Norway in archives and manuscripts

Norway's National Day (celebrating the adoption of the Norwegian Constitution in 1814) seems like a good occasion to consider the quite diverse material relating to that country among archival and manuscript collections in the Wellcome Library.

Given Sir Henry Wellcome's interests in travel and exploration it is perhaps not surprising that Norwegian Polar explorers are to be found represented in the Explorers Cuttings Books among the archives of the Wellcome Foundation and that there is correspondence with Otto Sverdrup in the 1890s about the gift of Burroughs Wellcome products in Private Letter Book 2, besides substantial materials relating to the marketing of pharmaceuticals in the Nordic countries at a rather later date. We can also note the acquisition of artefacts relating to medicine in Norway by the Historical Medical Museum, and the mention of several institutions there as recipients of transferred museum objects in the 1980s.

Records of British travellers to Norway can be found from the late nineteenth century, from individuals such as Charles Brodie Sewell, whose travel diary of a trip to Norway in 1888 can be found at MS.4512 (his very extensive documenting of his travels was described in an earlier post on this blog), and Sir Thomas Lewis, who made a hunting trip there c. 1900 (PP/LEW/B.2), to groups such as the Travelling Surgical Society, which visited Oslo and Bergen in 1949 (SA/TSS.2/17) and the Medical Pilgrims, whose Norwegian 'pilgrimage' took place in 1982 (SA/PIL/A.2/2). It also formed a popular venue for numerous conferences throughout the twentieth century, for a wide assortment of groups including district nurses, midwives, health visitors, women doctors, microbiologists.

The persistence of leprosy in Norway after it had died out in the rest of Europe is reflected among the papers of leading leprologist Sir Leonard Rogers (PP/ROG/C.13/7).

The papers of Lieutenant-Colonel J.W. Wayte, RAMC, among the Royal Army Medical Corps Muniment Collection, include his War Diary as officer commanding 189 Field Ambulance during evacuation from Norway, April-May 1940, and an appreciation of the operations in April 1940 from a medical viewpoint (RAMC/1952/2-4). The papers of Papers of Brigadier Sir John Knox Smith Boyd also include, among other reports  from blood transfusion teams in the field, those of North West Europe force in Norway, 1940.

Records of a number of organisations among our holdings contain material relating to their interactions with Norwegian counterparts and collaborators.

This little exercise not only illuminates our holdings specifically relating to Norway, it indicates the extent to which material in A&M is very far from being relevant only to the UK and that it has a significant geographical reach reflecting connections with continental Europe as well as the Americas and areas formerly part of the British Empire.

Portrait of a lady in Nizamabad: Isabel Kerr. Wellcome Library Item of the Month.

Photograph by G.M. Kerr, 1926. Wellcome Library no. 726380i.

This photographic print is one of the apparently few and elusive portraits of Isabel Kerr (1875-1932), a Methodist missionary who founded the Victoria Treatment Hospital for people with leprosy at Dichpali, near Nizamabad in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India.

Born Isabel Gunn, she had graduated MB ChB at Aberdeen in 1903, and arrived in India with her husband, the Rev. George McGlashan Kerr, in 1907. They noticed the frequency of leprosy and the unsatisfactory treatment of its victims, and having resolved to do something about it, received a donation of 10,000 rupees (£590) from a citizen of Nizamabad, Narsa Gowd, towards a leprosy hospital. In 1913 a gift of 60 acres of land at Dichpali (also called Dichpalli), a village ten miles down the railway line from Nizamabad to the city of Hyderabad, was received from the Nizam of Hyderabad. With further funds from Narsa Gowd and others, the hospital opened on 18 April 1915. [1]

The hospital expanded rapidly owing to demand, and by 1921 it consisted of 120 buildings. Further buildings were added in 1923 when the Minister of Finance of Hyderabad, A. Hydari (later Sir Akbar Hydari) opened more new buildings, again paid for by the Nizam. The running costs from 1910 to 1944 were subsidised by the Mission to Lepers, from 7 Bloomsbury Square, London (since 1965 known as The Leprosy Mission).

In 1920 Isabel Kerr adopted the treatment using oil of the chaulmoogra tree, which she learnt from Ernest Muir in Calcutta. It is presumably a chaulmoogra injection (excruciating for the patient) that is shown in the photograph. An Indian variation of the treatment used the related hydnocarpus plant, which was cultivated along with cinchona in the Nilgiri hills.

At Dichpali there was no shortage of patients, but in too many cases they were the wrong kind for treatment. The Rev. G.M. Kerr described how, in the early stage, when the disease was infectious and treatment would be most effective, patients would hide their symptoms. Only much later would they go for treatment, when the hydnocarpus oil could do nothing to undo the mutilations caused by the bacillus decades previously. Kerr compared the treatment-after-the-event at Dichpali to a clifftop where people were in danger of falling off: it would be better to install a rail at the top than a casualty station at the bottom. To encourage people to be treated in the early stages of leprosy, the Kerrs therefore opened an outpatient clinic in Hyderabad in 1928, with the desired effect: "Students from the colleges, clerks from their offices, and Government officials from their posts" all flocked to the clinic. [2]

A second photograph in the Wellcome Library (below) shows yet another foundation-stone laying ceremony, this time in 1935.

