When you've got go, you've got to go...

... but how and when you do it has become a matter for heated debate. The Department of Health's new strategy for England now gives adults a choice.

Make do and mend...

During these days of rising costs and the so-called credit crunch there's a growing trend to "make do and mend". Our wartime collection can teach us a lot about making do, growing our own veg., and generally stretching meagre resources that little bit further. Our website Propaganda: a weapon of war has lots of information on these publications.

Childhood memories

I found the following little gem while dealing with an enquiry relating to free orange juice for children in the early fifties. Being a child of that era it brought back lots of happy memories. Cod liver oil was also provided to combat rickets.
Kids of today would have a problem relating to the typical menu as shown, "but it did me no harm"!!!

Education education education

The Medical College and Research Institutions collection (Batch 2) is now available on microfilm at shelfmarks Mf.IP.15-Mf.IP.22. It starts with the Indian Medical Review which gives a wonderful overview of disease control, scientific discoveries and institutional achievements. You can view striking accounts of life at important medical institutions such as Central Research Institute, Kasauli, the Pasteur Institute at Coonoor, plus a wealth of statistical information from various Calcutta Medical Institutions. The Government objective was, in some cases like Lahore, to train native doctors in order for them to aid with vaccination administration and sanitation measures whilst ensuring that Western medical practices spread into local Indian life. The reports document examinations taken, castes of students, curricula followed, teaching staff, donations from beneficaries, even sports played. It cannot have been easy for many students; they needed to learn English and some required a good command of Urdu. Many were ill and some indeed died. Much is made in these volumes of student conduct, how to discipline them and their progress. However, in Nagpur (est.1867) W.B. Beatson sadly wrote,"The pupils showed not only indifferent progress, but an utter want of intelligence."

There is much to discover in this collection of almost 8,000 pages, and I find it has been a sheer pleasure to work with it.

The photograph that accompanies this post shows the Harcourt Butler Institute of Public Health, Rangoon, and is one of the few photographs from the collection.

Piper Alpha Disaster - 20 years on

Twenty years after the disaster, have lessons been learned? You can find out more about this major event here at the Library. "The Public Inquiry into the Piper Alpha Disaster" (the Cullen Report) is here, shelfmark: P.P. 1990-91 Cm 1310. We also have the transcripts of the proceedings. Ask for "Piper Alpha public inquiry [proceedings] held at Aberdeen Exhibition and Conference Centre, Bridge of Don, Aberdeen before the Hon. Lord Cullen", shelfmark: GEK.58. You can also read the Health & Safety Executive's report into the implementation of Lord Cullen's recommendations: "Implementation of Lord Cullen's research and development recomendations / J.G. Krol ... [et al.]", shelfmark: GHI.1997.2.25.

Aussie founders

Anyone out there with a convict ancestor? If they were transported to Queensland, Australia, now you can search for them on the State Library of Queensland's new database.

P.M. Gordon Brown says "stop wasting food"...

So say the headlines - but there's more to the Cabinet Office's report than that. It addresses issues of global food security, climate change and the way it affects food production, food and health, and ... food wastage.

NHS 60

Our National Health Service is 60 years old. The National Archives at Kew have a great "Citizenship" website, with a history of the welfare state.

India Papers on microfilm

Phase 1 of the Medical History of British India project is also available on 35mm microfilm. Simply go to the National Library of Scotland catalogues, click on main catalogue and type in Mf.IP., choosing the shelfmark search and you will find a list of the Phase 1 titles. The shelfmark for these runs from Mf.IP.1 - to Mf.IP.12.

Batch 1, Medicines, from Phase 2, is also available to view on film here in the Library. Type in Mf.IP.13 and Mf.IP.14 to view the titles. These notably include the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report (volumes vi and vii) from 1894 and the Hyderabad Chloroform Commission Report from 1891, as well as titles on opium use and cinchona cultivation.

Equality Bill

The Minister for Equality, Harriet Harman, announced her department's "Framework for a Fairer Future: the Equality Bill, sparking a "What is discrimination?" discussion in the media.

Zimbabwe elections blog

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office website has a blog by British Embassy staff in Harare. It gives a fascinating, if rather depressing, insight into what's going on there.

Vets in India

Our India Papers collection continues to take us down unexpected paths. Not only do we now have a publisher producing facsimile reprints of the Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report with their unique sepia photographs of hemp users but the website Medical History of British India is now well into phase 2 (look out for our Digitisation Manager Francine’s fascinating blog entries about this).
We’re pleased to announce that the Wellcome Trust has approved funding for phase 3 of the project, which will see our veterinary reports digitised and added to the site. This project has helped enormously in the success of a Collaborative Doctoral Award from AHRC, with the Library and the University of Strathclyde as partners. The post-graduate student will begin his study of the Civil Veterinary reports in October and he’ll contribute to the text for the website, enabling greater understanding of the content of this important collection.

Do you want to be in my gang?

