Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing statistics: November 2010

This month's cataloguing statistics for archives and manuscripts, like last month's, are dominated by two major groups of archive records. (New cataloguing accounts for all the records added to the database, although behind the scenes retroconversion work continues on the catalogue of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapists (SA/CSP).)

The first of our new cataloguing highlights is the archive of Henry V. Dicks (1900-1977), psychiatrist (PP/HVD). Dicks’s papers cover two highly contentious topics: sex and fascism. In the aftermath of the Second World War Dicks interviewed many former Nazis as part of research into questions about authoritarian psychology and collective psychopathology. Later, his work at the Tavistock Institute centred on marital dysfunction and the couple as a unit of therapy. His papers comprise 14 boxes and are described in more detail in a recent blog posting.

Our second highlight relates to the archive of Action on Smoking and Health (SA/ASH), or ASH, which has been held at the Wellcome Library since the early 1990s. The organisation is still an active one and thus, of course, generates new material for the archive: recent transfers have now been catalogued and the result is a doubling in size of the collection, now comprising 167 boxes and including material up to the early 21st century. The new material documents a period when the tobacco industry was very much on the defensive, striking back against attempts to restrict its advertising and sponsorship activities. Again, a recent blog posting describes the additions in more detail.

A third highlight relates not so much to new content for the archives database, as to what one can do with that content. Library users will be aware that archive and manuscript material is ordered online using the same system (the same reader's ticket, the same password, and the same interface) as one uses to order books from the stacks. In order to make this happen, periodic movements of data between the two databases have to happen: item-level records - those records that relate to an actual file or volume that can be consulted in the reading room as opposed to records from higher in the hierarchy that represent bigger intellectual groupings - have to be harvested from the archive database, converted to the appropriate printed-matter standard and loaded to the main catalogue. Our last harvest took place on either side of the final weekend in November, and moved over 14,000 new records into the main catalogue, making it possible to order much recently-catalogued or recently-retroconverted material. Collections affected include the papers of Sir Ernest Chain (PP/EBC), Alice Stewart (PP/AMS), the MRC Blood Group Unit (SA/BGU) and many others set out in recent cataloguing bulletins (see October, September and August for some recent examples).

Image: a montage of items from the archives of Action on Smoking and Health (ASH), supplied by Wellcome Images.

Anti-Smoking Archive Grows!

The archives of the anti-smoking charity ASH, held by the Wellcome Library, have almost doubled in size, with the addition of 80 boxes of newly catalogued material. The new material covers a very interesting period in the fight against smoking, when organisations such as ASH campaigned for cigarette advertising to be banned. It was widely stated that without the sponsorship of tobacco companies, many sports would not be able to afford to continue in the same way. Formula One was singled out as being particularly at risk – just try telling that to Lewis Hamilton!

The picture above is taken from an anti-smoking comic called “Smokescreens”, released in 1992 by ASH and ASH Northern Ireland. In the comic, a teenage brother and sister go to visit their mother in hospital. On the way, they bump into friends who are going to a concert, and it becomes clear that they both smoke regularly. Later, at the hospital, they find out that their mother’s illness is caused by smoking – in fact, just like them, she used to smoke to make herself look more mature. This story is presented by the fictional “Ray Cathode” of “Masters Cigarettes” who boasts that his company “are behind all your favourite sports – snooker, rugby, motor-racing, darts…” and are moving into sponsoring music (such as the concert being attended by the siblings friends). The final two images in the comic show a coughing teenage smoker next to the frail mother in a hospital bed, struggling to breathe through an oxygen mask.

The full catalogue of the ASH archives can be found by searching the Archives and Manuscripts online catalogue. Information about similar material can be found in the Archives and Manuscripts sources leaflet on smoking and tobacco.

Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing: October 2010

Our monthly cataloguing bulletin for October is short: not because of a lack of activity, but because the vast majority of the material newly released to the public falls into two major collections, both already described on the blog.

