Close up from Carracci’s engraving of The Crucifiction of Christ, 1589. WI no. L0073762

The print is in fact three three separate sheets, lined adhered to a backing sheet. In this format it is very long, over 1205 mm (height approx. 512mm).

It came into the Conservation Department as part of the Library’s Conservation and Priority plan for 2012-13, which identifies items in need of conservation or preservation. It had suffered a lot of edge damage, having been folded so that it could fit into a box, and it was also very dirty.

The whole item was first photographed and documented. It was then surface cleaned with a chemical sponge to remove surface dirt on the print. The sponge is thick, porous dry cleaning material which works like a large “eraser”, drawing  the dust, and dirt into the cells of the sponge material.

Chemical sponge with dirt absorbed from surface cleaning.

The print was then put in a humidification chamber where the paper was slowly humidified to ensure that there would be even wetting and no staining. Once this was completed the item was placed in a bath of warm water.

The engraving in a warm water bath

After two hours it was removed from the bath and the backing sheet was peeled off.

The backing paper peeled back from the engraving

The three loose prints were then returned to the bath to wash off any remaining loose adhesive.

The three loose sheets back in the bath

The three prints were then realigned and backed with a matching colour, light weight, Japanese paper. Finally, the print was mounted into a window mount so that it could be accessed and handled with ease.

And here are the ‘before’ and ‘after’ shots of this conservation makeover:

Before: the engraving before conservation work

After: the engraving after conservation work

The engraving is now back in its home in the Library stores, ready to be requested for viewing by visitors to the Library.

Author: Amy Junker Heslip, conservator at the Wellcome Library

Stonework for the Wellcome Research Institute building, 1931.

Following on from our earlier announcement about the Wellcome Collection Development Project, we can now give you more details about the works which will be taking place from 20 June.

We’ll have to make some changes to our opening hours and services during the building works which will run September 2014. We’ll be doing everything we can to keep you informed of the changes and assist you in making the best use of your time on your Library visits, ensuring you can access the materials you require.

Temporary changes to Library opening hours: Monday closure

From 8 August to March 2014, the Library will be closed on Mondays. Our Tuesday-Saturday opening hours will remain unchanged for now.

Timetable of the works and how they may affect you

Here are the current details of the planned changes:

• 20 June to 7 August 2013: We will be operating full Library services, but there may be some noise from the works taking place on the floors above and below the Library.

• 8 August 2013 to September 2014: Noise levels will increase as the building works become more advanced. In addition to the noise, there will of necessity be disruptions to Library services and opening hours, and some Library areas will be temporarily closed.

Most collections will be available at all times and online resources will be available to Library members as usual.

Accessing rare materials in the Library

From 8 August to 31 October 2013 we will be operating a temporary Rare Materials Room. Due to restricted space, we will operate a booking system to ensure that you can access the materials you need to view. More details about the booking system will be released nearer the time.

Stay in touch

If you’re planning to visit the Library over the summer, you might find it useful to contact us in advance. We can discuss which materials you would like to consult and when you plan to visit to ensure your Library visit goes as smoothly as possible.

Keep up-to-date

Up-to-date information about the Library works and any changes to services can be found on the Library website and here on the blog. We advise that you check online before making a visit during the works. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Adam and Eve by Jan van Scorel. Courtesy of www.renaissance-in-art.org

He requested a copy of the painting in a letter to Lord Salisbury of Hatfield House who owns it, in October 1974. His interest derived from a study on the malformation of hands and feet in mammals, a lecture that he delivered in Germany that year which was based on his work on the mutant genes of mice.

Close up of Adam’s left hand

The peculiarity of more than 5 digits is commonly known as ‘polydactylism’, and though less commonly encountered today due to the possibilities of cosmetic surgery, it has been an issue in the past. Closely inbred communities have been known to inherit the genetic abnormality.  In ancient times in the Levant, polydactylism was considered to be a mark of the Rephaim, a race of giants, who apparently needed more digits than normal folk. For more details on polydactylism in the ancient world, see Richard Barnett’s article published in the Bulletin of the Anglo-Israel Archaeological Society (volume 6, 1986–1987).

In the Old Testament, the book of Samuel describes such giants (II Samuel 21:20):

“Yet again there was war at Gath, where there was a man of great stature, who had six fingers on each hand and six toes on each foot, twenty-four in number; and he also was born to the giant”

Based on this ancient association of giants with multi-digits and superhuman strength, by giving Adam 6 fingers, Jan van Scorel gives him equally preternatural powers.

