Recollections from a Visit to Anna Botsford Comstock's Lake Cottage

Anna and Henry Comstock

Every reader of the Handbook of Nature Study (the book) knows who Anna Botsford Comstock is....the esteemed author of our nature study guide and lessons. She wrote the words that have touched my personal life in such a profound way, changing how we view the world in our own backyard. She may have touched your life in a similar way through the pages of the Handbook of Nature Study as you worked through the Outdoor Hour Challenges.


When the opportunity was offered to me a few years ago to visit and actually stay at her cottage in New York outside Ithaca, I wasn't able to make the trip at that time. It was on my mind a lot through the years so when a last minute trip involved traveling in New York came up last month, I immediately contacted the family that now owns the cottage to see if it was available during our visit. It was! We made arrangements to stay for three days in the cottage that Anna and Henry Comstock built on the shore of Lake Cayuga.

" During the fall of 1906, we were making habitable The Hermitage, our summer cottage on Cayuga Lake. We put a large window in the living room which gave us a wide view of the lake. This room was given a hardwood floor and was ceiled, to make it warm. Here we set up the wood stove that had been in my mother's parlor when I was a child. It had a grate and in the evenings we opened up its front doors; this made it as cheerful as a fireplace." Anna Botsford Comstock

It was just like I imagined it...set in the woods, right near the water's edge. The birds, flowers, and trees were those that Anna wrote about in her books. It was warm and cozy and somehow familiar.



We sat on the porch and enjoyed the sounds of the woods. The lake glistened as the sunset on that first day. I climbed into bed and thought how it must have been there over a hundred years ago when the Comstocks first built the cottage.

Sunrise Walk in the Woods

"Harry and I spent weekends there, and on each trip he would walk the mile and a half from Taughannock Station to The Hermitage, carrying on his back a basket filled with materials for fixing the house.The labor my husband performed in and about this place was remarkable." Anna Botsford Comstock

The next morning I was up early for a walk in the woods. I ventured out alone for the first hike and as I stepped off the porch I heard birdsong and glimpsed a young deer sneaking across the road into a thicket of bushes. The woods woke up as I hiked up the trail and my eyes were trying hard to take in all the sights.



The green of the new spring leaves, the thin trunks of the trees, the rustlings of birds and the cry of the mourning doves. These were Anna's woods. This was the place that helped inspire her to share her love of nature with teachers and children, bringing them into a relationship with common everyday things in their world.


There was teasel by the trail...new to me in person but familiar through the pages of the Handbook of Nature Study.  Advanced preparation does work...I recognized it right away and remember that she had called it " a plant in armor".

Sunrise Paddle

"He added paths and built a fine wharf and a double-decked boat house, in the upper part of which we swung our hammocks, and from which we enjoyed the glory of many sunsets. The Hermitage was always a place where work was play; we dumped our cares at the Ithaca station when we left, but they were always waiting to jump at us on our return." Anna Botsford Comstock

I made my way back to the cottage and by this time the boys were up and ready for the day. My husband and Mr. A took out the canoe onto the morning smooth water of the lake. Exploring a new place by water...leaving their cares behind as they paddled across the surface of the lake in the early morning sunrise.


Mr. B and I decided to take another hike through the woods and this time we noticed the wildflowers. These were the wildflowers of Anna's books...the ones we don't have in California.

The whole weekend was filled with the opening of eyes and hearts to a magical place, gently teaching us the way of the New York woods in which we found ourselves. One day it rained and we watched the drops fall from our dry spot on the porch. The fragrance of the wet woods was delightful...different than our Northern California woods. The rain stopped and we grilled dinner on the stone fire pit down by the water. We skipped rocks, sat and watched the fisherman go by on their little boats, and we shed our cares, refreshed.



At the end of the weekend, we had made many entries into our nature journals, took lots of photos, and made some memories of our own at this lakeside cottage.

We will always remember our weekend spent on Lake Cayuga at the Comstock's beloved Hermitage Cottage. Special thanks to Christiana and Alison who graciously opened up their family cottage to our family, making this trip to New York even more special.

I hope my readers enjoyed glimpsing our weekend....we all need to remember to build in our families a rich heritage of outdoor experiences. Who knows who it will touch in the future?

Here is the original webpage that Christiana posted on the Cornell website, Celebrate Urban Birds, that sparked our friendship:
Barb-Harmony Art Mom
Next time I will share our day at Cornell's Lab of Ornithology and Sapsucker Woods! More connections were made to the Handbook of Nature Study.

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.

Colouring in the last bits: the end of an era

Exactly ten years ago, on April 26th 2002, one of the Library's archivists sat at a PC and started our archive catalogue programme, went through various options to set up an import of data, selected the source file and clicked OK...
...and a matter of seconds later, our archive database had received its first load of converted catalogue data and we had set out on a journey from paper to digital, a journey completed a few days ago with the conversion of our last paper archive list.

