The Thing Is...Lister's Legacy

MRSA and C Diff may be relative new-comers on the scene, but hospital acquired infections have been around as long as hospitals have. It was Joseph Lister's groundbreaking work on aseptic surgery which offered the first hope of a solution in this life-or-death situation.

Join Professor Hugh Pennington, an eminent microbiologist who has advised on numerous outbreaks of E-Coli, C Diff and other infections, who will be speaking at the Wellcome Library about his hero Lister, the impact of Lister's work and how it relates to the challenges facing us today. The event will be hosted by Quentin Cooper from Radio 4's Material World, and will feature a mystery object - to be revealed at the event.

Where: Wellcome Library
When: 15 June 2011, 19:00-20:00

Book free tickets for the event.

Author: Eleanor Lanyon

New event: Spices, Food and Trade

As partners in the History and Heritage Adult Learning Network, the Wellcome Library is delighted to bring you details of a new event coming up in May.

Dr Richard Aspin, Head of Research and Scholarship, will be discussing Spices, Food and Trade. The talk will illustrate the connection between the three, as represented through manuscripts, artworks and books drawn from the Library's extensive holdings. The talk is part of the Past Caring: A Celebration of Food in History programme, with events taking place in libraries and museums across London.

Spices, Food and Trade will take place on Saturday 14th May, between 2pm and 3pm. The talk is free, but places must be booked in advance. Simply email t.tillotson@wellcome.ac.uk to book a place. We look forward to seeing you there.

Behind the Scenes: Outreach and events

Our Behind the Scenes topic this month is cross-departmental, focusing on the outreach and events programme. Although many staff in the Library have duties that involve public-facing work, there are a handful who spend a large proportion of their time planning, managing and carrying out the organised outreach activities.

Tours, Insights talks, and Library Workshops are held on a regular basis at the Library, and these can be booked in advance. Ross Macfarlane (Research Officer) manages tours specifically centred around the Special Collections, and Danny Rees (Assistant Librarian) focuses on the library User Services tours. Strongly focused around our academic audiences, these tours are tailored to meet the interests of each tour group and to ensure that we are giving people a good sense of how the Library’s holdings and services are relevant to them.

Insights talks are managed by Eleanor Lanyon (Library Outreach Officer) currently on secondment to the Wellcome Trust Events Team. The Insights talks are held on a weekly basis (usually on a Thursday), focusing on specific topics relevant to the Library and its holdings such as “The Occult”, “Fascinating Faces” and “Madness”.

Workshops are held a couple times a week and provide a forum for our users to learn more about how to use the Library’s resources more efficiently, to highlight the services that we provide, and to provide more information on research topics. These are managed by Lalita Kaplish (Assistant Librarian) and draw on expertise across the Library staff. Examples include “Wellcome Images” and “Plants and Medicine” among others.

Library also runs one-off or annual events that are geared toward particular audiences and help to raise the profile of the Library in the History of Medicine world and beyond. Phoebe Harkins (Assistant Librarian) is involved in the planning of these including the Medicine in Literature series, where authors who have used the Library collections for their working talk about their research processes. Authors including Phillip Hoare and Mike Jay took part in the launch of the series last year, and Michelle Lovric will be presenting her latest work “The Book of Human Skin” (Bloomsbury 2010) in July.

In order to coordinate all these internal events, a committee including key staff as well as Tracy Tillotson (Library Administrator) meet on a weekly basis. This ensures that there is good cross-departmental communication on all aspects of the events, and assures a high level of quality and relevance for the Library’s users. Tracy is the hub of much of this activity, liaising with the Trust Events team to make sure that Library events are coordinated with the rest of Wellcome Collection and the wider Trust as appropriate.

The Library is not, however, limited to its own four walls – externally-located events are also part of its outreach agenda. Events such as the Midsummer Picnics, activities in schools around medical humanities, and others are planned and managed by Eleanor, targeting a more general audience and younger groups.

