Influenza in India 1918

While I was working in the stacks on the India Papers Collection I had a look at some of the Sanitary Commissioner's annual reports from 1918, when influenza swept the world and killed millions. Thousands were killed in the Madras Presidency; in some districts as many as between 30-50,000 people. One problem was the superstitions of the people, particularly in rural areas:"Several people, mostly in the interior, were averse in the beginning to resorting to a medical treatment under a superstitious belief that the epidemic was a visitation of the Goddess or Amman and that no treatment by drugs should be attempted." (Annual report of the Sanitary Board, the annual report of the Sanitary Commissioner and the annual report of the Sanitary Engineer, Madras 1918)
Meanwhile the European Army in India had 19,308 men admitted to hospital and 775 deaths. As in the rest of the world, the second wave in autumn 1918 caused high mortality amongst sufferers.

Road safety week 10-16 November 2008

This week is the Road Safety Week campaign.
One of the House of Commons parliamentary papers I have recently catalogued is "Ending the Scandal of Complacency: Road Safety Beyond 2010, report, together with formal minutes, oral and written evidence" (HC 460).
In it , you'll find out that the first motorway in Britain was opened fifty years ago in December. There were just over seven million vehicles licensed in Britain in 1958, and 6000 deaths resulted in that year. Not suprisingly, the number of vehicles licensed have increased by 400% by 2007; however, the deaths on the road have gone below 3000 which I find incredible.

Scottish Cemetery

Off a busy street in Kolkata lies a little corner of Scotland - the old Scottish cemetery, containing the remains of hundreds of Scots who made their home in what was the heart of Imperial India. The decaying cemetery is now the subject of a project by our heritage colleagues from the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS). At the invitation of the Indian National Trust for Art & Cultural Heritage and the Kolkata Scottish Heritage Trust, RCAHMS staff are on their first field trip there to assess the damage and draw up a restoration plan.
Names from the interment register will be added to a database, and the team will not only restore the monuments, but help create a green space for the city.

You can follow the team's progress in their very entertaining blog!

Deadly flu

It is 90 years since the end of World War I, in which millions of people died. But did you know that it is also 90 years since another event killed millions more? Beginning as a first wave in spring 1918, “Spanish Flu” infected an estimated third of the world’s population and killed vast numbers (estimated at 50 million worldwide), mostly those who were between 20-40 years old. It reached its peak with second and third waves in autumn 1918 and winter 1919, just when peace was settling on the countries torn apart by warfare.
Even today no one knows why it was so fatal despite teams of scientists working to try and understand the origin of the virus. This may be crucial in preventing another devastating pandemic.
There are many Official Publications dealing with the threat of another influenza pandemic which include a Scottish framework for responding,Oral Evidence from the House of Commons, and NHS Scotland public health advice for travellers.
The Guardian's interactive feature, showing news articles and adverts from when the 1918 flu struck the UK, is very good and worth a look.
Meanwhile, Google is using today's search engine technology to track flu trends in the USA.
Photo of influenza virus credited to CDC/Dr. F. A. Murphy[via pingnews]

90th anniversary of the Armistice

The Armistice with Germany was signed at 5 a.m. on the morning of 11th November, 1918. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, rose and made the announcement to the House of Commons. He then read the conditions of the armistice. In conclusion, he said:
"I hope we may say that thus, this fateful morning, came to an end all wars."

One of the most poignant items we have in our collection is Soldiers Died in the Great War, especially the page (above) listing all those killed and injured on the day of the Armistice itself.

The Great War

With the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I approaching, we've been looking at some of our official publications from that time. From
Notes from The Front, and The field service pocket book we found some diagrams of the trenches, not only British, but German ones, too. The German trench even has a figure of a soldier with his trademark pointed steel helmet, and what appears to be a handlebar moustache. There's a lot of detail on construction and materials used, and also signs for sketching routes and battlefields, such as roads, woods, villages and churches.

