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Some fatherly advice from the king
What right do we have to subject our children to potentially dangerous medical intervention in the interests of sparing them from a devastating disease that they may never contract? In the early 18th century several British royal children were inoculated… Continue reading
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Lady Montagu and the introduction of inoculation
The British and Irish Women’s Letters database, subscribed to by the Library, includes diaries and letters from approximately 500 women. One of these women is the fascinating and adventurous Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Lady Mary Montagu was a celebrity in… Continue reading
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Edward Jenner: pamphleteer
Dr Rob Boddice presents the evidence for his discovery of a lost work by Edward Jenner in the Wellcome Library. Edward Jenner, father of immunology, pioneer of the vaccine against smallpox and all-round good egg, is well known for his… Continue reading
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Humans 1, Foxes 0: from our Sports Correspondent
Huntsmen in their red jackets, steam rising from huge horses on a frosty morning, the clamour of hounds: for many years this scene, immortalised on a thousand sporting prints or table mats, was a fixture in the British countryside and… 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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This is a public service announcement…
…and some benefit will be gained by reading on… trust me. Yesterday I attended a programme of public health information films The Cinema of Disease held at the Open City Docs Fest, which is taking place in and around UCL… Continue reading
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Wellcome Library gets a Healthcheck
The most recent web edition of the BBC’s Healthcheck series aired last week, discussing Professor Gareth Williams’s new book The Angel of Death, on the history and eradication of Smallpox. The feature is illustrated by an oil painting from our… Continue reading
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Jenner’s Marvellous Medicine
As part of the BBC’s History of the World series, BBC 1 West broadcast last night, Jenner’s Marvellous Medicine, a documentary in which presenter Mark Horton told the story of Edward Jenner and smallpox vaccination. The documentary drew extensively on… Continue reading
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Edward Jenner and his moving statue
Broadcast tonight in the UK on BBC1, will be the latest episode of Doctor Who, in which the time traveller with the medical title meets again with the ‘Weeping Angels‘, creatures with the appearance of statues but who can move… Continue reading
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Henrietta Lacks and HeLa
59 years ago today, Henrietta Lacks was diagnosed with cervical cancer. Few would have guessed the impact the cells taken from her tumour would have on cancer research, drug testing, and the discovery of vaccines. Until 1951, no researcher had… Continue reading