It is hard, now, to think back to those early days, so accustomed are Library users and staff to the archive database. The complexities of rendering a hierarchical archive catalogue on the screen - plus, for a long time, a lack of agreement as to what an archive catalogue should actually do [1] - meant that good catalogue software for archives developed more slowly than that for libraries, and it was only in the 1990s that a move to database catalogues gained some momentum. (Happily, this took place at the same time as the explosion in use of the World Wide Web, so archive catalogues when they did arrive were able to jump straightaway to giving readers web access, rather than forcing them to work with pre-web technologies such as Telnet.) Up till that time, the reader wanting to use our archives and manuscripts sources was confronted by six meaty published volumes of manuscript cataloguing, and some two hundred spiral-bound word-processed lists of twentieth-century archive collections.

For the reader wanting a particular organisation or individual's papers, this worked, and usership was steady. For the reader wanting thematic access across the collection, however, life was much harder. Some topics, of course, came up repeatedly, and for these we compiled sources guides describing material relating to particular themes or areas: many of these, radically recast and updated, are still to be found on our website. For the reader with a new, unusual or quirky topic, however, rather than one of the staples such as shell-shock or abortion, it could be difficult to know where to start. A few years ago, for instance, a user of the Rare Materials Room wanted to know about our sources relating to Marmite: the sort of question that would have been virtually impossible to answer before the database. [2]

The database was to revolutionise all this, and to democratise access to archives and manuscripts profoundly. It enabled readers to ask the questions that they wanted to have answered, not simply the ones we had managed to predict; and by opening up the database to a wider range of enquiries, saw some hitherto quieter areas of the collection, such as the American manuscripts, receiving heavier use than ever before.

First, though, we had to get the data into it. The turn of the Millennium saw a large number of collaborative exercises launched to get archive data onto the web, and it was from one of these that our first converted catalogues came. Access to Archives, or A2A, was a programme dedicated to converting archive catalogues to web-readable form and mounting them on the National Archives website, enabling a web presence for those many repositories which, at that stage, did not have their own site. One strand of the project worked to convert documents relating to London's contacts with the wider world, through exploration, trade and colonism, and it was material submitted to this which came back to us as a digital file in early 2002 and was loaded on that fateful April 26th. Among the items made available to readers in that first tranche were the journals of naval surgeon Fleetwood Buckle (MSS.1395-1404 and 5656), the papes of Sir James Cantlie, the tropical medicine specialist (MSS.1456-1499, 6931-6941 & 7920-7941), the diaries of the Tsimshian Native American Arthur Wellington Clah (WMS/Amer.140)... we were up and running.

From that point onwards, the process of retroconversion (to use the appropriate jargon) never stopped. We experimented with cutting and pasting word-processed catalogue into the database but the process was so complex (most of the old lists had been laid out on the page with copious paragraph markers and tab-stops, all of which needed to be removed) that it worked out quicker and cheaper to re-key catalogues. A dedicated project officer started work that year, working entire days at marking up catalogues in coloured pens (each colour corresponding to a database field) before posting the results to New Delhi, from which a spreadsheet of rekeyed data would appear with terrifying speed in the inbox. Little by little, several thousand records at a time, the database grew; little by little the profits of a particular stationers' on Cleveland Street, which boasted the best selection of coloured markers in Fitzrovia, swelled. At the end of this project, well over 75% of our data was in there. In the time since then, members of the archives department have converted the remaining catalogues in spare half-hours here and there (evening and Saturday duties have been particularly fertile times). Now, that era has ended. After a little under ten years, the final catalogue has been converted and loaded: the catalogue of the Chartered Society of Physiotherapy's papers, which had drawn the short straw and ended up last of all, was converted and loaded last week. You have only to go to Wellcome Images and search for the phrase SA/CSP to get an idea of the sort of things now described online: we expect the scrapbooks on the "massage scandals" that led to the CSP's formation to notch up a large number of hits all on their own...

2012, then, sees the end of an era: all of our archive catalogues online at last. It comes, as luck would have it, just as a new set of technical developments needs work: the wholesale digitisation of archive holdings, among other library materials, and the need to make catalogue records and images link up in as smooth and seamless an experience for the reader as we can manage. The archivists, needless to say, are not putting their feet up at this particular moment; it is, however, time for a few minutes of retrospect and quiet satisfaction as a long-running project comes to a close.

[1] For those who are interested, the breakthrough came in 1997 when the International Council on Archives set out the snappily-named ISAD(G) - the International Standard on Archival Description (General).
[2] It turns out that we have quite a few.

Images:
1/ The import screen for our CALM archive catalogue programme (backstage client): further information from the manufacturers here.
2/ Napoleon's tomb, St. Helena, from MS.1395, one of the papers of Fleetwood Buckle that were among the first items to be loaded to the database.
3/ Some of the actual pens used in retroconversion, kept for posterity.