UN Audiovisual Library of International Law

The Audiovisual Library describes itself as:
"a unique, multimedia resource which provides the United Nations with the unprecedented capacity to provide high quality international law training and research materials to an unlimited number of recipients on a global level. The Audiovisual Library consists of three pillars: (1) the Historic Archives containing documents and audiovisual materials relating to the negotiation and adoption of significant legal instruments under the auspices of the United Nations and related agencies since 1945; (2) the Lecture Series featuring a permanent collection of lectures on virtually every subject of international law given by leading international law scholars and practitioners from different countries and legal systems; and (3) theResearch Libraryproviding an on-line international law library with links to treaties, jurisprudence, publications and documents, scholarly writings and research guides. The Audiovisual Library is available to all individuals and institutions around the world for free via the Internet."

It's got some useful resources on it, and easily findable

Wellcome Library blog

I am pleased to see that Wellcome Library which is part of the Wellcome Trust has a new medically themed blog. I have used the site quite often in my medical history research and the blog is a useful addition to that. See video clips, learn about the latest digitisation projects, browse images and subscribe to feeds. The Wellcome Trust is the funding body for all 3 phases of the Medical History of British India Project.

Too little, too late?

In 2007 the Australian commonwealth, state and territory governments commissioned Professor Ross Garnaut to investigate the potential effects of climate change on the economy. The final report is now ready, and it includes criticism of the lack of urgency from other governments around the world to cut back on carbon emissions.

P.S. And in the same week WWF publishes its Living Planet report which outlines the terrifying scenario of dwindling resources and too many people using them up.

Medical History of British India Project on microfilm

All 136 volumes from the Medical History of British India project Phase 2 have all been microfilmed and are available to view at the Library. To view what’s on each reel, including Phase 1, enter Mf.IP in the search box on the main NLS catalogue and then select the shelfmark option. The volumes themselves will be returning to the shelves by the end of November; some will be undergoing conservation treatment first, however.
The digital images are undergoing renaming, sorting and conversion to Jpeg format. Then they will be processed by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) so that you can fully search them when they are online next spring . I can’t wait for that, especially to look for names of Indian Medical Service officers.

I spy ...

Captain Hamilton Bower's Diary of a Journey Across Tibet, published in 1893, details what was essentially a spying mission for the Intelligence Branch of the Quarter Master General's Department in India. He and his party endured bad weather, difficult terrain, stolen horses and "infuriated Tibetans, who had big stones in their hands and were dancing about in a threatening manner".

The first European to cross Tibet - "a huge white blank on our maps" - he received the Royal Geographical Society Founder's medal for his achievement, and the story of the journey is packed full of incident, with photographs and sketches of the scenery and locals.

It is the same Captain Bower who, on a trip to Turkestan in 1890, found the set of manuscripts which now bear his name.

World Food Day 2008

Today (16th October) is the FAO's (Food & Agriculture Organization of the UN) World Food Day. The event considers ways to tackle food production and the effects of climate change, global food security, and general awareness raising about world hunger (923 million under-nourished people at the last count...)

A little bit of politics...

...for all you political animals out there. Edinburgh's 12th Radical Book Fair starts on 29th October, with an opening talk by Mark Thomas.

Mad dogs and elephants

I have just started adding metadata for each volume of the Veterinary medicine material (from the India Papers), which forms Phase 3 of the Medical History of British India project. These 146 volumes will be online in late 2009. The first batch is about veterinary diseases and includes books on elephants. Elephants were used in India in the timber trade and also for transporting goods. It was vital that these animals, like many others employed by the government or army, were kept in good health, and these books give much detail about care and handling of elephants as well as how to treat elephant diseases. I wasn't aware until recently that elephants could contract rabies. Here is an account of a rare incident from A treatise on elephants by G.H. Evans (1901):"A mad dog, about five years ago, appeared in the elephant lines at Hyderabad. During the night it attacked an elephant when asleep and bit it on the trunk. The bite marks having been distinctly observed the next day, a little oil was applied, but nothing more was done and nothing particular occured till a month after the bite. During the first three days the [elephant] took food, ratib, and water, but afterwards took nothing. It did not appear to be afraid of water, as it drew it into its trunk and squirted it about, but did not drink any. It continued furious for two days, not allowing even the mahout to approach, after which it fell down and died suddenly."
The picture above shows "probably one of the finest workers in the Province [Burma]" and comes from the same volume. It appears as though this elephant was nearing the end of his life, which could have spanned eighty years or more.

