-
How to survive the dog-days of summer
Are you wilting under the heliacal rising of Sirius, Orion’s best friend, otherwise known as the ‘dog-days of summer‘? Whether or not you have modern air conditioning (or servants to fan your heated brow), history provides us with a number of examples… Continue reading
-
Wellcome’s tropical legacy
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
-
‘Small bite, big threat’
World Health Day 2014 (7 April) is about raising awareness of vector borne diseases – diseases carried by mosquitos, flies, ticks and bugs. In the 1980s the Wellcome Trust Film Unit produced a series of films about the history of… Continue reading
-
Sun, Sea and Snails
The island of St. Lucia: palm-fringed beaches bathed in glorious Caribbean sun and rugged volcanic mountains separated by valleys of lush, tropical vegetation – the perfect destination for that special romantic get-away, perhaps? In the 1960s, however, a group of… Continue reading
-
Combating the tsetse fly: rare historical reports now available
Brian Hursey was an international expert on the control of tsetse flies, the vector of African trypanosomiasis or “sleeping sickness” in man and animals. As a student, he specialised in the study of tsetse flies and, upon graduation in… Continue reading
-
Let us spray? Papers of Leonard Jan Bruce-Chwatt now available
The distinguished malariologist Leonard Jan Bruce-Chwatt (1907-1989) summed up the feelings of many of his contemporaries when, in 1986, he wrote: “We all know the main chapters of the sad saga of global malaria eradication and felt, often personally,… Continue reading
-
Item of the Month, December 2011: Sun Yat-sen and Sir James Cantlie
In March 1912 the provisional president of the newly created Republic of China, Sun Yat-sen, sent this letter to Mrs Mabel Cantlie, wife of the British tropical medicine specialist Dr James Cantlie. In it he surveys the enormous challenge the… Continue reading
-
Maxim and Wellcome: Medicine and Machine Guns
A scene from late-Victorian London society is captured here, in this illustration from the Wellcome Library: we’re at a Thanksgiving Day banquet in 1896. The great and the good of the American expatriate community are on show and presiding is… Continue reading