The Madonna with six fingers ca.1440

It is no coincidence also that God is said to have created the world in just 6 days, a fact that may account for the re-appearance of the 6-finger motif in art of the intensely religious late medieval period. “Maria mit den 6 Fingern“, ca. 1440 (The Mary with Six Fingers) remains a prime tourist attraction in the pilgrimage church of Maria-Laach in Austria today.

Conversely, the extra digit was not always seen in a favorable light: Anne Boleyn was said to have had a sixth finger which was viewed, by those hostile to her, as a sign of the witch within her.  This disputable fact originates from an unflattering description of her by the Catholic propogandist, Nicholas Sanders some 50 years after her death:

“Anne Boleyn was rather tall of stature, with black hair, and an oval face of a sallow complexion, as if troubled with jaundice. It is said she had a projecting tooth under the upper lip, and on her right hand six fingers …”

Scientifically speaking, surplus digits are caused by dominant genes – while we all have 2 copies of each gene, sometimes one gene overrides the other – multiple digits, or similar malformations, are occasionally the result.

Such mutations are not without significance. Gruneberg’s belief in ‘the importance of mutants in lab animals’ was crucial, as he pointed out:

“…before long the mutant genes and inbred strains of the laboratory rodents will make an increasing contribution to medical research”.

His research focused on skeletal mutations in mice in particular as a model for the study of genetic disorders in humans, a fascination which led him to collect cuttings and stories of equally unusual malformations: for example, a pair of rabbits who perpetually stood on their hind legs, conjoined rabbits, and in one case, a bull with an extra leg…

Photograph of a bull with an extra leg, from the Gruneberg archive.

To read the digitised correspondence from the Gruneberg archive, you need a Wellcome Library member login, or you may login with a Twitter, Facebook, Google or OpenID account. The login screen will appear when you open a digitised item from the catalogue or another webpage.

Dr Magnus Hirschfeld, 1932.

Last week I attended a colloquium in Berlin, Das Erbe der Berliner Sexualwissenschaft: Eine Fachtagung sexualwissenschaftlicher Archive, commemorating the 80th anniversary of destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld‘s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft by the Nazis on 6 May 1933.

I had been asked to talk about the material we hold in the Wellcome Library relating to Hirschfeld and his legacy and the impact of continental sexual science on British sexologists. There is a small amount of material specifically relating to Hirschfeld in Archives and Manuscripts: like Havelock Ellis, he was a respondent to Dr Josef Strasser’s questionnaire on his career decisions, c. 1930, and his 3-page letter to Strasser and a pamphlet can be found in MS.7042.

There is also a group of photographs of the World League for Sexual Reform (founded by Hirschfeld) Congress in Brno, 1932 among the archives of the Family Planning Association. Charlotte Wolff worked with Hirschfeld in her younger days in Berlin, and her papers among the archives of the British Psychological Society include her research files for her 1986 biography of him, the first to be published in English. The Library also holds copies of several of his works.

I was also able to mention that we hold the papers of Hirschfeld’s important precursor, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, as well as some material on Havelock Ellis, and important early printed works of sexology, including the first edition of Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and the German, and first English, editions of Ellis and J A Symond’s Sexual Inversion (the latter is very rare since Symonds’ executor bought up the entire edition to protect the family from scandal and distress). There is also a significant amount in A&M and the Library more generally pertaining to Hirschfeld’s leading British disciple, the Australian doctor Norman Haire.

World League for Sexual Reform leaflet, SA/EUG/D.250

Material on the World League for Sexual Reform (as well as published proceedings of some of its congresses held in the Library) is to be found in several archival collections, including the Eugenics Society (available online via Codebreakers), the Family Planning Association, and the Wolff papers. The international impact of early twentieth century European sexology can be seen in the files among the Edward Fyfe Griffith papers relating to the journal Marriage Hygiene, published in Bombay by Aliyappin Padmanabha Pillay.

While anyone seeking the impact of Hirschfeld’s work and that of continental sexology more generally in the UK and beyond would have to look in many other places besides the Wellcome Library (from the Havelock Ellis papers just down the road at the British Library, to the Haire papers at the University of Sydney, and numerous collections across the USA), nonetheless we hold a significant amount of material reflecting his legacy.

