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Tag: cancer

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  • Denis Burkitt’s safari diaries

    23/08/2016

    Denis Parsons Burkitt (1911-1993), while posted at the Mulago Hospital and Makerere Medical School in Kampala, Uganda, in the 1950s and 1960s, was the first to describe a childhood cancer which became known as Burkitt’s lymphoma. From the latter 1960s… Continue reading

  • A Cancer Landscape: a powerful new exhibition in Brighton

    16/01/2015

    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

  • Wellcome’s tropical legacy

    30/11/2014

    Some of the most innovative medical research happens in Africa. This was something Henry Wellcome knew, and it is something that the Wellcome Trust continues to be aware of. Today, major overseas programmes supported by the Trust include the KEMRI-Wellcome… Continue reading

  • Bone marrow smear, lymphatic leukaemia

    David Galton: early pioneer in chemotherapy treatment

    21/10/2013

    The papers of David Galton (1922-2006), a pioneer of effective chemotherapy treatment for leukaemia and lymphoma, have just been catalogued at the Library. The papers span Galton’s career, documenting early research carried out into the diagnosis and classification of blood… Continue reading

  • Paying attention to what women say

    08/03/2013

    International Women’s Day seems a good time to commemorate two amazing (and long-lived!) women doctors and researchers whose major breakthroughs were the result of listening to what women told them and paying attention to the implications. Cicely Williams (1893-1992) was… Continue reading

  • The ‘Orphans’ go for a short walk

    02/03/2012

      In 2009 the Wellcome Library acquired four large paintings known as the Acts of Mercy. They had been painted by Frederick Cayley Robinson between 1915 and 1920 for display in the Middlesex Hospital, in the Fitzrovia district of central… Continue reading

  • Go ask Alice

    18/10/2010

    During the final decades of the twentieth century, a leading go-to person for evidence on the deleterious effects of low-dose radiation was Alice Stewart, FRCP (1906-2002), then well past retirement age. Throughout her eighties and well into her nineties she… Continue reading

  • Graphic Medicine

    30/09/2010

    I’m not a great aficionado of comics or graphic novels. I know who Alan Moore and Stan Lee are; various (male) friends and family have raised my awareness of Marvel and DC Comics; I’ve read the odd issue of Swamp… Continue reading

  • A novelist’s bicentenary

    29/09/2010

    Elizabeth Gaskell, the novelist, was born 200 years ago today, on 29th September 1810. The huge success of the BBC’s version of Cranford (which added several of her other short stories to the adaptation) and, a few years before that,… Continue reading

  • Henrietta Lacks and HeLa

    01/02/2010

    59 years ago today, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Few would have guessed the impact the cells taken from her tumour would have on cancer research, drug testing, and the discovery of vaccines. Until 1951, no researcher had… Continue reading