Brain Season on Radio 4

This week sees the beginning of BBC Radio 4's Brain Season.

The centrepiece of the season will be a new 10-part series, A History of the Brain, presented by Dr Geoff Bunn. The series airs at 1.45pm, Monday to Friday, for the next two weeks with an omnibus edition on Friday evenings at 9pm. The series will also be available as a podcast. Audio clips of the series are also available on the Radio 4 website, accompanied by an array of historical imagery from our picture libray, Wellcome Images.

Also airing today at 8pm will be The Lobotomists, which explores the controversial history of the lobotomy. As part of the research for the programme, Dr Lesley Hall, Senior Archivist, Wellcome Library, spoke to the makers of the documentary about the Watts-Freeman lobotomy instruments we hold in our collections (the image above shows Dr Hall brandishing one of these tools).

The Lobotomists, A History of the Brain and the rest of the Brain Season will available for listeners in the UK to listen to after broadcast through the BBC iPlayer, for the next seven days. Listeners outwith these shores are able to listen live through the Radio 4 website.

Wellcome Library Insight - Fascinating Faces

This Thursday afternoon (16th June) offers another chance to explore the provocative idea that faces can be 'read', through our free Fascinating Faces 'Insight' session.

This session will explore face reading, from its origins in Ancient Greece and China up to present day security debates on facial recognition.

Our Insight sessions give visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. Sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

This Thursday's session starts at 3pm, and tickets are available from the Wellcome Collection Information Desk from 1.30pm onwards. For more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Image: J.C. Lavater, Essays on physiognomy, translated by Henry Hunter, D.D. London: John Murray, 1789-1798. Volume I, page 96, group of faces set in a circle.

Item of the Month: 'Business Head of the Future'

Recently re-discovered in a corner of the storage rooms was a modest, thin volume that revealed the economic hope of the future in earlier times, when faith was placed in one man. It was none other than David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer who became Prime Minister. But on what basis did the author have such confidence in him? It was quite simply that he had a large head which bulged in the right places. If I tell you that it was written by Brighton's brightest phrenologist, J Millott Severn, this might help explain why it came to be and why the shape of the Chancellor's skull was significant.

The enterprising 'bump reader' had measured Lloyd George's head some ten years earlier and concluded that the it had physically grown, reflecting the internal growth of his remarkable mental powers. Shrewdly, Severn was making the most of his celebrity clients to bolster his own reputation.

Severn was typical of those self-made phrenologists first emerging during the Victorian era when the popularity of this practise was at its height. The descendent of Derbyshire Quakers, he is celebrated by locals as a favourite son of Codnor, after achieving some success and a decent living from his self-promotion. Having toured extensively around Britain, Severn's autobiography gives an intriguing insight of vernacular life up and down the country, often going behind the closed doors of private homes. (In one such domicile, he is alarmed to see the offspring with a learning disorder chained to a wall and he is asked to give a pronouncement on the severity of the condition.)

Flying in the face of accepted medical knowledge Severn is insistent that his tape measure proved an adult's cranium could expand. I wonder if Lloyd George's luxurious locks of later years could possibly have added something along the way. As any phrenologist will tell you, size does matter and the bigger the better. For a look into the original world of phrenology you can browse the original Phrenological Journal here in the Library or see any of our 659 holdings on phrenology.

Below are some examples of phrenological readings of past celebrities; Charles Dickens (ref : L0067697) and Robert Peel (ref: L0007584) from Wellcome Images:


The analysis of Charles Dickens is from Mary O. Stanton's Encyclopaedia of face and form reading. For a more detailed explanation of the less flattering image of Peel see our catalogue record.

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing statistics: December 2010

In the weeks before Christmas work proceeded on various long-running projects within and outside the online database. As mentioned last month, behind the scenes retroconversion work continues on the catalogue of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists (SA/CSP), completion of which will bring all our archive catalogues onto the database after ten years' work. We are also coming close to the end of a project to fine-tune the catalogue of the Royal Army Medical Corps collection (one of our most heavily-used) and make it suitable for online ordering: we hope to say more about this next month. The highlights of new cataloguing for this month, however - that is to say, cataloguing completed and made available to the public, as opposed to work proceeding on longer-term projects - all come from the manuscript collection.

The image at the head of this posting (from Wellcome Images) is of James Braid (1795-1860), the Manchester surgeon and general practitioner to whom we owe our modern understanding of hypnosis (and indeed the very word). Franz Anton Mesmer had described the phenomenon in the late 18th and early 19th century, but had ascribed it to disturbances in a “magnetic fluid” that surrounds us all, created by the mesmeric operator waving their hands, having a physical impact on the subject. Braid re-examined the phenomenon and described it in terms of a neurological state brought on by concentration, placing it in the field of psychology rather than physics. Newly visible in the database is a letter by Braid (previously part of the old Wellcome Library Autograph Letters Sequence, and thus only accessible using a card index in the reading room), in which he discusses another late 18th century concept by this stage relegated to the fringes of crankdom, namely phrenology. (MS.8756)

Turning to fiction, we made available two unpublished works of fiction (or lightly fictionalised autobiography) by Colonel Frederick Smith, CB, CMG, DSO (1858-1933) of the Royal Army Medical Corps. There are versions of a novel set in Sierra Leone - "The White Man's Grave"- in 1898 (the year of the Sierra Leone Rising against the imposition of a hut tax following declaration of British Protectorate status), and an account of service as a medical officer in France in the early months of World War I. The papers are described in more detail in a recent blog posting. (MS.8701)

Finally, we also made available some papers relating Professor Cyril Keele, FRCP (1905-1987), pharmacologist, and his research on pain. (MS.8755)

Wellcome Library Insight - Fascinating Faces

This Thursday afternoon (6th May) offers another chance to explore the provocative idea that faces can be 'read', through our free Fascinating Faces 'Insight' session.

This session will explore face reading, from its origins in Ancient Greece and China up to present day security debates on facial recognition.

Our Insight sessions give visitors to the Wellcome Library an opportunity to explore the variety of our holdings. Sessions are thematic in style, last around an hour and offer a chance to learn about our collections from a member of Library staff.

This Thursday's session starts at 3pm, and tickets are available from the Wellcome Collection Information Desk from 1.30pm onwards. For more details, see the Wellcome Collection website.

Identity Exposed

How do you spot a liar? What features do aggressive hockey players have in common? Calling all seekers of the shady secrets of face-reading, this is your chance to delve into a centuries old world of knowledge known to its practitioners as Physiognomy.

See its powerful influence across many cultures and wonder at the free 'teeth and ears' guide. Your host for this adventure in human character is awaiting you at the Wellcome Library. Just turn up on Thursday 3rd December in time for a 3.00pm start for Fascinating Faces, the talk lasts for an hour in the viewing room. You may never look at people the same way again...