Author: Lalita Kaplish

The theme of World Environment Day 2016 is the illegal wildlife trade. All five of the world’s species of rhinoceros have been brought to the edge of extinction thanks in part to a lucrative international trade in exotic animals and… Continue reading

Take a look at the published books in our collection classified under the subject Vegetarian Diet and you might be surprised. A substantial number were published in the second half of the 19th century. The first vegetarian society in the… Continue reading

The theme for World Health Day 2016 is “Beat diabetes”. How did diabetes become a public health issue? Maybe public health officers from the past can shed some light. Diabetes is a complex condition. We’ve known of its existence for… Continue reading

Now that you have grown that beard or moustache for Movember, take the advice of a couple of barbers on how to keep it smart throughout Decembeard. Because, as any hipster will tell you, there’s more to having a beard… Continue reading

In the Library collections is this print intriguingly captioned “The false bearded sapeurs-pompiers at Fourneaux”. The caption tells us that the figures are firefighters in a small town on the French-Italian border, but what’s the story behind the false beards?… Continue reading

Photograph 51 is the title of a play on the London stage throughout autumn 2015. The play explores the controversy surrounding Rosalind Franklin and her contribution to the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953. The discovery… Continue reading

In August 2015 we asked the design firm Good, Form & Spectacle (G,F&S) to work with us (and our metadata) on a month long web development project. The result was What’s in the Library? – four prototypes of tools for… Continue reading

BBC Radio 3 will be broadcasting live from Wellcome Collection throughout the last weekend in September. From Friday 25 September – Sunday 27 September there will be live music, discussion and one-off programmes and events taking place throughout the venue.… Continue reading

We have put over 20,000 of our digitised books online and, thanks to full-text searching in the Library catalogue, our digitisation programme is starting to bear fruit for researchers. To prove the point I sought inspiration from our collections on… Continue reading

On World Refugee Day, we remember that refugees have always been with us. Doctors and health workers have worked with refugees throughout history – many have personal experiences as asylum seekers and migrants themselves. You can find traces of many… Continue reading