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Spotlight: the story of a medieval chapel over time
The Norwich artist John Sell Cotman (1782–1842) published numerous etchings of buildings in Norfolk, Yorkshire and also Normandy in France. The Library has a copy of one of his Normandy etchings, showing the chapel of Saint-Julien at Petit-Quevilly near Rouen.… Continue reading
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Malaria in the Port of London
The medical officers of health for the Port of London had a unique job travelling up and down the Thames from London to the Thames Estuary, inspecting the cargo and crew of ships from around the world. The rapid spread… Continue reading
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‘Ghosts of giant physiologists and vampire surgeons’
In 1887, writing under the pseudonym of Aesculapius Scalpel, Hackney GP Edward Berdoe published a frightening novel portraying everyday cruelty and callousness at the fictional St Bernard’s teaching hospital. Despite being a work of fiction, the author claimed 75 per… Continue reading
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‘Making History’ in the Wellcome Library
The BBC Radio 4 series Making History investigates issues about the past, raised by questions from the programme’s listeners. This week’s episode (now available for listeners in the UK on the Radio 4 website) has a strong emphasis on the… Continue reading
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Open this year
Archives are the raw material of history: where a published source will typically give you an overview, archives plunge you into the day-to-day detail of the past. It is from this detail that history synthesises its grand pictures: there is no… Continue reading
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Ballad to Blues
“I went down to the St. James Infirmary I saw my baby there, She’s laid out on a cold white table, So so cold, so white, so fair” So runs the chorus of St James Infirmary: a Blues standard which… Continue reading
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The ‘Orphans’ go for a short walk
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
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160 years of Great Ormond Street Hospital
Today marks the 160th anniversary of the opening of the Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, London. As such, we felt we couldn’t let the anniversary pass unnoticed, particularly as the range of material held by the Wellcome Library on the… Continue reading
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If not here, where?
It was the proud boast of London’s Windmill Theatre that “We never closed”: that throughout the Blitz, as bombs rained down on London, the theatre continued to provide nude tableaux for the entertainment of lonely servicemen and their like. The… Continue reading
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Camberwell House Asylum
One of the fastest-growing categories of Wellcome Library users in the past ten years has been family historians. Many people, of course, have medical practitioners among their ancestors: doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, opticians, vets… But the Library’s holdings for family historians… Continue reading