Sir Everard Home, (WI no.V0002850)

Dr Simon Chaplin, Head of the Wellcome Library, will be giving a lecture about the surgeon Everard Home at the Hunterian Museum in London on Tuesday 14th May at 13.00.

“Who was the real Everard Home (1756-1832)? Was he a brilliant surgeon and scientist, author of hundreds of papers and books, who secured the legacy of his brother-in-law and mentor John Hunter and who achieved the highest offices of his profession? Or was he a vain and duplicitous charlatan, despised by his peers for his Royal sycophancy and publicly shamed for destroying John Hunter’s manuscripts?”

Go along to the lecture and find out more: Lunchtime lectures at the Hunterian Museum

Bellevue Hospital, New York City: a female patient in a cell with barred windows. WI no. L0031132

Over the past two weeks I have undertaken a placement at the Wellcome Library, cataloguing the papers of renowned psychiatrist Hugh Freeman. Freeman made important contributions to changing mental health provision in Britain. As a champion of community care and deinstitutionalisation, Freeman pioneered psychiatric units in general hospitals. He went on to greatly expand day hospital and outpatient care, enabling patients with serious mental illness to be managed in various settings outside medical institutions.

His main concern was the conditions in which people were treated in mental hospitals and ways to prevent admission or to provide treatment in community settings. To this end he initiated teams of co-workers such as mental health social workers, mental welfare officers, nurses and GPs who provided early treatment and alternatives to mental or psychiatric hospitals. He also started one of the first psychiatric case registers with the help of the Salford medical officer for mental health. He used the register to monitor the service needs of the population of Salford, a poorly resourced industrial city environment.

The treatment of the mentally ill has changed dramatically over the past century – even reading some of the early papers in Freeman’s collection (dating back to the 1960s), the use of terms such as “mentally sub-normal” by many of his then contemporaries indicates a very different way of viewing those suffering from mental health problems. The move from institutionalisation of patients to managing them within environments in which they can still access constant support from their local community support groups and networks has had a substantial impact upon the way in which those with mental health conditions are understood and perceived by society.

Freeman’s papers include notes, slides, drafts, correspondence, lecture materials and an extensive array of publications and editorials from his career as an academic and editor of British Journal of Psychiatry  and other prominent publications.

Anglo-Saxon Medical Manuscript. Collection of five receipts, for heartache, lung disease, ‘wenns’ or tumours, and liver disease. Click on image for more details. (Wellcome Library MS 46)

In around 1000 CE three Anglo-Saxon scribes contributed to what would become one of the most unusual manuscripts to have survived from Anglo-Saxon England.

Now in the collections of the Wellcome Library, this manuscript, catalogued as MS.46, is a single page that was cut away from an Anglo-Saxon manuscript, with five medical recipes in Old English on one side, and short quotations and scribbles on the other. We don’t know when it became separated from its original manuscript, or even which manuscript it was separated from. The page was probably toward the back of an Anglo-Saxon manuscript that contained another text entirely – the recipes were entered onto a leaf that was left blank when the main text had been completed.

We can work out roughly when the recipes were written down based on the scribes’ handwriting. Anglo-Saxon handwriting followed fashions and the three Anglo-Saxon hands on MS.46 are all typical of English scribal styles from about 1000 CE. All three scribes used the English Vernacular minuscule script with varying degrees of success; scribe 1 in particular is quite inconsistent in his letter forms. The three scribes of MS.46 are by no means terrible, but only scribe 3’s writing has much in common with the practised Old English book hands that one finds in the Beowulf manuscript or the Old English boundary clauses of contemporary charters. This makes MS.46 even more special as most of the surviving manuscripts from Anglo-Saxon England were copied by monks whose days were spent writing: they were monks by vocation, but scribes by profession within their religious houses. The recipes on MS.46 look like the work of monks who had been taught to read and write as part of the standard monastic education, but who were not used to copying texts on a regular basis. The recipes seem to be more of a voluntary contribution, rather than a planned text, and where one monk started, two others followed.

Verso MS 46, Wellcome Library.

Anglo-Saxon medicine is important within the context of early medieval European medicine, as it is the only medical tradition where original medical recipes have survived that were written in the vernacular (Old English), rather than Latin copies of Classical recipes. Four large texts of Anglo-Saxon medical recipes have survived, but none of the recipes on MS.46 appear to directly match any of the recipes recorded in these key texts, suggesting that they may have been copied from one or more sources that are now unknown to us.