Extreme traveller of the early C20th

John Fulton Barr as a young man

A small collection of papers of John Fulton Barr (1868-1954) has just been catalogued and is now available for reader use. Barr qualified in medicine at the University of Glasgow in 1891. According to the donor of the papers, after the relatively tame postgraduate enterprise of going to Paris to study ophthalmology, Barr then joined in the Klondike Gold Rush, an episode in his career sadly not covered by the diaries and other items we hold.

Early in 1900, like so many of his compatriots, he sailed from England to serve in the Boer War. This period of his life is covered by three diaries (PP/JFB/A.1/1-3) and nearly 100 black and white photographs showing a very wide variety of aspects of the life he encountered in South Africa. There are also a couple of postcards from him to a Miss Isabelle Carmichael of Kilmalcolm, Renfrewshire. These materials form a welcome addition to our already significant holdings relating to the war in South Africa, 1899-1902, a topic of continuing interest to researchers.

Following this episode, Barr went to Japan, and was involved in a business venture - a salmon cannery - on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Siberia. Over the years he made several expeditions into this wild volcanic region. Even these days this area presents huge challenges for the traveller because of its inaccessibility and rugged terrain, although a tourism industry is developing. His surviving diary 1907-1909 describes his travels in Japan, China, and Russia and his expeditions into Kamchatka

There are frustratingly no diaries for the period from 1909 until 1917. Thus, although Barr was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the RAMC in August 1914, we only have an account of his war service from November 1917, along with a little, mostly official, correspondence. He was discharged from service in 1919, taking a position as surgeon on one of the ships repatriating chinese labourers after the War, in order to return to Asia.

After further travels in the Far East, and also trips to North America, the Baltic and Australia, Barr returned to the UK.  According to the Medical Directory he held a few hospital medical officer posts in Scotland, before establishing himself in Unstone, Derbyshire (near Sheffield), where he continued to reside after his retirement from practice c. 1940, and to keep up his diaries. He continued to take extended periods of travel: apart from fairly frequent trips to Scotland (mainly Gelston) and a couple to Ireland, he went to South America in 1924 and South Africa in 1932, revisited Japan in 1939, and visited Sri Lanka in 1940, as well as going to Wengen, Switzerland, on  several occasions during the 1930s.

John Fulton Barr in the 1940s

There is a complete run of his diaries covering his career and travels from 1917 until 1948, although according to the British Medical Journal Barr did not die until 1954.

This collection, though small, offers considerable riches to the researcher, adding to our existing treasure-trove of unpublished travel writings as well to our extensive holdings on War, Medicine and Health, and illuminates an unusual and enterprising medical life-course.

Nature Study When You Travel - Kona Coffee Farms

Vacation nature study is a great way to learn more about the natural beauty and richness of a new place. We always try to include learning in our travel time and Hawaii affords some unique opportunities.

Especially for coffee lovers. Which I am....a lover of Kona coffee.

We visited two coffee farms on the Big Island of Hawaii and were able to tag along on a coffee tour at both places. The first farm was Mountain Thunder and we drove up the side of the mountain/volcano to try out their organic coffees. We met up with the tour and the first thing the guide showed us were the coffee trees.



Did you know that coffee continually blooms from February to October...at the upper elevation of this particular farm? You can have blossoms, green cherries, and red cherries all on the same branch. You harvest the berries when they are red so with coffee there is no one time harvest, it is a continual process.



We picked a few cherries ourselves, opened them up and tasted the sweet, slimy inside around the bean. There are normally two beans in every cherry (when there is only one round bean it is called a "peaberry"). The red skins are not wasted. They either compost them or make them into "Kona Red" which is a product rich in antioxidants. We were able to taste Kona Red tea and it was light and tasty.


Can you smell the heavenly aroma of coffee beans roasting? We were able to observe the whole process from bean picking to roasting at Mountain Thunder. Afterwards, we tasted coffee, sipping the steaming cups and delighting in the heady fragrance of the,100% Kona coffee. I chose a package of whole beans to bring home and enjoy here in California plus a box of dark chocolate espresso beans (haven't cracked the box yet...waiting).



Here was the resident cat at Mountain Thunder.....she looks like she needs a cup of the good stuff.


We also visited a coffee farm lower down in elevation. Greenwell Farms is a popular tourist stop and they were geared up for lots of tasting there. This was our second visit but our first time touring the farm. We were able to actually walk out and see the rows and rows of trees.



Here we saw the beans as "parchment" where they are drying in the sheds. They pull back the sliding roof and stir the beans. It was amazing how much work goes into a coffee bean to make my little cup of coffee. I know one of my readers is also a lover of Kona coffee and she drinks Greenwell Farms Chocolate Macadamia Nut Coffee (Hi Ellen!) but I am in love with their Chameleon Blend Kona Coffee. 


One last photo especially for Tricia over at Hodgepodge. Can you believe the size of these hydrangeas? These were along the road near Mountain Thunder and I thought of you when I saw them...had to stop to take a photo.


