Wellcome Library Research Articles

The American contribution to attachment theory: John Bowlby’s WHO trip to the USA in 1950 and the development of his ideas on separation and attachment

ABSTRACT This paper explores John Bowlby’s foundational contributions to attachment theory, particularly his fascination with ‘separation’ and its impact on child development. Tracing the origins of Bowlby’s interest to his personal experiences and his exposure to ideas of mental hygiene and child guidance in the 1930s, it underscores the alignment of his ideas with key figures in the English school of psychoanalysis. The central narrative of this paper unfolds during Bowlby’s 1950 WHO research trip, investigating orphaned and separated children in Europe and the USA. Utilizing archival materials from the Wellcome Library in London, the authors offer unique insights into Bowlby’s journey, highlighting his evolving views on mother-child separation through interactions with his American colleagues. This comprehensive exploration sheds light on Bowlby’s pioneering work, emphasizing the American influence on his ideas, and the evolving theoretical framework that continues to shape our understanding of child development and attachment today.

An Unedited Witness to the Early Middle English Lyric Candet Nudatum Pectus in London, Wellcome Historical Medical Museum and Library, MS 801A

An Unedited Witness to the Early Middle English Lyric <i>Candet Nudatum Pectus</i> in London, Wellcome Historical Medical Museum and Library, MS 801A

On the occasion of the centennial of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1923: Nicolae C. Paulescu-between scientific creativity and political fanatism.

On the occasion of the centennial of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1923: Nicolae C. Paulescu-between scientific creativity and political fanatism.

Narratology in Early Modern medical manuscripts: The Case of London, Wellcome Library, MS 213

It has been argued that narrative elements can be found throughout the history of English scientific writing. Narratives can be linked to specific genres; thus, learned texts for medical doctors were different from those directed to lay audiences (Taavitsainen, 2022). This article sets out to analyse a specific type of medical narrative, that of recipe collections, focusing for the purpose on the text housed in London, Wellcome Library, MS 213. The manuscript dates from the beginning of the seventeenth century (1606, more specifically) and gathers recipes “experienced and tryed by the speciall practize of Mrs Corlyon” (Moorat, 1962-1973).[1] The codex belonged to Alethea Howard (née Talbot), Countess of Arundel. The main aim of the study is to identify and examine narrative forms and functions as well as particular features in the collection of recipes held in MS Wellcome 213, which can contribute to the knowledge of recipes written by and for women during the early modern period.&#x0D; &#x0D; [1] This has been taken from the database description of the Library Catalogue of the Wellcome Collection, available at https://wellcomecollection.org/works/u3w8qbrt (date of access: February 2023).

Gender, race and class at work: enlisting African health labour into the Gold Coast Medical Service, 1860–1957

From the mid-nineteenth century, the people of the Gold Coast formed an essential component of the missionary and early colonial medical services (CMS). The labour of the people was mainly...

Martin Folkes (1690–1754): Newtonian, antiquary, connoisseur

This is a wide-ranging, informative, but ultimately slightly frustrating book. It represents the first book-length account of Martin Folkes, the only man to become president of both the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries, a distinction that, as the author tells us in her acknowledgements, was what drew her to her subject in the first place. Previous authors had been discouraged by the apparent lack of source material, since Folkes directed on his death that his papers should be destroyed. Anna Marie Roos, however, has been able to do much to rectify this state of affairs. Thus she uses materials auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1932, some of which subsequently turned up on book barrows in the Farringdon Road, whence they were retrieved by the late R.E.W. Maddison and subsequently presented to the Royal Society, while others were acquired directly by the Royal Society itself and by the Wellcome Library. She has also been able to trace letters in the collections of such of Folkes’s correspondents as Henry Baker and Charles Lennox, 2nd Duke of Richmond, and more scattered materials that survive in repositories like the Norfolk Record Office and the Bodleian Library – in the latter case, the travel journal that Folkes kept while he was on a tour on the continent in 1733–5, an episode on which Roos wrote an informative article in the British Journal for the History of Science in 2017 that forms a significant component of the current book.

