The Researcher’s View

The International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE) is a voluntary international organisation for physicians working in the field of epilepsy. It is committed to ensuring that health professionals, patients and their care providers, governments, and the public world-wide have access to… Continue reading

On Ada Lovelace Day, medical student Emily Garrett explains why her research into the archival papers of Letitia Fairfield left her so inspired by this pioneering 20th century doctor. I first entered the Wellcome Library just over two years ago,… Continue reading

Through his research into the patient case notes of the Mental After-Care Association, Dr Stephen Soanes explores some of the attitudes towards convalescence in the mental health hospital system of the early 20th century. As a medical classification, convalescence represents a caveat. Neither… Continue reading

I am a scientist in the Randall Division of Cell and Molecular Biophysics. I am also a cinematographer. Making movies of cells and tissues under a microscope is a regular occurrence in our laboratory. To be clear, there is no… Continue reading

The ‘Morbid Anatomy Anthology’, is a collection of essays by scholars, artists and writers “working along the intersections of the history of anatomy and medicine, death and the macabre, religion and spectacle”. Carla Valentine from Barts Pathology Museum tells us what… Continue reading

‘Global Health’ is very much in the news with the Ebola outbreak in Western Africa. We tend to take the notion of such global health initiatives for granted now but David MacFadyen’s research reminds us that this was not always… Continue reading

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

Is medical history dead? So suggests Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, in a recent comment piece (unless you’re a Wellcome Library member you’ll need to register to read it or pay $31.50 to rent the page for a day).… Continue reading

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

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