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The cataloguer’s conundrum
The Wellcome Library is very pleased to announce that the third and final batch of Francis Crick’s scientific papers is now fully catalogued and available for research. The entire archive has recently been imaged as part of the library’s Wellcome… Continue reading
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Happy 200th Birthday, William Makepeace Thackeray
William Makepeace Thackeray, Victorian novelist probably best known for his panoramic work Vanity Fair and its anti-heroine, Becky Sharp, was born in Calcutta on 18 July 1811. While his work does not, on the whole, reflect the medical profession of… Continue reading
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Messages to Francis
From letters sent to the eminent molecular biologist Francis Crick between 1987 and 2003: Dear Francis, wen I am olda, I wood lik to be a brilliant scientistt like you. Did you always want to be a scientist? Is it… Continue reading
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A novelist’s bicentenary
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
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Archives and Manuscripts cataloguing – July 2010
Our archive cataloguing during July was chiefly dominated by on-going projects rather than the release of new records to the database: although several of those projects will appear very shortly, some as early as August’s round-up. One very small collection… Continue reading
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Sun, Sea and Seeds
As the Royal Horticultural Society’s annual jamboree opens this week in Chelsea it is timely to remember the man who not only donated land at Wisley in Surrey in 1903 for the Society’s new national gardens, but also with his… Continue reading
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Was Freud Really “The Father of Psychoanalysis?”
The place of Sigmund Freud in history is assured. However, this was not always the case. In 1930 Freud regularly found himself facing accusations that he had stolen all his valuable ideas about psychoanalysis from Pierre Janet, a fellow pupil… Continue reading
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Scaling the walls of the citadel
Today’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Life of the Day is the pioneering woman doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. She was admitted to the Medical Register in 1865, having received the Licentiate in Medicine of the Society of Apothecaries as the… Continue reading
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Notorious decadent sighted in the Wellcome Library
Newly added to the online catalogue of Wellcome Library archives: two letters by the French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848-1907). Huysmans is most famous for the novel À rebours (Against Nature), a landmark of the decadent movement whose millionaire “hero”, Des… Continue reading