Author: Chris Hilton

Elizabeth Gaskell, the novelist, was born 200 years ago today, on 29th September 1810. The huge success of the BBC’s version of Cranford (which added several of her other short stories to the adaptation) and, a few years before that,… Continue reading

Last week, the Royal Mail launched a new set of stamps commemorating the UK’s history as a world leader in medical research. The set illustrates six medical breakthroughs from 1897 to 1971: the synthesis of beta-blockers; the discovery of penicillin;… Continue reading

August saw the completion of several long-running projects, with newly catalogued collections and retroconverted catalogues both entering the online database for the first time. Several thousand new records were made available for searching, chiefly relating to twentieth-century collections. Our first… Continue reading

One hundred and ten years ago, two doctors confronted one another in South London. One, in his fifties at the time, was the acknowledged leader in his field. The other, ten years younger, was a few years into a stellar… Continue reading

Our archive cataloguing during July was chiefly dominated by on-going projects rather than the release of new records to the database: although several of those projects will appear very shortly, some as early as August’s round-up. One very small collection… Continue reading

One hundred and seventy years ago, on the 1st of August 1840, a court-martial convened in the East India Company military base of Dinapore (now Dānāpur, in India’s Bihār state). Dinapore was a staging post on the route up the… Continue reading

July 31st 1910: one hundred years ago today, a small, balding, bespectacled man stands in handcuffs on a docked ocean liner, arrested on his arrival in Canada. The man is Hawley Harvey Crippen, and he is under arrest for the… Continue reading

BBC Scotland’s The Cell, which features stills from Wellcome Images, won “Best scripted programme” at the ABSW Science Writers’ Awards on Friday. Last week we wrote about the recent multitude of appearances our images have made on television this year.… Continue reading

Photographs of books and manuscripts in Wellcome Library’s collections and images submitted directly to the photo library, Wellcome Images, are regularly featured on television programmes. Television viewers might have seen Wellcome Library material without even realising it. Two of these… Continue reading

Fifty years ago today, Aneurin Bevan MP died of cancer at the age of 62. His legacy, of course, is very much alive: as the UK enters a round of what we are warned will be ferocious cuts in government… Continue reading