Author: Chris Hilton

Two hundred years ago, an English businessman waited nervously at Dover, about to take a leap into the unknown. In July 1817, at the age of 31, Joseph Jackson Lister – a wine merchant and, in his spare time, a… Continue reading

So, what did you get for Christmas? It is, of course, the thought that counts: remembering someone, and taking the effort to choose something for them, rather than selecting the precise object that they might have got for themselves. Even… Continue reading

Eighty years ago, on 30 November 1936, a huge fire lit up the night sky over London. The Crystal Palace in South London had caught fire and as the colossal structure blazed, Londoners had a preview of what many would… Continue reading

For National Poetry Day we highlighted one of the poems in our collection: a rollicking travelogue that is sadly anonymous.  Much of the poetry in the Wellcome Library is anonymous – in many cases, it is amateur material bad enough… Continue reading

For National Poetry Day, Chris Hilton shares an unlikely offering from our collections. We’ve often said that if the Wellcome Library needed a mission statement, one possibility would be “more than you think”: a collection built around the central organising… Continue reading

History is often the piecing together of fragments. Archive documents are the tracks and traces of long-gone events, which the researcher looking for truth about the past follows to assemble the scraps of evidence that build up a picture. Sometimes… Continue reading

Huntsmen in their red jackets, steam rising from huge horses on a frosty morning, the clamour of hounds: for many years this scene, immortalised on a thousand sporting prints or table mats, was a fixture in the British countryside and… Continue reading

As 1909 drew to an end, Miss Beatrice Mary Jane Banks was in her early thirties and living in East Sussex. Her routine sounds agreeable: she made her home in a country house on the outskirts of a small village,… Continue reading

Wednesday November 19th is World Toilet Day. For readers in the developed world, this conjures up images of gleaming white porcelain and a hole down which bodily waste vanishes swiftly to be dealt with, somewhere, by someone else: a machine,… Continue reading

In the popular view of the Western Front in World War I, 1915 can be something of a forgotten year. By the end of 1914 and the famous Christmas truces, the trench network stretched from the Jura to the Channel,… Continue reading