We really enjoyed the coffee farms on our trip but that was not the only opportunity we made for nature study related activities. I will post soon about our ocean adventures.

A Doctor on Holiday: World Tourism Day

Regular visitors to this Blog will know, the Wellcome Library holds the personal papers of many doctors, surgeons, medical scientists and practitioners throughout the ages. These collections, especially from the 19th century onwards, frequently include entertaining journals, notebooks, letters and ephemera generated during the course of travels, trips and holidays undertaken by these medics.

To mark World Tourism Day, we'll focus on a particularly appealing set of holiday journals: those of London-based Scottish doctor Charles Brodie Sewell (1817-1900). They comprise 18 volumes, mainly covering his trips around all parts of Britain and the resorts of Europe between 1868 and 1892 and are illustrated with much inset material such as brochures, advertisements, tickets, menus, photographs and folding maps (MSS.4498-4515). Evidently once Sewell had built up a popular and successful practice he was able to reward himself with substantial holidays when could he de-stress and make use of his many contacts abroad.

There are, however, some notable diversions from the traditional British and Continental destinations. In 1883, when he was around 65 years old Sewell and his companion (it is likely that this was his wife, but it is possible that it may have been his daughter) made a long-intended trip to the North Eastern seaboard of the United States of America and into Canada (MS.4508). During this period, September-October, he had the chance to meet American friends and colleagues, some of whom he’d only ever been able to correspond with over the years. There were also many opportunities to experience new scenery and different races and cultures as the pair traveled through the state of New York, up the Hudson River, to Lake George, Saratoga Springs, Toronto, Montreal, Lake Ontario, the Lachine Rapids, Quebec, Boston, Newport, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC.

The holiday began with the Atlantic sea crossing. This is particularly anticipated and relished by Sewell who writes an entertaining account of the two weeks from Liverpool to New York on the White Star liner Britannic. As one would expect, this takes in stormy weather, severe bouts of sea-sickness, gossip regarding fellow passengers, sporting activities on deck (tug of war, long jump and hop scotch) and complaints about the racket coming from the saloon at night.



Once the “strict and venal” searches by New York harbour customs officials were completed Sewell and his companion were free to explore the sights. The recently completed Brooklyn Bridge in New York City especially impresses Sewell who takes a ferry along the East River and passes underneath it. At this point in time it is the longest suspension bridge in the world. Anchored by two neo-Gothic towers and a complex framework of steel-wire cables it was guaranteed to amaze.



As well as striking man-made structures, magnificent natural phenomena such as Niagara Falls take up many pages in the journal. Sewell’s hotel room provides a view of the American and Canadian side of the falls, which he describes as “dazzling” and “an intoxicating sight, grand and beautiful beyond description”. A truly memorable day out, it is also characterized by the - even in the 19th century - familiar tourist sights of people offering guide services, photographs and cheap souvenirs. Viewing the Falls from a sheltered position, Sewell gleefully describes seeing two men in standard issue yellow oil skins get soaked through and looking miserable, several drenched people and "a fool" using an umbrella.

The journal contains descriptions of a great many buildings, places, sites and scenes which would not vary much from the itinerary of today’s visitors to the eastern United States and Canada. Also in not too dissimilar tourist fashion, Sewell expresses annoyance at various officials, amazement at the large portions of food in America, and gives his opinions on the standard of accommodation (overall, Canadian facilities are presented as being somewhat less comfortable than those in the United States), troublesome fellow passengers, rude hotel staff, touts, hawkers and prices. If he was alive today, one can imagine him posting comments on travel advisory websites, giving his ratings on various hotels, services, tourist sights and transportation.

What makes this (and all the other journals in this collection) all the more enjoyable are the humorous anecdotes which vividly convey Sewell’s character and opinions. At one point he describes a train journey during which he encounters an incessantly garrulous passenger who he tries to avoid by pretending to be asleep… alas to no avail!

On a more serious note - and with particular relevance to the ethos of World Tourism Day - this journal also insights into contemporary relations between the African-American and white communities in the USA and Sewell's impressions of the status of Native Americans in Canada.

Sewell’s enthusiasm for travel continued for nearly another ten years as he undertook further trips to Europe (including visiting Switzerland, Germany and parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) and England. There is a notable detour to Norway in 1888, an account lavishly illustrated with pictures of dramatic fjords and mountain landscapes (MS.4512).

Images:
- Drawing of a steam boat on the Lachine Rapids, Canada
- The saloon passenger list of the White Star Line steamship 'Britannic' for its journey from New York to Liverpool, 27th October 1883
- A general view of the Brooklyn bridge taken from Columbia Heights, Brooklyn. New York can be seen in the distance
- The view from the top of Brooklyn Tower, looking down upon the bridge and towards New York
(All images, from MS.4508).

Author: Amanda Engineer

Wyoming Road Trip Video - My Son's Creation

Want to see a teenage view of the trip?

