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Tag: research

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  • The story of Daraprim: from experimental drug to commodity

    30/06/2016

    A 62-year-old pharmaceutical drug developed by the Burroughs Wellcome Co. hit the news recently when the drug company who purchased the US marketing rights and increased the price by 5,000%. Today pyrimethamine (brand name Daraprim) is mainly used to treat… Continue reading

  • The recent history of bovine tuberculosis

    02/12/2015

    Dr Angela Cassidy shares some of the challenges of being an historian of the recent past. How to make sense of the recent past? At what point does an issue or event stop being part of today’s social fabric and… Continue reading

  • Thalidomide: an oral history

    28/04/2015

    To mark the 50th anniversary of the withdrawal of the drug thalidomide from sale the UK in 2012, Professor Anne Borsay of Swansea University embarked on a project to collect oral testimonies from a cross-section of the thalidomide population. I… Continue reading

  • Ashes to Ashes: doctors debate smoking

    11/03/2015

    To mark national No Smoking Day, historian Professor Tilli Tansey draws on first hand accounts of how the British medical community responded to emerging evidence of the connection between smoking and health in the 1950s. The link between good health… Continue reading

  • Love in a ‘cold’ climate

    13/02/2015

    Fancy a romantic get-away this Valentine’s day? Forget weekends in Paris, fancy hotels, red roses and oversized teddy bears; from 1946, volunteers flocked to the MRC Common Cold Research Unit (CCU) in Salisbury for a holiday with a twist –… Continue reading

  • Wellcome Trust research bursaries

    30/01/2015

    We are delighted to announce a new Wellcome Trust Research Bursaries scheme. This scheme is for small and medium-scale research projects based on library or archive collections supported by the Wellcome Trust. Projects must focus either on Wellcome Library holdings or… 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

  • Snuffing potash to ward off flu

    13/11/2014

    Professor Barry Doyle discusses how the Library’s online public health resource, London’s Pulse, enabled him to do new research into the influenza epidemic of 1918, and shares his findings with us. With the centenary of the First World War and… Continue reading

  • Spotlight: an artistic expression of science

    02/09/2014

    Some items in our collections are intriguing because they sit on disciplinary boundaries or ‘blend’ traditionally polarised subjects such as art and science. This photograph represents a combination of the embryonic field of neurology, Shakespeare’s play Macbeth and the practice… Continue reading

  • Is Medical History Dead?

    04/08/2014

    Is medical history dead? So suggests Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, in a recent comment piece (unless you’re a Wellcome Library member you’ll need to register to read it or pay $31.50 to rent the page for a day).… Continue reading