Wellcome Library no. 749712i

The foundation stone was laid this time by Amena, Lady Hydari. By this time Isabel Kerr had died: she died in 1932, aged 57. [3] The Rev. George McGlashan Kerr continued to run the hospital after her death, until his retirement to Scotland in 1938. His archive including three photographs is in Edinburgh University. He died in 1950.

Isabel Kerr was described as "modest, shy and diffident, and reluctant to speak in public". Hence no doubt the lack of photographs of her: the opposite of the much-portrayed Albert Schweitzer, renowned for his skilful use of publicity.

As a Methodist, Isabel Kerr was doubtless familiar with, and motivated by, the words of John Wesley (1703-1791), the founder of Methodism:

"Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can."


[1] Dermott Moynahan, The story of Dichpalli, London: The Cargate Press, 1949, is the source for most of what is written here. It is a revision of his earlier book The lepers of Dichpali, London: The Cargate Press, 1938. In the earlier edition but not in the later, the present photograph of Isabel Kerr is reproduced with legend "Dr Isabel Kerr giving an injection" (facing p. 28) 

[2] Rev. G.M. Kerr, 'Tackling a great social problem: the fight with leprosy', The foreign field (of the Wesleyan Methodist Church), April 1926, pp. 155-158 

[3] Her obituary in The Lancet reads as follows (in its entirety). "Isabel Kerr, M.B. Aberd. The death is reported from Dichpali, the Leper hospital settlement outside Nizamabad, of Dr. Isabel Kerr, the Scottish medical missionary, who has made this institution the outstanding centre in South India for the treatment of leprosy, and for training in diagnosis and treatment. Born at Fochabers-on-Spey in 1875, she graduated in medicine at Aberdeen in 1903, and went to India with her husband, the Rev. George M. Kerr, who is superintendent of the Wesleyan Mission Station at Nizamabad. She had charge for 12 years of the mission hospital there until the foundation of the Dichpali Home, where husband and wife have worked devotedly ever since. In 1923 she was awarded the Kaisar-i-Hind gold medal in recognition of her services." (The Lancet, 31 December 1932, pp. 1460-1461) 

Portrait of John Wesley: mezzotint by J. Faber after J. Williams, 1743. Wellcome Library no. 9621i.

Gimme some skin, man

Last week I attended as invited commentator a fascinating and thought-provoking conference, ‘Scratching the Surface: the history of skin, its diseases, and their treatment’, held at the University of Birmingham Medical School under the auspices of the History of Medicine Unit at Birmingham and Trent University (Ontario), with support from the Wellcome Trust and the Society for the Social History of Medicine. Many of the speakers were familiar faces from their researches in the Wellcome Library.

With twenty papers packed into the course of two days, this conference was both dense and wide-ranging. The periods and places under discussion ranged from eighteenth-century London, Italy and Quebec to 1980s San Francisco, via Mexico City in the 1790s, the nineteenth century Maghreb under French colonialism, Hong Kong and its New Territories under British rule before the Second World War, and mid-twentieth century Uganda. The conference was kicked off to an excellent start by Philip Wilson’s keynote, ‘Reading the Skin, Discerning the Landscape: Geohistorical Depictions of the Human Surface’.

Among the rich spread of topics discussed were the apparently new disease of pellagra in eighteenth century Italy (already associated with maize-eating, in the form of polenta, at that early date); Admiral Francis Beaufort (of wind-scale fame)’s skin disease and its diagnoses both contemporary and more recent; outbreaks of skin conditions believed to be specific to a particular area (St Paul’s Bay Disease in Quebec, ‘Radesygge’ in Norway, the lesions observed among the indigenous population of the Mahgreb); Percival Pott and his colleagues treating wounds at Barts in the eighteenth century; scrotal cancer in chimney-sweeps; vaccination, tattooing and ‘dermographia’; light therapy for lupus in the early twentieth century.

A theme that pervaded the conference was the important of visual depictions of skin diseases and the quest for accurate reproduction of various dermatological phenomena, through water-colour paintings, wax modelling and the preservation of specimens, and the important role these played both in teaching medical students and in health education. Another theme was the common perception that manifestations on the skin signified deeper problems within the bodily system. While many papers dealt with this question of what was false within appearing on the surface, others dealt with the penetration of the skin by outside forces, whether this was the wound treated by the surgeon, the surgeon’s own penetrating knife or scalpel wounding to heal, the soot ingrained in the skin of climbing boys, the lancet of the vaccinator, the needles of the tattooist, or the entry into the system of woolsorters of the anthrax bacillus.

The wider cultural concerns which, as it were, were perceived as writing themselves on the skin or explored through dermatological issues were strongly represented. To take just one example, the ‘Itch’ in early modern London was not merely associated generally with the more degraded social elements, it was particularly associated with the Scots who, following the Act of Union, were seen as that era’s flood of undesirable immigrants to the metropolis.

The presence of the particularly stigmatised ailments of leprosy and syphilis was prevalent: one redolent of Biblical horror and the other of God’s punishment for immorality. The attitudes they created towards sores and lesions on the skin seem to have become intricately imbricated in attitudes towards other diseases which manifested similarly.

As may be imagined, providing a few summary concluding remarks was a far from easy task with so many excellent papers and such a variety of topics, but some attempt was made to draw out common themes and resonances, including the need for caution in, so to speak, deciphering the messages written on the skin and not turning these into simplistic dramatic or moralistic narratives.

It is anticipated that a publication will ensue from this stimulating event.