Here is Mr. A's video: Yellowstone Trip




I told him he should make videos as a business since he is getting quite good at it. I think I watched this one about five times and I'm not tired of it yet. Something about having the photos and videos all linked together make it interesting.

Anyway, check it out....this one is only around two minutes long.

Wyoming in the Summer - Roadtrip

Roadtrip - California, Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah

Mr. A loved driving across the Nevada landscape and setting the cruise control at 75 MPH. This was his first real roadtrip where he did a lot of the driving for us. I enjoyed sitting in the passenger seat and soaking in the big skies and the distant mountains still iced with snow.

Although we enjoyed the whole trip, the star of the show was most definitely the Grand Tetons. We were able to swing a room at the Jackson Lake Lodge for part of our trip and it was great home base. It was everything a lodge should be and more.


Wyoming landscapes...sun, clouds, and terrain are quick to change.

My sons were both feeling crummy with colds when we were in the middle of our trip so the long hiking days we planned had to be adjusted. Instead, we drove one day up into Yellowstone National Park and did a quick circle tour of some interesting spots in the southern part of the park.



We walked on the boardwalks around the Lower Geyser Basin. It was a fairly active day and we got to see a couple of geysers spout that don't regularly put on a show. In fact, we got caught in the spray of one geyser....that was a first.



I spent time on the lookout for interesting wildflowers which were abundant during our trip. This Elk Thistle was interesting and beautiful as it grew alongside the boardwalk.



Our one hike of the day was down the switchback trail to the brink of Lower Yellowstone Falls. The flow was at a near record high when we were there and it was roaring down the canyon. Amazing to stand right at the edge of where the water falls over the rocks!

It was a quick Yellowstone trip but we soaked in the wonderful landscapes and made some great memories. We headed back into Grand Teton Park and alongside the road near the Jackson Lake Lodge we spotted a mama grizzly bear and her two cubs. We stopped across the road and down a little to watch the cubs playing in the meadow. This was a first for our family....we have seen lots of black bears but these were our very first grizzly bears. We didn't stay long since we really didn't want to disrupt them but I have to admit very exciting to see this in the wild.



One night we drove up Signal Mountain and watched the sunset over Jackson Lake. As sunset grew closer, the group of us up there got larger. I was pleased that most of us were there to sit quietly and watch with cameras in hand. The one thing about going to national parks is that you realize there are many people visiting from outside the U.S. They have come clear around the world to see what we have in our own backyards. It gives you fresh eyes to think about what you have and need to appreciate.

Those clouds in the sunset photo above turned into thunderheads and by bedtime it was quite a show. We watched from our room window as the sky came alive and the thunder was louder than I have ever heard before...almost like explosions. It rained just a little and then the storm disappeared. Perfect Wyoming experience for the boys!





When morning dawned, the skies were clear and the sun was warm. On our way out of the park we stopped to enjoy the reflection of the mountains in the lake in the early morning light. Breathtaking!



When we stopped to take the reflection photos, I noticed these huge seed clouds at my feet. We looked them up in our guide and identified them as Yellow salsify. The flowers look much like dandelions but the seeds heads are much larger. I had my son put his hand in the photo so you could see how large they are.

Our road trip is over for the summer and we have packed in some great family memories. The boys enjoyed the wildlife and the great food we enjoyed on our trip. I packed breakfast and lunch but we ate our dinners in restaurants. The most memorable meal ended with fresh homemade huckleberry pie. I am going to dream of that slice of heaven for a very long time to come.

It is nice to be home, back to my garden but it is always refreshing to get out on the open road and see some new and exciting things. I have a couple more posts to share with other aspects of our trip so stay tuned.

Barb-Harmony Art Mom

Swiss National Day

Every country has its own day for fireworks, it seems: November 5th in the UK, July 4th in the USA, July 14th in France. In Switzerland it’s today, 1st August, and anyone standing on the southern shore of Lac Léman tonight, in France, will look across to see firework displays taking place all down the long sweep of the Swiss shore. Today is the Swiss National Day*, when communities gather all over the country (and beyond, in the so-called “Fifth Switzerland” made up of expatriates) to celebrate their Swissness and the survival of their country despite all the obstacles that geography, language, religion and sometimes-aggressive neighbours have placed in the way of its unity. Here we look at some Swiss items in the Wellcome Library collections, and the links between Switzerland and the United Kingdom.

[*Of course, as a multi-lingual country Switzerland has not one but four names for the celebration, calling it the Bundesfeier (German), Fête nationale (French), Festa nazionale (Italian) or Fiasta naziunala (Romansch).]

