Tag: military medicine

A “damned near-run thing” said the Duke of Wellington on his victory over Napoleon at Waterloo on 18 June 1815. The Battle of Waterloo was the the bloody finale of the French Emperor’s 100-day reign. While Napoleon was exiled to… Continue reading

The papers of doctor and medical educator, Eric Kennedy Cruickshank (1914-2007) have recently been catalogued and are available to researchers in the Wellcome Library (Library catalogue reference: PP/EKC). The papers, donated to us by Josephine Cruickshank in 2009, give a… Continue reading

Archive cataloguing sometimes unearths some previously unknown gems amongst our collections. This is certainly the case with the papers of father and son Dominique and Félix Larrey (MS.8889), formerly in the autograph letters collection. Dominique Jean Larrey, 1st Baron Larrey… Continue reading

Carlos Paton Blacker or ‘Pip’ as he was more commonly known by his closer contacts, was a psychiatrist and eugenicist who played a crucial role in family planning in Britain during the 20th century. His archive, which is in the… Continue reading

A new year, and more new material made available for research. During January, nearly four hundred new database records were created for archive material, one hundred and fifteen becoming visible online during that month. As the disparity in numbers indicates,… Continue reading

We recently received, from his granddaughter’s executor, a couple of manuscripts of Colonel Frederick Smith (1858-1933) of the Royal Army Medical Corps. When cataloguing these, and turning to the usual sources of reference for information on his career, I discovered… Continue reading

The picture above was drawn in 1944, when the artist was interned in Tamuang camp, Thailand. This drawing, along with two others by the same artist, came to the Wellcome Library as part of a small collection of papers belonging… Continue reading

One hundred and seventy years ago, on the 1st of August 1840, a court-martial convened in the East India Company military base of Dinapore (now Dānāpur, in India’s Bihār state). Dinapore was a staging post on the route up the… Continue reading

Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways (Proverbs 6:6) Over a million species described – and maybe another six or seven million out there awaiting description. Insects account for maybe half of all living species – and when… Continue reading

The catalogue of the papers of Sir Thomas Lewis held by the Wellcome Library is now available to view online. The collection includes much on his wartime work at military heart hospitals in Colchester and Hampstead, and with the Ministry… Continue reading