“Rede hit sofft”: John Audelay's Practice of Care

“Rede hit sofft”: John Audelay's Practice of Care

Eric J. Miller memorial lecture—his legacy

In the group relations/Tavistock milieu Eric Miller comes as close to an icon as social scientists and psychoanalysts can tolerate ... most of you will know him from his prolific writing and might have learnt, through his books, about his life-long concern with the paradox of being a human. Those of us fortunate to have known him personally, would recognise his many humanly contradictions. A man of few spoken words, he had mastered the study of phenomena, and I believe touched people so deeply because of his ability to simply be with people without memory or desire in the fully Bionian sense. In this twentieth anniversary of his death, this memorial lecture is a memoir of Eric, as I remember him from the many teas in the Khaleelee–Miller conservatory, when I came for supervision meetings, from group relations conferences and—applying some poetic licence—from putting together pieces of others' memories of him as they were willing to share them and his field notes as preserved in the Tavistock Institute's archive at the Wellcome Library.

Did Ancient Egyptians Discover Local Anesthetics?

The tomb of Ankh-Ma-Hor who served King Teti of the sixth dynasty (circa 2345 to 2323 BC) in Saqqara, Giza, Egypt, was discovered by Victor Loret (1897) and reexamined by Kanawati and Hassan in 1995.1 The tomb was dated 2340 BC by the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and was called the “doctor tomb” because its carvings contain several medical scenes. Ankh-Ma-Hor may have been interested in medical items that were related to his life experiences, but there is no indication that he was a doctor. A scene depicting circumcision was found between rooms 1 and 2 on the east wall (image reproduced with permission from the Wellcome Library).The circumcision is probably the oldest depiction of a surgery.2 This scene is the oldest known documented circumcision procedure. The scene shows the procedure performed in two ways. In the left part, the circumcised person was held by a third person, with the following words in hieroglyphs: “Hold him still. Do not let him struggle.” Interestingly, in the right part, the person performing the circumcision applied something to the penis with subsequently no need for him to be held by another person with words in hieroglyphs that read, “I will proceed gently.” We do not have information about the nature of the material that was used to avoid struggling of the person who had the circumcision. It is possible that the ancient Egyptians had knowledge about local anesthetics. It is not clear whether this preceded the use of coca leaf chewing practiced by the Incas before 2500 BC.3The author declares no competing interests.

Protecting the Empire’s Humanity: Thomas Hodgkin and British Colonial Activism, 1830–1870, by Zoë Laidlaw

Zoë Laidlaw’s first book, Colonial Connections: Patronage, the Information Revolution and Colonial Government (2006; rev. ante, cxxiii [2008], pp. 1,576–7) examined the processes of British imperial administration from the inside, in a globe-spanning, intensely archival, and pioneering fashion. This second monograph, while sharing the same concern with archives, networks, information, and the misunderstandings which shaped colonial government, turns to those who sought to influence the running of the empire from without. The book is really a methodological experiment. It is a study centred on a single, massive personal archive: that of Thomas Hodgkin, the Quaker doctor and philanthropist. In 1837, Hodgkin co-founded the Aborigines’ Protection Society—for generations thereafter the most prominent metropolitan organisation which claimed to want to protect the indigenous peoples of the British empire against the depredations of governors and settlers—and remained until his death in 1866 one of its leading lights, as well as promoting a range of other imperial and para-imperial ‘humanitarian’ causes. Laidlaw’s approach is to follow the spokes of his archive (currently housed at the Wellcome Library in London) outwards, interrogating virtually all the imperial concerns, contacts and networks for which it supplies evidence. This is a novel strategy, at least for nineteenth-century imperial history. Hodgkin’s archive could hardly be better chosen as a starting point for the scheme, given the extraordinary reach and scope of his preoccupations. Not the least significant result of Laidlaw’s endeavours is to provide comfortably the most sophisticated and reflective history of the Aborigines’ Protection Society, in its early decades, which is now available. But the broader purpose of the book is to probe the wider tensions, ties, and contradictions within British imperial humanitarianism between the 1830s and the 1860s.