Nevertheless, there is a  link between MS.46, recipe 3, and British Library Cotton Domitian i, an Anglo-Saxon miscellany containing copies of works by Isidore and Bede. The medical recipe on BL Cotton Domitian i, f.55v was copied at St Augustine’s some time in the second half of the tenth century and so it predates the hands on MS.46 by up to fifty years. I have reproduced the two recipes below and underlined shared words and phrases:

BL Cotton Domitian i, f.55v:

Þas wyrta sceolon to wensealfe . elene . garleac . cerfuille . rædic . næp . hremnes fot . hunig 7 pipur . cnucige ealle ða wyrta wringe þurh clað . 7 wylle þonne on þam hunige.

Wellcome Library, MS.46, recipe 3:

Hat wyrcean þe sylf wenn sealfe man sceal niman clæne hunig swylc man to blacan briwe deþ 7 wyllan hit neah briwes þicnesse .7 niman rædic 7 elenan . fillan 7 hrefnes fot, \næp/ cnocian swa man betst moeg. 7 wringan þonne þa wyrta 7 geotan þæt was þærto 7 þonne hit beo forneah gewylled cnucian godne dæl gar leaces 7 don þærto 7 piperian swaswa þe þince.

Wellcome Library, MS.46, recipe 3

As to the reason why the three scribes of MS.46 wrote down the recipes, it is impossible to know for certain. There is a chance that the scribes of MS.46 were copying recipes from multiple sources in order to build their own mini-medical compendium, that they had access to BL Cotton Domitian i, and added a recipe from it to their list, but I do not think that such a direct relationship can be proved as there are too many small variations in the two copies of the recipe. Furthermore, none of the other recipes on MS.46 have such close relationships with any other surviving recipes from Anglo-Saxon England.

MS.46 is a remarkable witness to monastic scholarship and an important example for Anglo-Saxon historians of the vernacular medical culture, and spontaneous writing. MS.46 differs from most surviving Anglo-Saxon texts in that it is not a meticulous, planned production. The leaf may have been a jotting page that was later intended to be re-copied in a larger collated recipe book, or simply a recipe list by the monks of one particular house, culled from other texts that they had access to, in order to form their own informal repository. The leaf shows us that multiple monks at one religious house were interested in medical recipes, and were comfortable with writing in the back of a pre-existing book in order to collect their notes together.

MS.46 has survived reformation, bookbinders, fire and neglect. For one small page, it makes a large contribution to our understanding of monastic networks, religious scholarship, and early medieval  medicine.

Author: Sarah Gilbert.

For more on MS.46′s provenance, see this previous post.

Digitisation Doctor workshop, 15 April 2013

A full report on the Digitisation Doctor workshop of April 15 is now available, along with many of the presentations given on the day. A brief summary of the day with links to presentations can be found below:

Introduction – Simon Tanner, King’s Digital Consultancy Service

The introduction highlighted fundamental questions for those wishing to begin a digitisation project, with an outline of the most significant pitfalls and constraints.

Workflows – Christy Henshaw, Wellcome Library

A full overview of all the stages of a digitisation workflow and how to plan a project, including the key considerations of roles and responsibilities, logistics and file management.

Conservation – Gillian Boal and Matt Brack, Wellcome Library

An outline of the importance of conservation within the digitisation workflow and the approaches required. This talk also discussed actual examples, training and surveys.

Image Capture – Richard Everett, Wellcome Library

An overview of the image capture process covering a range of imaging technologies and object formats, with different handling techniques also described.

Imaging Studio at the Wellcome Library

Case Study 1 – Susannah Rayner, School of Oriental and African Studies

A real-world project example describing the digitisation of the Fürer-Haimendorf archive, a visual documentation of tribal cultures in South Asia and the Himalayas.

Case Study 2 - Elaine Charwat and Andrea Deneau, Linnean Society

Another real project example discussing the issues faced during the digitisation of the archives of scientist and doctor Carl Linnaeus.

Metadata – Tristan Ferne, BBC Research & Development

A full discussion of what metadata is and approaches to its use. Different metadata standards were referenced and the methods for metadata creation.

