Author: Angela Saward

A Gift for Love is a film about a seven-year-old girl, Judy, played by Amanda Humby, finding her mother the perfect Christmas present with the 6 shillings and 8 pence in her money box. The only problem is that they… Continue reading

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage falls on 27 October and the slogan for this year’s celebration is “Archives at Risk: Protecting the World’s Identities“. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has announced that all of the world’s… Continue reading

Roger Graef is a distinguished theatre producer, documentary film maker and founder of the production company Films of Record. He curated a programme of films around science on film for the 75th anniversary of the Wellcome Trust in 2011. It… Continue reading

How an unusual request regarding one of our digitised films led to a mystery night out for our moving image curator: The US musician Jack White (formerly of the White Stripes) recently launched a new album, ‘Lazaretto’. Lazaretto is also… Continue reading

A recently broadcast BBC television programme, The Battle to Beat Polio, features historical footage from a Wellcome Library film. The film in question is The Both Mechanical Respirator, 1939 and it has an interesting story of its own. Polio or… Continue reading

To mark the centenary of the pioneering animator Joy Batchelor, Moving Image and Sound curator Angela Saward discusses one of her films – The Five – and relates daughter Vivien’s account of her mother’s life and work.  One of the… Continue reading

For 2013, the theme of UK Disability History Month (22nd November to 22nd December) is: Celebrating our struggle for independent living: no return to institutions or isolation. Such issues were nascent in the early 1960s and surface in a film called… Continue reading

In honour of home movie day on 19th October, we have created a playlist on the Wellcome Library’s youtube channel of amateur films shot by doctors and others on their travels. The earliest footage, A day at Gebel Moya, briefly… Continue reading

This is a fragment of a longer film (the original length was 502 feet which is about 6 minutes) depicting the surgical removal of the uterus (a hysterectomy) in close-up. Pysosalpinx relates to the fallopian tube being blocked by pus.… Continue reading

It seems that you can hardly switch on the TV these days without stumbling across a fly-on-the-wall documentary set amidst the high octane drama of an A&E department, or someone willing to have the details of their intimate surgery broadcast… Continue reading