Item of the Month - November 2009

The journals of Arthur Wellington Clah (1831-1916) – Christian missionary and First Nations hereditary Tsimshian chief – are perhaps one of the more unexpected treasures of the Wellcome Library. Written over fifty years, from 1859 to 1910, they comprise a uniquely personal meditation of social change drawn from the tumult of European imperial adventure.

Clah grew up on an islanded bay on Canada’s northwest coast. Dense forests of cedar and pine massed behind, cut through with rivers that flowed from the glaciers of the mountain interior. These were the heartlands of the Tsimshian people, who had first come into being when the trickster, Raven, stole the light of the world from the Great Chief of the Sky and lifted darkness from the land. They grew rich on the natural wealth of their forests and waterways, and developed astounding artistic and ceremonial traditions. However, by the nineteenth century, this wealth had begun to attract the attention of European traders and in 1831 – the year of Clah’s birth – the Hudson's Bay Company founded a trading station in the bay where Clah came to live. Named Fort Simpson, its arrival transformed the Tsimshian.

The above painting by Frederick Alexcee, a Tsimshian contemporary of Clah, shows Fort Simpson as it was three or four decades after the arrival of the Hudson's Bay Company. Around the Company’s white fort the large wooden houses of the Tsimshian cluster, each decorated with painted fronts and carved totem poles. The majority of Tsimshian tribes had soon moved to Fort Simpson, to take advantage of the trade opportunities close proximity offered. Groups that were scattered now competed for social position. The greatest status was granted to those who could give away or destroy the most goods in public feasts named potlatches, and in the clamour for position increasingly extravagant potlatches came to be held. Victorian observers, shocked by such apparent waste and perturbed by lavish ceremonies involving the manifestation of animal spirits, decided the higher blessings of civilization should be called upon. And so in 1857 a young English missionary named William Duncan arrived, eager to bring the Word of God to the benighted of the world.

Clah became a native language instructor to Duncan and, in turn, Duncan taught Clah to read and write English. Clah was one of the first converts of Duncan’s hugely successful mission, which was to lead to the founding of a separate Tsimshian Christian community in Alaska named Metlakahtla that still exists to this day. Clah took up missionary work himself, preaching to villages deep in the forests of Canada and far north in the Alaskan tundra. Such ventures are recorded in his journals, which take the form of a highly personal history of the Tsimshian people. Everyday observations of the weather and of town life in Fort Simpson and Metlakahtla sit alongside reflections upon his faith and the transformation of the beliefs and practices of the Tsimshian. He writes of the banning of the potlatch and traditional winter ceremonies, and of the interweaving of these customs with the newly adopted Christian religion. Indeed, the old and the new entwine in his words – the light of God carrying the echo of Raven’s wing, the traditional spirit quest robed in the search for salvation – as he seeks to find a place for the Tsimshian in a world unravelled and created anew. [1]

After his death, Clah's journals were purchased by Henry Wellcome, founder of the Wellcome Library. Wellcome had been a committed supporter of Metlakahtla and regarded Clah's journals as something of a protogenic testament to literate cultural progress. What is certain is that, in the words that Clah set down, the great changes the Tsimshian experienced are given powerful and lasting voice.

[1] Susan Neylan, The Heavens Are Changing: Nineteenth-Century Protestant Missions and Tsimshian Christianity (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003), p.174.

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

Layers of identity: Sir Charles Wyndham

Wyndham's Theatre in London's West End is hard to miss. Located in Charing Cross Road next to Leicester Square Underground station and adorned with crisp neo-baroque stone-carvings, it is surrounded in the early evenings by theatre-goers waiting for friends before entering the auditorium. It is named after the man who built it, Sir Charles Wyndham (1837-1919), actor and manager of the theatre. However, Wyndham was not his family name. Before he adopted it, he was Dr Charles Culverwell: his metamorphosis, from jobbing doctor to theatrical knight, is a good example of artfully manipulated identity.

