Author: Chris Hilton

Laudanum, Sago and Glue for the Father of his Country Two hundred and fifty years ago, on September 20th 1759, a young member of the landed gentry in Virginia sent an order for supplies to London. The document, now held… Continue reading

Recent historical work casts doubt on the provenance of Scotland’s national dish, as reported on the BBC website on Monday 3rd August. Historian Catherine Brown has located a reference to haggis in Gervase Markham’s 1615 work The English Hus-Wife, which… Continue reading

Eighty-five years ago today, on August 3rd 1924, the novelist Joseph Conrad died of a heart attack at his home in Kent. Conrad’s narratives are slippery constructions, with lavish use of fractured timescales, unreliable narrators and indirect speech. Their indirection… Continue reading

The Library blog generally focuses on items in the Wellcome Library’s holdings, mentioning their catalogue descriptions in passing: it rarely features the unglamorous process of how those catalogue descriptions are created. Two new additions to the catalogue of archives and… Continue reading

June the 9th is International Archives Day, designated by the International Council on Archives (ICA). Of course, archives are everywhere: wherever there is writing, there are people using it to document their activities. Less obvious, perhaps, is the global span… Continue reading

Late medieval anatomy works often contain a standard set of illustrations, copied and recopied from text to text. Typically, these depict the body front and back; the skeleton and muscles within it each from the same two viewpoints, and so… Continue reading

Obituaries of J.G. Ballard published in the last week have all mentioned the writer’s two years studying medicine at Cambridge, a period in which he dissected the physical body as prelude, he hoped, for a career in psychiatry. As it… Continue reading

From the Sahara to the Euston Road April’s Item of the Month is an excellent illustration of how unpredictable the Wellcome Library’s holdings, and archive material in general, can be. It occurs in the papers of the nineteenth century pathologist… Continue reading

One hundred and eighty years ago, on 31st March 1829, a York tanner and preacher (and occasional artist) named Jonathan Martin was on trial for his life. Some eight weeks previously, on 1st February, Martin had hidden himself in York… Continue reading

The Wellcome Library’s online archive catalogue has just added a new name: Charles Babbage (1791-1871), the mathematician and designer of mechanical computing devices, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, that foreshadowed today’s information technology. Thirty-five letters and notes by… Continue reading