The date of the National Day commemorates the first Federal Charter, dated “early August” 1291, although it has become conflated also with the slightly later Oath of the Rütli sworn between the representatives of the three original cantons, an event dramatised by Schiller in his play Wilhelm Tell (and re-enacted at a crucial moment in the country’s history, in 1941, when the 650th anniversary of the confederation was used to reaffirm a commitment to democracy and independence). Needless to say, history does not really provide a neat date and time at which the country was founded. Rather, the origins of Switzerland lie in a gradual coalescence of various communities, mostly of their free will, for mutual protection and self-determination. As the Middle Ages progressed, the original three “forest cantons” of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden, clustered in the mountainous area around the Vierwaldstättersee, were joined by other similar areas, by imperial cities such as Zürich, Bern and Basel, by their subject areas, and by other loose confederations of mountain communities such as those that now make up the cantons of Valais and Graubünden, until by the early modern period the country had essentially the shape that it has today.

There have long been strong links between Switzerland and the United Kingdom, with the nineteenth century particularly important for these. The Romantics’ appreciation of Switzerland’s scenery – prior to the Romantic movement it had been more usual to see mountains as a nuisance – forged a trail that tourists followed, with an ever-expanding railway network (and travel agents like Thomas Cook) making it ever easier to get there. The names of hotels in holiday centres such as Interlaken are a testament to the British influence on Switzerland’s tourist industry. Politically, too, Switzerland was appealing to the nineteenth-century Briton. At a time when much of Europe was controlled by empires and other undemocratic régimes, this was a country whose foundation myths, of sturdy independent peasants banding together to resist oppression and decide their policies by democratic means, chimed well with Victorian ideas of ancestral Anglo-Saxon liberties and the evolution of the Mother of Parliaments. (In each case, of course, the foundation myth ignored many less democratic elements such as the unequal weighting that wealth gave certain citizens’ voices, and the complete absence of any voice for women.) The robust Protestantism of many Swiss would have been congenial, too. Here, a Victorian Englishman could have enjoyed foreign travel whilst feeling that the people around him were almost British themselves: sensible, sober people not given to continental vices such as riots, revolutions or too much gesticulation. One of the strangest survivors of this nineteenth-century kinship stands in the London district of Brixton, one of the capital’s poorer neighbourhoods: in the midst of a 1960s housing estate is a pub called “The Hero of Switzerland”, the sign showing the iconic scene in which William Tell aims his crossbow at an apple on his son’s head. The building is modern but stands on a site used for a pub of that name since at least 1901.

As one might expect, many of the Swiss items in the Wellcome Library relate to British travellers. In 1817 Joseph Jackson Lister (1786-1869), wine merchant, microscopist and later to be father to the founder of antiseptic surgery, was one of the British subjects flocking across the Channel to see the European sights that had been off-limits for a generation and were now finally opened to them by the victory over Napoleon. His travels are recorded in a tiny, neat diary, illustrated with pencil sketches and watercolours that track his journey across France to the Alps and then back to Britain down the Rhine (MS.6962).

Lister's journeys took him to the foot of the Gotthard Pass, into territory that was still quite wild and woolly for the average traveller. Later in the nineteenth century an expanding tourist industry had made the mountains more accessible, with mountain railways making it possible for ordinary tourists to reach summits previously thought of as the haunt only of ghosts and dragons. The surgeon Charles Brodie Sewell (1817-1900) visited Switzerland repeatedly from the 1860s to the 1890s and his detailed travel journals give an indication of how domesticated, comparatively, the Alps were becoming: photographs show us the rack-railway climbing to the summit of the Rigi, one of two that were built to this peak. Many other papers in the Library collections document similar holidays, up to the mid-twentieth century. The diary of Dr Forrest Leon Loveland, a general practitioner from Topeka, Kansas, documenting a trip to Europe in 1931, is particularly colourful, with photographs, cuttings and ephemera pasted into a large diary-cum-scrapbook (MS.7974). Shadows are cast on this tourist idyll, however, by one item Loveland includes: next to a painting of Zürich and photographs of the railway up the Pilatus is a monochrome newspaper cutting whose title declares "Germany's 100,000 on fighting edge", next to which a member of the Wehrmacht blows a purposeful bugle. Particularly poignant reminders of the world beyond the Alps come in the papers of the psychoanalysts Siegmund Heinrich Foulkes (originally Fuchs) (1898-1976) and Elizabeth Therese Fanny Foulkes (née Marx) (1918-2004). The couple collected postcards when on holiday, and their papers include blank undated cards from all over the world, Switzerland included. The Swiss cards appear to date from between the wars and it is probable that whichever of the Foulkes collected these (they were not married to each other at that time) would still have been a German citizen, since each was born German but was forced to emigrate to the U.K. by Nazi persecution of Jews.

