles of the files behind them to those in the archive collections.

Here's one we made earlier...

As the latest issue of the Wellcome Trust's Big Picture tackles the themes of Food and Diet, we thought we would set a culinary challenge for chef Zack Mila. Faced with the Library's collection of 17th recipe manuscripts - and an absence of details, such as cooking times and temperatures - could Zack bring a centuries old recipe to life?

Click on the film above to see how Zach - aided by the Wellcome Library's Helen Wakely - got on (and if you want to look at the recipe in more detail, this link from our catalogue will take you to a digitised edition of it).

Video by Barry J Gibb, Multimedia Editor, Wellcome Trust

Digitising the archive of geneticist Hans Grüneberg

The Wellcome Library is host to numerous scientists who are famed for discovering important aspects of genetics, many of whose papers are being digitised as part of a major on-going project. While Arthur Mourant was the so-called ‘father of serology’, Hans Grüneberg was believed to be the ‘father of mouse genetics’ (Lewis and Hunt, Biographical Memoirs of Members of the Royal Society, 1984, vol. 30, p.239).

His papers were recently catalogued (see our earlier post) and these papers are now in the process of being digitised. A gifted Jewish scientist, Grüneberg was plucked from Germany in 1933, to work on the genetics of the mouse at University College London, alongside another distinguished geneticist, J. B. S. Haldane. According to Lewis and Hunt, Gruneberg's "...great strength was his singleness of purpose … reinforced when he saw the mouse as a model for the understanding of inherited defects in man". 

Grüneberg’s personal papers contain numerous lab notes, correspondence and research on the genetic make-up and defects of the ‘house mouse’, including press cuttings retained by Grüneberg for their relevance to his work. But it wasn’t just mice Grüneberg paid attention to as we see in a cutting dated 15 November 1947, headed ‘'British Rabbits. They like to walk on two feet” which shows two rabbits (see image above) apparently suffering from a genetic spinal defect: 

"On a table top in Reginald Freeman's butcher shop in Barking outside of London, England, two young rabbits named Junior and Mr. Walker padded back and forth on their forefeet before an admiring crowd. Mr Freeman, used to his rabbits' habits, took a seat in the corner. To people who wondered why the rabbits walked this way, he explained that the rabbits simply like to. Both have been doing it since they were born. Mr. Walker the elder rabbit, started right off walking on his forefeet. Junior, a female, at first experimented with the more conventional four-legged method but after watching Mr. Walker for a while switched to his two-legged style. Mr. Freeman asked a veterinarian about all this and was told the rabbits' spinal muscles were underdeveloped and they walked on two legs because it was easier".

The study of spinal cord neural tube defects, which would have probably been the cause of the rabbits' deformity was one of the areas that Grüneberg researched in embryonic and new born (specifically 'curly-tail') mice for their striking similarity to the situation in humans. For information on his research in this field, see 'Genetical studies of the skeleton of the mouse VIII. curly-tail' in Journal of Genetics 52 (1954), The pathology of development : a study of inherited skeletal disorders in animals / by Hans Grüneberg, Oxford, Blackwell, 1963 and file ref: PP/GRU/80)

Image refs: Photograph from press cutting dated 15 November 1947 File ref: PP/GRU/57. X-ray of normal (left) and transgenic (right) mice, B0003657, Wellcome Images.

"A Digital Future for the History of Medicine?"

Next Wednesday (23rd March), Dr Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, will be giving a talk at the Centre for the Humanities and Health (CHH), King’s College London, titled: "A Digital Future for the History of Medicine?"

The talk starts at 6pm and will take place in the Council Room (K2.29), King's Building, Strand Campus, King’s College London (directions).

More information is available through the CHH events webpage.

Image: The gyri of the thinker's brain as a maze of choices in biomedical ethics. Scraperboard drawing by Bill Sanderson, 1997 (Wellcome Library no. 40586i).

A Jersey connection: Arthur Mourant and Jacqueline du Pré

The Wellcome Library is not known particularly for its holdings of musical celebrities but the archives often reveal some unexpected items. The fate that struck the talented cellist, Jacqueline du Pré does fall within the Wellcome Library’s remit however, given that it was multiple sclerosis that robbed her early of a longer brilliant musical career. Readers would not expect to find material from her within the personal papers of the serologist Arthur Mourant, that have just been digitised as part of a wider project dedicated to "Modern Genetics and its Foundations".

Yet, here we find correspondence of a very personal nature that reveals the close relationship that Mourant had with her Jersey-born family. In one letter dated 9 September 1942 from Jacqueline's father, Derek du Pré, Mourant is invited to be god-father to her older sister, Hilary Anne (File ref: PP/AEM/A.262).

Mourant’s papers include several other letters from Derek, many press cuttings from the 1960s relating to Jacqueline’s brilliant career and private life as well as all Jacqueline’s concert programmes and tickets Mourant attended.

In his autobiography Mourant includes childhood reminiscences of Jacqueline’s sister, Hilary and his relationship with the Du Pré family. She remembers him as a warm and generous man who played with the Du Pré children and “took delight in listening to their weekly concerts”. Mourant was known as the 'Pied Piper' in the children's games, as well as ‘Lalla’ and ‘Uncle Arthur’ (Blood and Stones: an autobiography by A.E. Mourant, La Haule, Jersey: La Haule Books, 1995, p.96). A bachelor until late in life, Mourant enjoyed feeling a part of their family. Also within the papers is a poem that is dedicated to the musically gifted Jacqueline, here re-named ‘Dame Josephine’:

It is touching to find Mourant retained an undated drawing given to him by Jacqueline when she was very young.

The drawing sits in the archive alongside a letter dated March 2nd 1961 from Jacqueline to Mourant: "Dear Uncle Arthur, what a wonderful bouquet! It gave me such pleasure when I came home and arranged the lovely variety of Spring flowers (at 3 a.m!)… with lots of love from Jackie". This letter was sent the day after her debut concert at Wigmore Hall at the tender age of 16 - his brochure and ticket are retained within the same files (PP/AEM/A.267):

Just over 10 years later after extensive concert performances, Jacqueline was forced to retire from the platform apparently from ‘nervous exhaustion’ that was later correctly diagnosed as multiple sclerosis. She died at the age of 42 on 19 October 1987. Following du Pré’s diagnosis, Mourant wrote a letter in Feb 1972 to R.J. Berry of the Royal Free Hospital, London requesting information about the disease according to a responding letter dated 23 Feb 1972 containing multiple-sclerosis statistics (File ref: PP/AEM/K.194).

Picture references:

Photo of Jacqueline du Pré by Lotte Meitner-Graf taken from a Royal Festival Hall concert programme 21 November 1965, File ref PP/AEM/A.268
Drawing and letter given to Mourant by Jaqueline du Pré, n.d. File ref. PP/AEM/A.267
Mourant’s poem dedicated to Jacqueline, n.d. File ref PP/AEM/A.272
Cover of Wigmore Hall concert programme, File ref PP/AEM/A.268

Authors: Rada Vlatkovic and Julia Nurse