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  • The Hip Experience!

    12/08/2014

    Artist Mary Rouncefield relates the story of her hip replacement operation in words and pictures. All of her compelling watercolour and ink drawings are available in Wellcome Images. At home indoors for a couple of weeks after the operation, I… Continue reading

  • Beds not Bombs: histories of the medical anti-war movement

    04/07/2014

    To launch the Medact archive on 27 June 2014, Wellcome Library played host to a conference on the history of medical activism: ‘Beds not Bombs: Exploring the archives of anti-nuclear medical campaigning and protest’. Delegate Paul Sims reports back on… Continue reading

  • Artists and Melancholy

    03/07/2014

    Laurinda Dixon, Professor of Art History at Syracuse University, did some of the research for her book on early modern representations of ‘melancholia’: ‘The Dark Side of Genius’ at the Wellcome Library. Here she describes how a mental and physical… Continue reading

  • Francis Galton: a Victorian polymath

    19/06/2014

    We have added two new digitised archive collections (Alan Coulson and Francis Galton) to the Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics online resource. Here, Katy Makin from the University College London (UCL) Special Collections team shares her experience of working with… Continue reading

  • The Sick Rose

    02/06/2014

    Wellcome Trust Engagement Fellow, Richard Barnett’s new book, The Sick Rose is about disease and the art of medical illustration. Largely based on images from the Wellcome Library collections, its contents are at times explicit and uncompromising representations of  illness.… Continue reading

  • Sir Henry Harris: a life in research

    18/03/2014

    I have recently catalogued the papers of Sir Henry Harris, the 29th Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford. Harris’s pioneering work into tumour suppressor genes has greatly influenced the cancer research field and along with colleagues he… Continue reading

  • More from the EPUK archive: a cow with a gas mask

    29/11/2013

    In December 1952 London was caught in the grip of a suffocating smog which lasted for four long days. Visibility was reduced to as little as a few yards and transport became impossible. A performance of La Traviata at the… Continue reading

  • There’s something in the air

    20/11/2013

    It is easy to take the air we breathe for granted, but its quality has been ensured by tireless campaigning from societies such as Environmental Protection UK and its predecessors: the Coal Smoke Abatement Society, the Smoke Abatement League of… Continue reading

  • Forbidden fruit in Iranian cuisine

    06/11/2013

    Iran has a long history of interaction with the West. One aspect of cultural cross-fertilization is the art of cooking. The Library recently acquired a new Persian manuscript collection of culinary recipes, which sheds new light on the influence of… Continue reading

  • Heavenly bodies: astrological medicine in Wellcome manuscript MS.40

    05/08/2013

    Before beginning my dissertation research at the Wellcome Library my understanding of astrology was, like most people’s, limited to my star sign (Taurus) and reading the occasional horoscope in the paper. As a medieval art historian, I had some sense… Continue reading