We have focussed so far chiefly upon foreign visitors to Switzerland, but of course Swiss material is also present in the collection. Our manuscript medical recipe books include Swiss items such as MS.7908, a collection of medical recipes originally put together by a priest in Birmensdorf (canton Zürich) in the early seventeenth century. Perhaps the most striking of our Swiss holdings, however, are among the most recent. The Library's Iconographic Collections include a large number of Swiss public health posters, warning against AIDS and counselling condom use (as ill-luck would have it, AIDS arrived at about the same time that Switzerland underwent a large increase in intravenous drug use, making the problem even more pressing). The posters - available, of course, in various languages including those of immigrant communities such as Turkish, as well as the country's official languages - come in various styles, from the oblique to the downright startling and explicit. Backgrounds to the messages vary from nightclubs in, presumably, the grittier city neighbourhoods, to the chocolate-box Switzerland of Alps and meadows, in which a Heidi-milkmaid brandishes a condom and proclaims "Ohne? Ohne mich." (An idiomatic translation might be "Doing without [a condom]? Do without me."). In one particularly pretty series, the instantly-recognisable skylines of various Swiss cities are shown at night, lit only by the stars and a strange, pink moon that turns out on closer inspection to be a condom.

August 1st has provided us with a reason to dig out some of our Swiss holdings: but, of course, there are many more and they are available all the year round. All these and more can be consulted in the Library (and images of many Swiss-related items can be found on Wellcome Images). You are invited to come and explore, whether it that takes the form of rambling over Alpine meadows or looking at the many inventive uses graphic designers can find for the humble condom.

Images:
Aerial illustration of the Vierwaldstättersee (also known in Britain as Lake Lucerne), from the diaries of Dr Forrest Leon Loveland, general practitioner of Topeka, Kansas, documenting a trip he made to Europe with his wife Helen in 1931 (MS.7974).
Postcards collected on Swiss holidays, mostly showing the Berner Oberland, in the papers of S.H. Foulkes (PP/SHF/A/C/7).
Title page, MS.7908: 17th century recipe compilation.
"The Hero of Switzerland" pub, Loughborough Road, London SW9: image copyright Christopher Hilton, made available under Creative Commons via the Geograph website.
A square and fountain in Zürich, drawn by Joseph Jackson Lister in MS.6962.
The Vitznau-Rigi railway, from the 1885 travel diary of Charles Brodie Sewell (MS.4509).
AIDS-Hilfe Schweiz and Swiss Federal Office of Public Health: poster warning of the importance of condom use, 1990s.
AIDS-Hilfe Schweiz and Swiss Federal Office of Public Health: poster warning of the importance of condom use, 1990s.
Swiss Federal Office of Public Health: poster warning of the importance of condom use, 1990s, showing Luzern by night.

Run down, and needing rest and change?

Are you a nerve-exhausted town dweller? Dyspeptic, depressed, anaemic? Trying to think and just getting no response from your brain no matter how hard you press down on the accelerator?

Late July, and schools across the United Kingdom have closed for the summer. Departure lounges and roads to the south are clogged with families heading off on holiday, whilst back in the office even for people without children the atmosphere changes: we may not any longer be bound by the school timetable but prolonged exposure to it in formative years hammers home the message that the six weeks coming up are different in some way. One of the saddest discoveries of starting most jobs is the realisation that from now on, commuting will go on through much of August as well, and one may cling fondly to the idea that there will be at least some form of summer slow-down in blatant contradiction of the evidence.

Well, for most of us the long summer holidays of childhood are gone for ever; but to cushion the blow, we invite you to take at least a short weekend break courtesy of the Wellcome Library. The Library, as regular users will know, is rich in travel writing: wherever humans go, disease and injury follow them, so no matter how obscure a corner of the world one selects, the chances are that a doctor will be there recording his or her impressions. (See our guide to unpublished travel writings in the archives for an overview ; or, for some ripping yarns of medical men going into the unknown, come along to the next running of our “Around the World in 100 Years” Insights Tour.) This posting, however, is intended simply to be a quick weekend break to keep you going until your proper holiday, so we will stay closer to home and allow ourselves to be pampered at a good hotel rather than plunging into the unknown…

One of the frequently-used sources in the Library’s special Quick Reference Area is the Medical Directory (earlier volumes here), of which the library has a long and virtually complete run described in an earlier blog post. As a tool for biography and family history, a means of finding out about individual medical men and women, it is unrivalled. There is, however, a lot more to it: each annual volume represents a snapshot of the medical profession in the UK, listing not merely practitioners but also hospitals, medical societies, benevolent funds, dispensaries … and healing spas. In addition to the official Directory, too, there are advertisements for medical services and equipment, and here again spas and resorts occur. Using this material, we will treat ourselves to a weekend away at a spa in the years between the World Wars.

Spa treatment has been recommended over the years for a huge variety of ailments. In the Medical Directory advertisements, we see it indicated for bronchial complaints, tuberculosis, arthritis, scrofula, sciatica, alcoholism, obesity and constipation – to pluck some conditions completely at random. This blog, of course, cannot offer medical advice and we would urge anyone suffering from most of the complaints listed above to consult a doctor – we will concern ourselves with the more general, vague feeling, so common at this time of year, that there are better places to be than at one’s desk.

