Farewell to India

After five and a half years I’m hanging up my Digitisation Manager’s hat and saying goodbye to the Medical History of British India.

I’ve had a brilliant time and have been privileged to work with such amazing material and a group of very talented colleagues across the National Library. Special thanks must go to the procurement staff and the Digital Team, plus to Jan Usher who was one of the co-founders of the project.

I’ve been to some great places to talk about the project, including the Wellcome Collection in London and Brisbane, Australia, and have met some wonderful researchers along the way.

Most of all, I have been immersed in a world long gone but preserved in our reports, British India. I have met doctors and patients, pioneers of medicine, witnessed the horror of death and disease and the role of medicine in colonial power. From prostitutes who lived in rum barrels, to bowel gangs and rabid badgers, medical students, veterinarians and lunatics, it has been a colourful experience!

These reports are all still available for free on the website and on April 10th I will be giving a talk called Painful Tales from the Raj at the National Library’s George IV Bridge Building at 6pm.

 

I’m doing another podcast on the asylums and mental hospitals and will be promoting the vaccination reports which are due online next month.

I have a new post as Digital Projects Officer, still in the NLS, working to bring more of the Library’s collections online.

The Library is applying for more funding to add further reports to the website so this may not be the end of the journey….

One "therian" a day...

In 130 B.C. a Greek ship sank off the coast of Tuscany, Italy.
How can this be relevant to the history of medicine? It can because in 1974 the shipwreck was found and years later a box full of ancient medicines, prepared by the physicians of ancient Greece, was discovered amongst other objects.
Many of the pills were completely dry and have recently been analysed by Robert Fleisher of the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park (Washington, DC), who reported on his study on Monday 13th September 2010 at the Fourth International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology in Copenhagen, Denmark. Analysing the DNA fragments of two of the pills, Fleisher discovered that each tablet is a mixture of more than 10 plants extracts. Carrot, radish, celery, wild onion, oak, cabbage, alfalfa, yarrow and hibiscus are only some of the ingredients.
Alain Touwaide, scientific director of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, is studying whether these plants extracts are now known to treat illnesses effectively. He also aims to discover therian, an ancient remedy, and to document exactly the measurements ancient doctors used to manufacture it.

(photo credit : planetaryapothecary.com)

Happy 1st Birthday Wellcome Library Blog

Congratulations to the Wellcome Library Blog on receiving 20,000 visits in its first year from people in 139 countries.

Written by Wellcome Library staff, this is an entertaining and informative blog for those interested in the Wellcome's amazing collection of medical history items. If you haven't had a chance to visit, why not do so on its first birthday?

(Photo credit: www.himetop.wikidot.com)

Explore medical history online

The Intute website has reported several new medical online resources this week, including:

The National Library of Medicine has digitised key volumes from medical history, including De Humani Corporis Fabrica by Andreas Vesalius, Micrographia by Robert Hooke and Historiae Animalium by Conrad Gesner. You can listen to audio commentary, pan and zoom and read notes for each title here.

Small and Special provides free access to the results of a project into the early development of The Hospital for Sick Children at Great Ormond Street, in London, which was England's first in-patient hospital for children. The project to analyse the patient registers of the hospital from 1852 to 1914 has been carried out in partnership with Kingston University and funded partly by the Wellcome Trust.

Delta classic public health texts provides free access to full text PDFs of key works in the History of Public Health made possible by Delta Omega - the Honorary Society for graduate studies in Public Health, governed by the National Council. They are generally out of print, or not widely available in libraries. Included from the Nineteenth Century are On the mode of communication of cholera by John Snow, The Contagiousness of Puerperal Fever by Wendell Holmes, Notes on Nursing by Florence Nightingale as well as Reports of the Sanitary Commission in Massachusetts.

(Text: intute.ac.uk, photo credit: National Library of Medicine)

A site for bored eyes

The Science Museum's History of Medicine site, Brought to Life, is well worth a visit if you are interested in learning more about diseases, surgery, medical techniques and objects and famous scientists.
The site is split into areas which makes it handy to surf in small chunks. There is material to support both GCSE and undergraduate study and the selected links and bibliographies offer further tantalising information at the end of each article.
The site is funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Photo credit: Science Museum home page

History of medicine on TV

BBC Four's new five part series called Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery starts at 9pm tonight. Presented by the medically trained Michael Mosley, each episode covers a different branch of surgery.
I was browsing the volumes about Calcutta Medical Institutions in which doctors were evaluating Joseph Lister's antiseptic methods. The 1880 report has a section by the First Surgeon, K. McLeod in which he writes, "I have come to consider it a sacred and imperative duty to endeavour, to the best of my ability and means, to prevent every breach of surface, whether wound or sore, from becoming the seat of septic change; and if it has already done so, to correct the vice and restore it to sweetness." Click on the image to see more about McLeod's antiseptic methods in Calcutta in the mid 1880's.
McLeod came to Edinburgh in 1876 and on following Lister in his wards, realised that he hadn't been carrying out the procedure in accordance with Lister's teaching. He returned to India determined to demonstrate "strict Listerism." Mortality rates were seen to fall after surgery when using antiseptic methods. It is due to the painstaking work of doctors like McLeod that surgery was made much more effective and less fatal.
No doubt the BBC programme will show others like him, so I am very much looking forward to watching it. There is a BBC book by Richard Hollingham to accompany the series.

Medical History of British India Project

Have you heard of a bowel gang? Or why a woman was living in a rum-barrel in 1878? Do you wonder how vaccines are made? What was it like to be in the army in India in the last quarter of the 19th century? What did medical students study in Nagpur and how many passed their exams?

The answers to all these questions are contained in the Medical History of British India collection of the India Papers. The project involves microfilming the books and then digitising the film to produce images which can be viewed online. Each page of the 126 volumes will be available free of charge. The project is funded by the Wellcome Trust and forms Phase 2 of the web feature Disease prevention and Public Health Medical History of British India.
The items are rare, dating from ca1850 to ca1950 and are of interest to medical historians and genealogists as well as to the casual reader. The content is legible and makes for fascinating reading, not only from a medical perspective, but also from a social and geographical one. There are many tables of detailed information, plus drawings, photographs and maps. Although most volumes are in a report format, they offer an absorbing glimpse into a world long gone, and yet many of the issues resonate today. Click on the images to see a cholera map of India and patients suffering from kala azar.

As project manager and metadata creator I shall be sharing some of my finds each week in this blog. From hemp to hospitals, from monkeys to malaria, from research to rabies and from cholera to quinine, there is much to explore in this compelling collection.