Culverwell's father and uncle were both doctors of a sort. His father, Major Richard Culverwell -- as with the epidemiologist Major Greenwood, Major was his forename, not a military rank -- apparently had an M.D. degree, but instead of practising medicine, he ran a Turkish bath in the City, and together with his brother, Samuel Henry Culverwell, owned hotels in Arundel Street and Norfolk Street, both streets joining the Strand with the Thames. A third brother was Charles's doctor-uncle Robert James Culverwell MRCS (1802-1852), a fringe practitioner with a Giessen M.D. who also ran a bath-house in the City of London, and another one at 10 Argyll Place, off Oxford Street. The baths were advertised in his many popular pamphlets on bathing, indigestion, nervous diseases, "marriage", venereal disease, fresh air, health and longevity. He practised near the bottom of the medical hierarchy.

Charles Culverwell's education and early career followed those of his uncle so closely that people who had not met them must have assumed they were the same man: schooling in Germany, followed by medical education in Dublin, King's College London (near the family hotels), and an MD from Giessen, followed by medical practice in Great Marlborough Street, round the corner from his uncle's West End sauna. In 1860, eight years after his uncle's death, he published Health, happiness and longevity (price 1 shilling, so presumably a puffing pamphlet), and in 1863 advertised his practice in terms similar to his late uncle's:

Dr. Culverwell, M.R.C.S., L.M., L.S.A., 3, Great Marlborough Street, W., can be consulted upon all cases of nervous debility, involuntary blushing, palpitation, loss of memory, incapacity, spermatorrhoea, sterility, cauterisation and galvanism. Just published, 1s., by post 13 stamps: 18 sealed—" Marriage, its obligations, happiness and disappointments". Mann, Cornhill, or Author, as above.

Charles Culverwell was also involved in both amateur and professional theatre as an actor. In that field, he later claimed to have given his career a leg up by publishing lavish reviews of his own performances in the Theatrical journal. On a trip to America in 1862-1864 he tried both professions. As a surgeon he served for the Union army in the American Civil War, mostly in St Louis and New Orleans (with the aid of a testimonial from P.T. Barnum, whom he encountered by chance in a hotel lobby). As an actor he played with little success in performances in New York and Washington, where he appeared on stage in Hamlet with the later assassin John Wilkes Booth playing the title role.

However, after his return to England his career in the theatre advanced apace: in the words of the Oxford DNB ,

A slightly crooked mouth and heavy eyelids lent him a quizzical or mystified look that only enhanced his appeal. As his wavy hair turned from brown to silver his charisma increased. Seldom in fifty years on the stage did he fail to capture the men's admiration or the women's hearts. With the sole exception of Ellen Terry, no British player of his era surpassed his ability to sway the audience by the power of personal charm.

Gradually Dr Charles Culverwell, the agony uncle of Great Marlborough Street, faded from view: after 1882 he no longer submitted his name to the Medical Directory and in 1886 he changed his name formally from Charles Culverwell to to his stage name of Charles Wyndham. A warning to those who assume that disappearance of a name from the Medical Directory means that the person concerned had died -– though in a sense, Dr Culverwell had died. In 1890 when the Surgeon General's Office in Washington D.C. needed to get in touch with Dr Culverwell, the Post Office in London replied that there was no trace of him, though at the time he was starring at the Criterion Theatre, with his new name in lights above Piccadilly Circus. His only continuing connection with the medical world was a willingness to put on fund-raising performances for hospitals such as the Middlesex. Wyndham was knighted in 1902 and died in 1919.

The 1889 photograph of Wyndham by Barraud (above) thoroughly bears out the pen-picture in the Oxford DNB (click on the image to enlarge it). The portrait has recently been added to the Wellcome Library and joins other portraits of public performers such as acrobats, preachers, singers, quack-doctors and horse-tamers.

Wyndham was familiar with the illusory qualities of human identity. In one play that he produced, critics praised the convincing performance of an unknown actor, named as Mr Crabbe, playing the part of a French waiter. Enquiries revealed that the part was played not by an actor at all but by a real Frenchman employed as a waiter at one of Wyndham's father's hotels. How many layers of representation does that make?

Sources
John Malcolm Bulloch, 'Sir Charles Wyndham's family, the Culverwells', Notes and queries, 27 April 1935: 290-294
George Rowell, 'An acting assistant surgeon', Nineteenth century theatre research, 12 (1984): 25-38

Photograph of Sir Charles Wyndham: Wellcome Library no. 672836i.
Photograph of Wyndham's theatre by Vivido, 29 December 2008 some rights reserved