But where will we go? The range is huge. Health resorts occur in all corners of the country, linked by the thousands of miles of pre-Beeching Report railway (and, despite the founding of the Irish Free State some years before that gave Ireland her independence, the Directory also lists resorts in Ireland, such as Lisdoonvarna in County Clare). Some are spas in the strict sense of the world, growing up around a mineral spring with medicinal value, but others are health resorts in the broader sense, allowing one to relax and recharge in a pleasant environment. Sometimes this is the seaside, sometimes the mountains. Levels of activity vary: in many cases the sedate stereotype of the genteel watering-place is clearly appropriate, but in others it most certainly is not: the Directory lists Blackpool as a health resort, for example, and whilst that may or may not be true even its best friends could never call Blackpool sedate. Climate varies too, from one end of the country to another, and whilst one patient may need a mild climate for another a brisk breeze may be called for. There is clearly the need for an online flow-chart that will take people through the intricacies of choice and work out the precise spa that would be appropriate for someone suffering from lethargy and constipation but able to deal with chilliness and averse to sea-bathing – here, all we can do is set out some examples…

The resorts of the south and south-west, where winter is mildest, are recommended for people struggling to cope with the British climate. Torquay proclaims itself good for “delicate children of Anglo-Indian stock” and Ventnor, similarly, targets “delicate, Indian-born, children, weakly girls at puberty, and ... the infirm and aged who have no cardiac weakness.” The adjoining towns of Hastings and St Leonards, meanwhile, boast a winter climate notable for “mildness and equability”: there is “a fine sea-front where invalids can walk, sit or drive almost daily during the winter, and good sea-bathing in summer.” In general, although St. Leonards (to the west of Hastings itself) is less sheltered and “rather more bracing”, the two resorts form

“a harbour of refuge for those who are physically unequal to the struggle against the inclement, changeable and sometimes severe wintry weather experienced in other parts of the British Isles.”

As we all know, that inclement and wintry weather doesn’t have to happen in winter – it can come at any time, as much of June demonstrated! For most of us, however, summer is a time to look for something a bit more bracing. Here the Scottish resorts come into their own; latitude (and in some cases altitude) gives them a cooler climate akin to that some way up in the Alps, with the added bonus of the Northern summer's long days. Speyside – a chain of small towns centred on Grantown-on-Spey - offers air that is “singularly fresh and pure, and the atmosphere translucent and free from excess of humidity, owing perhaps partly to the formation of granitic rocks…” Further north still, Strathpeffer – Britain’s most northerly spa – makes similar claims:

“The climate of Strathpeffer is sheltered and sedative, but on the upper slopes the air is fresh and invigorating…. Strathpeffer is therefore eminently a tonic spa.”

All the Scottish spas offer golf, of course; other physical activities available might include walking on the hills or in the sheltered forests of the Spey valley, tennis or bowls. Permits for fishing can also be obtained (we are in the world of John Buchan and would expect no less) and Nethy Bridge, on the Spey, markets itself particularly to “the tired health seeker who is also a trout fisher.”

It all sounds wonderful and definitely one would expect it to have “a powerful restorative effect in many cases of nervous and mental fatigue and overstrain, insomnia, nervous dyspepsia and depression, especially in middle and later life” (as Speyside sells itself). One must, however, be careful not to overdo it – as Braemar counsels, “It should be remembered that the northern and stimulating air is an incentive (sometimes undesirable) to active exercise”, even if one has been ordered expressly to relax.

Strathpeffer, as well as golf and walking, offers also the unappetising prospect of the “one of the most highly sulphuretted waters in Europe”, to be quaffed medicinally by the residents. Downing vast stoups of something that tastes like someone else’s used bath-water is, of course, the downside to residence at many health resorts. No such drawbacks await you at Blackpool: the “chief watering place of Lancashire” takes its water externally, on the seven miles of sea-front. Emerging from the sea, one may amuse oneself in all sorts of ways: “the promenades and rock gardens, the covered colonnade and piers…cinemas, tennis, golf, bowling … the children’s playgrounds, sea and motor excursions.” However, as the advertisement coyly points out, “The annual number of visitors and excursionists is believed to be more than five millions, and Blackpool is not an invalid’s resort in the summer season” – which is certainly one way of putting it.

On the facing page, through the random action of alphabetical order, we find the more genteel resort of Bude in Cornwall. Here, there is sea-bathing, and for those unwilling to face the sea the Bude Canal can be pressed into service (built in the nineteenth century to carry fertiliser inland, by now the canal was curtailed to the bottom mile or so: its state today). Facing west, it receives strong Atlantic winds which make it less suitable than some resorts for the physically frail but

“In the early summer and the autumn months… the climate is very good for those who require a pure and invigorating air. Cases of bronchial catarrhs and early phthisis, anaemia, debility and ‘brain-fag’, are stated to respond favourably at Bude.”

“Brain-fag” …. we can all relate to that, can’t we? Jeeves, pack our bags and bring the Bentley round to the front; we’re off to to the seaside to recharge the bean.

Images: all from the 1933 Medical Directory.