The Library’s holdings are also displayed for public consumption in exhibitions. Wellcome Collection exhibitions usually incorporate a number of items, and items are loaned to external museums, galleries and libraries. Rowan De Saulles (Library Exhibition Liaison), manages all aspects of these loans, and is currently working on material to be used in the “Skin” exhibition coming up in Wellcome Collection in June.

Although it is impossible in the space of a blog post to detail all the work that goes into the Library’s outreach activities, it can be seen that there is a dedicated programme, and staff with time dedicated to supporting, promoting and contributing to them. These events add great value to the service the Library provides to its users, allowing our holdings to be used and understood creatively, and leading to a broader and deeper understanding of the subject of the History of Medicine across a wide range of audiences.

Wellcome Film officially launched

Readers of this blog, subscribers to our Wellcome Film YouTube channel, and those who regularly use our film collection will know that digital video has been available online for several months now, with more titles added on a regular basis as the Wellcome Film project moves forward. This week we took a moment to celebrate 2 years of work on this project by holding an official Launch party at the Wellcome Library on 2 November 2009. The official press release is on the Wellcome Trust website.

Around 90 people attended, with a champagne reception to kick off. Richard Aspin, Head of Research and Scholarship at the Wellcome Library, introduced the project and the collection, saying that "Wellcome Film is the one of the most important digitisation project to date in our ambition to transform the user experience of The Wellcome Library."

Following Richard, our keynote speaker Jordan Baseman talked about his film project Nature's Great Experiment, a thought-provoking documentary on behaviour and genetics of twins. The film explores themes researched by Professor Terrie Moffitt and the Twin Studies Research Team at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London. Jordan's project was partly funded by the Wellcome Trust. Jordan discussed one particular film that he discovered in the Library's Moving Image and Sound Collection, The Management of Twins in Pregnancy and Labour (1958), produced by the Wellcome Trust and filmed at University College Hospital, London. The film proved to be a catalyst for his project, providing much-needed inspiration to bring his ideas together. Before showing a short clip from his project, Jordan described the 1958 film during his speech as

"...an extraordinary document that at its heart focuses on the delivery of two sets of twins. It is a stunningly beautiful, profound and slightly disturbing document. It is disturbing because of the passivity of the mothers, but also because of the location and presence of the camera. The camera is not passive. It is an active instrument that records these momentous events from a privileged vantage point. The twins are literally delivered to camera: displayed for us to see."

Angela Saward, Curator of the Moving Images and Sound Collection at the Library, rounded off the evening by thanking the long list of people and organisations involved in the project - in particular the Project Advisory Board, JISC Collections who part funded this project, and Lucy Smee, who spent 17 months cataloguing, quality checking, and segmenting almost every single title. Angela then showed a film trailer created for the project by JCA tv, the facilities house that provided telecine, video recording, encoding and transcription services (see below).

New evening events in the Wellcome Library

In April, the Library will launch a new strand of events, held in the Reading Room, to explore how authors have drawn on the resources of the Wellcome Library to inspire and inform their writing.

The Ghosts of Netley, Thursday 23 April, 18.30–20.00
Philip Hoare, author of Spike Island, will use archive images and film to re-imagine the history of Netley Victorian military hospital through its ruins, and the disparate men and women who worked or visited there.

The Atmosphere of Heaven, Thursday 21 May, 18.30-20.00
Author Mike Jay will discuss his new work The Atmosphere of Heaven: The Unnatural Experiments of Dr. Beddoes and his Sons of Genius, to be published by Yale University Press in April. Mike will discuss the chaotic rise and fall of the Pneumatic Institution in Bristol, and reveal for the first time its crucial influence - on modern drug culture, attitudes toward objective and subjective knowledge, the development of anaesthetic surgery, and the birth of the Romantic movement.

Tickets for both events are free but must be booked in advance. You can also telephone on 020 7611 2222.