The Researcher’s View

To mark national No Smoking Day, historian Professor Tilli Tansey draws on first hand accounts of how the British medical community responded to emerging evidence of the connection between smoking and health in the 1950s. The link between good health… Continue reading

This is an extract from an article first published in the Wellcome Trust online journal Mosaic: the science of life. It is republished here under a Creative Commons licence. Disabled people’s sexuality has been suppressed, exploited and, at times, destroyed… Continue reading

How much did Ursula Bowlby’s personal experience of motherhood contribute to her research on the relationship between infants and mothers, and to the development of her husband’s work on attachment theory? These are questions that Dr Katherine Holden explores in… Continue reading

Dr Christoph Laucht’s research explores the ways in which medical professionals organised to protest against nuclear war in Cold War Britain. We invited him to share some of his findings from the archives. Britain experienced a revival of fears of… Continue reading

John Moore, Collections Manager and Librarian for the College of Science and Engineering at Glasgow University Library, reflects on the University of Glasgow’s medical history. Many of the library’s 19th century medical collections will be included in the UK Medical Heritage… Continue reading

It’s not often that archivists get to visit the source of their historical records. Archivists at the Borthwick Institute for Archives got to do just that on a trip to former mental hospital, the Retreat, in York. The Borthwick Institute… Continue reading

Margaret Felton from Sussex Community NHS Trust reflects on the emotional impact of an upcoming exhibition at the Brighton Science Festival. It was not until I heard artist and cancer patient Michele Angelo Petrone (1963-2007) talk about and show the… Continue reading

Katy Makin reveals some insights into the personality of the multi-talented geneticist Lionel Penrose from his personal papers, which have been digitised as part of the Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics online resource. Lionel Sharples Penrose (1898-1974) is best known… Continue reading

Professor Barry Doyle discusses how the Library’s online public health resource, London’s Pulse, enabled him to do new research into the influenza epidemic of 1918, and shares his findings with us. With the centenary of the First World War and… Continue reading

Researcher Katherine Allen is using recipe manuscripts to study domestic medicine in the 18th century. I first came upon the topic of recipe books as sources for the history of medicine during my master’s degree at the University of Saskatchewan.… Continue reading