Author: Chris Hilton

Quick – what’s the connection between a hundred-foot rampaging gorilla and the Wellcome Library? Well, it wouldn’t be a common sight in the reading room, and although stepping out onto the Euston Road has its hazards they usually relate to… Continue reading

Arthur Balfour, politician; Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate; Sir James Crichton Browne, physician and psychologist… In 2002, the Wellcome Library’s online catalogue of archives and manuscripts went live, replacing various large printed manuscript catalogues and several hundred typed lists of archives.… Continue reading

Almost 40 boxes of additional records of the Wellcome Museum of Medical Science (WA/MMS) have recently been transferred from storage and are now catalogued and available to researchers in the Wellcome Library. The idea for this ‘teaching museum’ was first… Continue reading

On this day in 1771 – exactly 240 years ago, in other words – the Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) died in Italy. Like Henry Fielding, another of the eighteenth-century founders of the English novel, he had travelled to the… Continue reading

This week’s free Wellcome Library Insight session – on Thursday 8th September – explores how doctors, governments and ordinary citizens in London have struggled against poor hygiene, pollution and dreadful epidemics, developing the themes of the recent Wellcome Collection Dirt… Continue reading

One of the fastest-growing categories of Wellcome Library users in the past ten years has been family historians. Many people, of course, have medical practitioners among their ancestors: doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, opticians, vets… But the Library’s holdings for family historians… Continue reading

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… Continue reading

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… Continue reading

This month’s new cataloguing bulletin from the Archives and Manuscripts department releases a large tranche of material for researchers to work upon: five collections of twentieth-century papers, totalling over 230 archive boxes of material or over 1000 new database records.… Continue reading

This week is National Music Therapy week in the UK: running from June 6th toJune 11th, and organised by the British Association for Music Therapy (BAMT). Music therapy harnesses the ability of music to express things in a non-verbal way,… Continue reading