You give me fever...

I heard on the World Service news over the weekend that an international team of scientists have deciphered the genetic code for Plasmodium vivax, one of the four parasites which cause malaria. This is said to be a huge breakthrough in understanding the life cycles in both mosquitoes and humans and could lead to "malaria-resistant" mosquitoes in the future.
Looking back to early research on malaria, it was Ronald Ross(pictured,1857-1932), who joined the Indian Medical Service in 1881, who made the discovery in August 1897 that malaria was transmitted through the bite of an infected mosquito. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1902. You can read two volumes by Ross here on the Medical History of British India web feature

What is Prorogation?

This marks the end of a parliamentary session. This is the time between the end of one session and the State Opening of Parliament which begins the next session.
This year the State Opening of Parliament for the 2008-09 session will take place on Wednesday 3rd December 2008.

Celebrate Edinburgh's libraries!

There's a week-long celebration of Edinburgh's libraries starting on Saturday 8th November. There's something for everyone in the programme, with walks, tours, hands-on sessions, poetry readings, politics, films, music and meet-and-greet-the-author sessions. Oh, and there'll be an Official Publications person (Elaine Simpson) to help you at the launch!

Are we headed for another Great Depression?

Maybe not yet, and maybe never, but arguments about government's role in regulating the financial sector raged pretty much as they're doing now when President Roosevelt introduced his New Deal in 1933, including reforming banking practices such as pushing through the Emergency Banking Act. The Library of Congress has a great resources page on just about everything you wanted to know about the New Deal.

Scottish Government spending plans

During the global economic slowdown/crash/financial meltdown/end-of-civilisation-as-we-know-it/crisis/credit crunch/mess it's worth having a look at the Scottish Government's draft budget for 2009-10 to see what their spending plans are and where they may affect you most.

Who'd have thought root-blight was so pretty...?

At last our Medical History of British India leaflets have arrived. We distributed 200 of these at the recent Society for the Social History of Medicine conference in Glasgow, and will be leaving a trail of them wherever we go....

They're very eye-catching and the cover features what looks like a flower in bloom - it's actually root-blight in solanum melongena (aubergine), from Scientific memoirs by Medical Officers of the Army of India, Part X published in 1897.

Sex, lies and red tape

The Lock Hospitals were part of a system to control the spread of venereal disease amongst troops in India in the latter part of the 19th century.
There are 5 volumes of reports on the working of these hospitals in the Medical History of British India project and they have returned from being filmed and scanned. Of all the collections in the project I find this the most extraordinary, giving lively and unrestrained accounts of the Imperialist implementation of the Indian Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864 and 1868.
To protect soldiers from disease prostitutes were encouraged to register and be examined weekly. However, some did not bow to the authorities and continued to ply their trade any way they could: “a woman, believed to have been a source of much mischief, was found in the lines, living in a rum-barrel.” (North-Western Provinces, 1878) Click on the image that accompanies this post to see the full page containing this quote.
The authors of the reports did not disguise their feelings about the native women, many of whom were driven to prostitution through poverty and addiction: “It is worse than useless retaining these hags on the register; they should be turned out of cantonments, and a younger, less repulsive class of women substituted. Until something of this kind happens the Lock Hospital is not likely to prove a success.” (R. M. Edwards, 1877)
Anyone interested in governmentality, colonial medicine and power, history of prostitution and military health will find these reports fascinating. Lock Hospitals were not just used in India; the London Lock Hospital opened in 1747 and as recent as the 1940s there was one on Fantome Island, North Queensland, which treated Aboriginal people.

Serving by the Code

One of my absolute favourite items that I have worked with in the Medical History of British India project is Code of medical and sanitary regulations for the guidance of medical officers serving in the Madras Presidency. This two volume work, published in 1870, gives copious detail about the career and duties of medical officers. There are details of pay and leave, travelling on duty, sanitary regulations, medical stores, hospital supplies, transport of troops and dress regulations. Click on the image to view a soldier's medical history form.
If your ancestor was a medical officer in Madras around this time then these books give a full picture of their working conditions. To those interested in colonial medicine the appendices give examples of forms used by the Government to collect information and aid administration.