Tag: iconography

“Wine of the Incas. … Coca of Peru. For convalescents.” Lithograph after A.M. Mucha. Wellcome Library no. 658317i. As fireworks, church-bells and champagne corks sounded the passage of 2009 into 2010, library users were receiving a benefit that was in… Continue reading

Long before and long after the photographer Eadweard Muybridge shot and killed his wife’s lover Major Larkyns in San Francisco in 1874, he has never been far from controversy. The picture above (click on image to enlarge) is one of… Continue reading

The date is disputed – some sources say it’s the 21st December – but other evidence points to the fact that today in 1503, Michel de Nostradame (or Nostradamus, to give the familiar Latinised version of his name) was born… Continue reading

                                Wellcome Library no. 669602i This painting of a parish council meeting is a remarkable document, and perhaps not as well known as it deserves to be (click on the image to see the picture in all its amazing detail).… Continue reading

The journals of Arthur Wellington Clah (1831-1916) – Christian missionary and First Nations hereditary Tsimshian chief – are perhaps one of the more unexpected treasures of the Wellcome Library. Written over fifty years, from 1859 to 1910, they comprise a… Continue reading

Lithograph after a design by Al Capp (1909-1979) Wellcome Library no. 679768i Behind the scenes, the Wellcome Library has been cataloguing a large collection of posters which the Library has gradually acquired over the last couple of years. They are… Continue reading

Detail of painting of Benjamin Jesty by Michael William Sharp, 1805. Wellcome Library no. 654136i   In 2006 the Wellcome Library repatriated from South Africa the portrait of Benjamin Jesty, a farmer who practised vaccination in Dorset in 1774, twenty-two… Continue reading

A man with Lupus erythematosus. Watercolour by Mabel Green, 1902. Wellcome Library no. 672807i The International Medical Congress which took place in London in 1881 was the seventh in the series, sandwiched between the sixth congress in Amsterdam and the… Continue reading

It was on 15 September 1986 that the Wellcome Institute received a letter from the London art dealer David Salmon, who ran a shop called David Tremayne Ltd towards the western end of the King’s Road in Chelsea. He had… Continue reading

It’s Monday and the week gets off to a good start: the next job lined up is to catalogue a collection of unknown mezzotints. These have been in the Wellcome Library for at least seventy years but have only recently… Continue reading