The King Institute of Preventive Medicine in Guindy undertook a variety of medical work and its annual reports have just been microfilmed. Through checking the films this week I have been re-acquainted with one of my favourite institutions.
This is because the reports give a lively and vivid snapshot of life at the institute between 1906 and 1932, not to mention that prominent figures in the medical field worked there.
The Bacteriological Section produced vaccines, including prophylactic cholera and combined typhoid and paratyphoid (T.A.B.) vaccines, anti-meningococcus vaccine and anti-influenza vaccines, the numbers produced appearing in these reports. Investigation units were engaged in the field and reported on outbreaks of diseases such as cholera, typhoid fever, dysentery, relapsing fever, gastro-enteritis, glandular fever, malaria and chicken pox in both settlements and jails.
It was in the 1922-23 report from Alipuram Jail, Bellary, that I came across the term “bowel gang.” 1,250 men were found to be suffering from latent dysentery: “These men were constituted into a “Bowel gang” housed separately; dieted and treated for their conditions. They were given suitable work in their own enclosure, and were not allowed to mix with the rest of the convicts.” (page 31, click on the image to view the paragraph from the report) This system seemed to work and cases of dysentery were reduced within 3 months, although I shudder to think of the indignity of being a member of such a gang. I wonder, also, if the members knew of the designation that was given to them to aid medical research and disease control.
The King Institute of Preventive Medicine is still in operation. Visit its website at http://www.tnhealth.org/meking.htm

Dr WHO?

It's the 60th anniversary of the World Health Organisation. To mark this occasion they've got a nice potted history, plus an online photo exhibition of their work.

Binge drinking

The Scottish Goverment set out its plans to help curb the so-called binge drinking culture.

Treaty of Lisbon

The Irish people rejected the Treaty in a referendum last week. What does it all mean? Read the official response to the rejection, and what other countries think about it.

Refugee Week

Refugee Week is on from 16th to 22nd June. Check the NLS events pages for what's on here at the Library.

It's a good time to take a look at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) website, there's a fascinating pictorial history of the organisation and its work.

42 days later...

The Government's successfully steered the "42 days detention" clause through the House yesterday. Find out more about the Counter Terrorism Bill and its associated documents.

Scientific Memoirs

This week I finished cataloguing (adding metadata to a database for each page) a series called Scientific Memoirs by Officers of the Medical and Sanitary Departments of the Government of India. This was the first Anglo-Indian publication entirely devoted to biological research. Published in Calcutta from the late 1890's to 1913, there is much pioneering medical work in these volumes.

There is still no vaccine for malaria, but in these memoirs scientist S. R. Christophers, a celebrated and lifelong malariologist, was studying the transmission of malaria (it is now known from Ronald Ross that the Plasmodium parasite was carried in female mosquito saliva and injected into its victim). There are reports of anti-malarial operations at Mian Mir, where standing water, breeding grounds of the Anopheles mosquito, were being destroyed in an attempt to control the disease.

Christophers also worked on kala azar, a deadly disease caused by the parasite Leishmania donovani, which causes fevers, enlargement of the liver and lowers immunity. It is known as Dum Dum Fever or Black Fever and is transmitted via the bite of a female sandfly.

Another microbiologist, W. S. Patton, was sure that the parasite was present in bedbugs and he spent many years studying these insects and his work is also in the Scientific Memoirs. It makes me feel itchy just thinking about his experiments!

Also in the Memoirs is a book by David Semple from 1911 when he developed his Semple rabies vaccine from Pasteur's original. There is work on cholera by D. D. Cunningham who was born in Prestonpans, and plenty of reading about snake venoms and anti-venomous sera, dysentery, typhoid fever and black-water fever.

Click on the image to see David Prain's 1904 drawings of cannabis plants.

What I find fascinating about these volumes is the scientific rigour that was applied to the work and the excitement of new discoveries. These scientists are truly amazing and as Robert S. Desowitz says, "they pursued their microbial quarry with a tenacity that by today's standards of paid-for-by-project research seems almost quixotic." (The Malaria Capers, p.41)

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.

Peer review

It’s surprising to learn that full sets of the House of Lords sessional papers are quite rare things; our collection is in fact only around 90% complete. A bit of history first: Lords records date from 1497, though these weren’t methodically filed until the 17th century. Printed Lords papers weren’t produced until the 18th century (though the Journal began its printed life in 1767). The disastrous fire of 1834 destroyed the Palace of Westminster, and with it a number of Lords records, though a major part of these were saved by a quick-thinking clerk throwing bundles of them out of a window into the courtyard below!

In the early 70s a project involving the British Museum (now the British Library), Board of Trade, the House of Lords Library, the Treasury, Home Office, Bodleian Library and NLS assembled as many sets of Lords papers as possible. The British Library and the House of Lords Library have complete sets; NLS has around 90%.

It is often assumed that there is little (if anything) in the Lords papers that isn’t in the Commons papers – this is not so. Some material does not feature at all in the Commons papers; for example, peers have always been able to introduce a Bill in the Lords – even if rejected, these records give an interesting insight into the concerns and influences of peers through the years. Commons and Lords can set up separate committees to examine the same subject – the evidence gathered and sources used by each may be quite different. Also, sometimes fuller versions of Commons committees may be published in the Lords papers rather than in the Commons. [1]

So, the moral of this story is, of course, don’t forget about the Lords papers! They are a huge resource, and can help to complete your research.


[1] Mallaber, Kenneth A. The House of Lords sessional papers.