Tag: archives

June the 9th is International Archives Day, designated by the International Council on Archives (ICA). Of course, archives are everywhere: wherever there is writing, there are people using it to document their activities. Less obvious, perhaps, is the global span… Continue reading

Last November we reported on the acquisitionvia a sale at Sothebys of nearly 4000 index cards of notes of Sir Bernard Spilsbury’s autopsies. This collection has proved highly popular with readers since it has become available. We are now delighted… Continue reading

In 1909 Paul Ehrlich, working with his Japanese student Sahachiro Hata at the National Institute for Experimental Therapeutics in Frankfurt, discovered that the 606th substance tested in their attempts to discover a specific chemotherapeutic agent to cure syphilis, the arsphenamine… Continue reading

From the Sahara to the Euston Road April’s Item of the Month is an excellent illustration of how unpredictable the Wellcome Library’s holdings, and archive material in general, can be. It occurs in the papers of the nineteenth century pathologist… Continue reading

BBC Radio 4 today aired a documentary called Revealing the Mind Bender General. Details: James Maw on the controversial psychiatrist Dr William Sargant, who tested drugs on his patients with, some say, catastrophic results. In the 1960s and 1970s he… Continue reading

Today the Peckham Society hosted the unveiling of an English Heritage Blue Plaque on the site of the house at 142 Queen’s Road Peckham in which Drs Innes Pearse and George Scott Williamson set up the first phase of the… Continue reading

Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915) was a leading medical researcher of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries particularly famed for his work in bacteriology and immunology. He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1908. He is best remembered for ‘Dr… Continue reading

The Wellcome Library’s online archive catalogue has just added a new name: Charles Babbage (1791-1871), the mathematician and designer of mechanical computing devices, the Difference Engine and the Analytical Engine, that foreshadowed today’s information technology. Thirty-five letters and notes by… Continue reading

Early in February a substantial additional tranche of papers of Donald Winnicott was received from the Winnicott Trust to add to the significant transfer they made last summer of the papers of this important figure in child psychiatry and the… Continue reading

In the wake of the ‘Frankenstein science’ fears stirred up by last year’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill, startling evidence has come to light of a strange hybrid organism genetically engineered in the USA. A newly-catalogued file in Francis Crick’s… Continue reading