OCR – Simon Tanner, King’s Digital Consultancy Service

This talk explored the process of using optical character recognition (OCR) to create searchable text from images, revealing when OCR is a viable option for digitised text.

Simon Tanner, KDCS, introduced the day and shared insights into OCR

Systems – Mark Hedges

Illustrated the challenge of maintaining the value of digital collections (or ‘assets’) within management systems and described the resources required to do so.

Digital Preservation – William Kilbride, Digital Preservation Coalition

Provided guidance in what to think about when trying to maintain access to digitised content, starting from: how long are we planning on this material being available for? 

Legal – Naomi Korn, Naomi Korn Copyright Consultancy

Gave an overview of the legal landscape for digitisation projects and explained how questions of copyright should be dealt with as part of a digitisation workflow.

Costs – Ed Fay, London School of Economics

Explored methods for managing the costs of digitisation and considered these costs in view of long-term commitments to sustainable access to digital collections.

Access - Katie Smith and Carolien Fokke, Collections Trust

This presentation introduced the Europeana portal for access to digitised content from across Europe, also discussing the Europeana Inside network and Partage Plus project.

Matt Brack, Wellcome Library, introduces Susannah Rayner, SOAS

My involvement with Sanger’s notebooks is through the Human Genome Archive Project. I have been looking at the work of scientists who not only directly contributed to the Human Genome Project to sequence the entire human genome, but also those whose work made the whole project possible. I have been surveying scientists to find out whether records of their work have survived. My survey period runs from 1977 to 2004, starting with the development of Sanger sequencing to determine base sequences in DNA.

Frederick Sanger’s notebooks are part of the Biochemical Society collection (SA/BIO), deposited at the Wellcome Library.

Fred Sanger at the Sanger Centre

Sanger’s name might not be as well-known as some of the other scientists included in this project, but he is one of just four people to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes. He was awarded his first in 1958 “for his work on the structure of proteins, especially that of insulin”. The second award was shared in 1980 for his contribution to determining base sequences in DNA.  Sanger’s sequencing technique allowed long stretches of DNA to be rapidly and accurately sequenced. It was the Sanger method that was used by the automated sequencing machines that allowed the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome to be identified in the Human Genome Project. It’s not a coincidence that the UK sequencing centre that contributed a third of the finished human genome sequence bears his name.

Sanger’s lab notebooks offer a fascinating insight into his work; beyond his published papers in scientific journals. They help to illustrate that scientific discoveries are not simply a flash of brilliance, but are often the result of a gradual development of ideas and techniques through both success and failure. Sanger’s comments from some of his experiments during 1973 and 1974 demonstrate this (SA/BIO/P/1/43). The results from experiment D94 on priming with restriction enzyme fragments are described as “pretty ghastly”:

After experiment D106 on decamer sequencing he notes “These are not too good…. doesn’t really seem this would be a reliable method as it stands”:

The film is presented by Julian Huxley who was, at the time, Secretary of the Zoological Society, and it features a number of well-known personalities of the era. It draws heavily on scientific advances in the understanding of nutrition and several key people appear in the film including Professor Sir Gowland Hopkins who helped to discover vitamins, Sir John Boyd Orr, the Director of the Rowett Institute and Dr George M’ Gonigle, the Medical Officer of Health for Stockton-on-Tees.

I particularly like the interviews with working class mothers about their shopping habits and how Dr M’Gonigle says, “…the average working class housewife, by rule of thumb methods, knows pretty well what food stuffs to buy to feed her family properly though she doesn’t know a vitamin from a bus ticket yet our investigations show quite clearly that as her income increases she approaches more and more nearly a really satisfactory diet….” [this is around 17 minutes].

In other words the poor diet of many people is not due to ignorance or stupidity but a lack of means. With the outbreak of World War Two in 1939 the British Government adopted many of the ideas set out in this film. Food rationing, which continued into the early 1950s, improved the diet of many people in Britain.

An image from the film which divides the population into six income groups and shows how poorer people are more likely to suffer from nutritional deficiencies.

The film was directed by Edgar Anstey for the Gas, Light and Coke Company and is reproduced online with the permission of the National Grid Archive. If you want to delve deeper, the Wellcome Library holds lots of supporting information including a copy of John Boyd Orr’s report: Food, Health and Income : a report on a survey of adequacy of diet in relation to income, which was the inspiration for much of the film, and the archive of Dr M’Gonigle (PP/GMG).