Wellcome Witness Seminars: as noted last month, the catalogue of material documenting the Wellcome Witness Seminars held over the past twenty years has been subject to a major expansion: recent seminars were added to the catalogue completely recasting the arrangment of the catalogue and doubling its size. This new material includes original audio tapes of the seminars (in some cases, master plus copy), photographs of witnesses and other participants, correspondence, and programmes and lists of participants. The new catalogue was made visible in early October, and described here. It can be browsed in the archives catalogue using the reference GC/253.

Alice Stewart: as noted in another recent blog posting, this month saw the completion of work on the papers of Alice Stewart (née Naish). These chiefly relate to her career in epidemiology, especially on effects of low-level radiation. She worked with John Ryle in the Department of Social Medicine at Oxford and was famously involved in a controversy with Sir Richard Doll over her childhood cancer study conclusions. The bulk of the papers relate to the later phases of her career from the 1970s onwards, although there is some material relating to her earlier activities: there is professional correspondence from the 1960s until the time of her death, copious records of her research activities, and numerous files relating to her involvement in lawsuits as an expert witness on vibration sydrome and on the effects of low-dose radiation. Her extensive travels to speak in both academic and other venues, particularly from the 1970s, are well-documented, as is her support for organisations and activist groups concerned about radiation and the environment, among these the Women's Protest at Greenham Common. Finally, there is some personal and family material, including material on her mother (an early woman doctor), and letters from the poet and critic William Empson with whom she had a relationship spanning several decades.

Finally, a new sources guide was added to the archives section of the website, detailing sources relating to Smoking and Tobacco, and a catalogue record created for this so that searchers in the database could be directed to this listing.

Image: old Wellcome Library printed catalogues, from Wellcome Images.

Smoking with the 'Family Doctor'

As today is No Smoking Day in the UK, we felt it was a worthwhile opportunity to flag up a few items from the Wellcome Library's collections relating to tobacco. This in itself is no easy feat, given a simple word search on 'tobacco' on our online catalogue brings up nearly 1200 results...

We've decided to focus on two representations of doctors and one real-life epidemiologist. In discussing our Wellcome Film digitization project, we've previously flagged up the unhealthy habits of Nick O'Teen. Today we've turned to Smoking and You, produced by the Ministry of Health in 1963.



In Smoking and You, charts show the increase in cigarette sales between 1910 and 1960, as well as the increase in deaths from lung cancer. A doctor addresses the camera, warning of the risks to health from smoking and adds that he himself smoked until seeing the damage it caused to his patients.

Less than 20 years before, the (albeit fictional) Doctor narrating Family Doctor (1946), offers a very different attitude toward smoking, going as far as to offer a patient a cigarette to calm her nerves. For much of the film, the Doctor is seen puffing away on a pipe: an object as vital to his air of medical familiarity as his three-piece suit and gentlemanly manner.



This change from our smoking doctor of 1946 to one warning of the dangers of cigarettes in 1963 can in great part be put down to the research of Sir Richard Doll, who helped determine the link between smoking and lung cancer, as part of work carried out whilst he was part of the Statistical Research Unit of the Medical Research Council (the findings of which were first published in the British Medical Journal in 1950).

Sir Richard Doll's papers are now part of the Wellcome Library's archives and manuscripts collections (reference PP/DOL), and were drawn upon for Doll's authorised biography, Conrad Keating's Smoking Kills: The Revolutionary Life of Sir Richard Doll, which was published late last year.

Doll was a smoker, but just like our Doctor in Smoking and You, gave up when the evidence in front of him convinced him to change his ways. Doll's research may even have been enough for our Family Doctor to stop sharing cigarettes with his patients, and even put out his pipe.

Wellcome Film has a new homepage

Wellcome Film, the Library's film digitisation project, has a new home page. This page includes a dedicated search function for this collection. Some interesting keyword suggestions are: 'birth', 'diabetes' and 'brain tumour.' The search returns results from our online catalogue providing comprehensive descriptions of the titles and links to the videos.

Follow the highlighted links on the new homepage to see some of our video suggestions on topics ranging from the tsetse fly to Russian recreations of Pavlov's conditioning experiments.

The search term 'public health' will find public information films on medicine and health provided by the BFI National Archive, such as the following video Dying for a smoke (1967), a cartoon warning schoolchildren against smoking:

Wellcome Film also has its own YouTube channel with a selection of titles from our collections.