HF02-02 THOMAS ROWLANDSON AND THE ENGLISH PENII

You have accessJournal of UrologyCME1 May 2022HF02-02 THOMAS ROWLANDSON AND THE ENGLISH PENII Michael Moran Michael MoranMichael Moran More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000002540.02AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827) was one of England’s most recognizable caricaturists and is little appreciated in medicine. He is overshadowed perhaps historically by his rival William Hogarth (1697-1764) but he has a certain appeal to urology in his numerous depictions of British penii. The word penii is a British slang humorous reference to multiple penises. There exist multiple compendia of Rowlandson's artworks, commentaries and even a short biography. Almost none of his works though are quoted by medical historians. METHODS: A review of the literature of all aspects of the works of Thomas Rowlandson with special attention to his more obscure sexual images. We also paid significant attention to his depiction of medicine and surgery as well as anatomy of his time. The Wellcome Library in London as well as the British Museum also provided invaluable assistance in finding many more esoteric works by Rowlandson. RESULTS: Caricature is a satirical artform widely utilized since the Renaissance as a reflection upon the mores of society, in this instance, the Georgian era of England. Since this artform is a cross between art and humor they reflect intently some of the foibles and humorous thoughts of the times in which they were created and printed. There are always two sides to the caricature- the caricaturist and the subject. CONCLUSIONS: Rowlandson was a prolific Georgian artist whose life stretched across the loss of the American colonies by England, the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon. He was singularly recognized in his own time by his “topical caricatures” and was collected by the Royal Family. He appears to have been fascinated by English sexual practice and portrayed the British penis avidly and often and deserves a resurrection of sorts, especially in sexual medicine and urology. Source of Funding: None © 2022 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 207Issue Supplement 5May 2022Page: e206 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2022 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Michael Moran More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF DownloadLoading ...

Disinfectants: Use of Different Types of Sanitization Techniques in 18th and 19th Centuries Britain and India

The article focuses on the use of different kinds of disinfectants used for sanitization and cleaning of public and private places for curbing the spread of diseases from one place to another. Multiple methods were employed for disinfection; some of which are easily accessible to the common people while others were particularly used in infirmaries and hospitals at the time of treatment. The article also shows that disinfectants were supplement to medicine and they target limiting of the contagion to a space whereas medicines were given for the treatment of patients. Historically, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed unprecedented development in the field of chemistry which led to the discoveries of different types of antiseptic solutions and disinfectants apparently endorsed by the germ theory. Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://wellcomeimages.org

‘Probatum est’. The Medical Recipes in London, Wellcome Library, MS 3009

Recipe books are frequently encountered in Early Modern English scientific writing. They are of paramount importance to understand medical practice in the period and they usually gather collections of culinary and/or medical recipes. The present paper investigates the medical recipes contained in MS Wellcome 3009 (ff. 17r–90r), a 17th-century recipe book housed at the Wellcome Library in London. The medical recipes are analyzed in terms of their structural and linguistic features and, in this sense, five different stages are distinguished within the recipes: a) title; b) ingredients; c) preparation; d) application; and e) efficacy phrase.

Orthographic standardisation in early Modern English: London, Wellcome Library, MS 3009

ABSTRACT Early Modern English is regarded as the key period in the establishment of the written standard of the language. The present study contributes to the discussion on the standardisation processes of the English spelling in the period. It assesses the level of orthographic standardisation of London, Wellcome Library, MS 3009 (ff. 17 r–90 r), a 17th-century recipe book. The orthographic variables considered fall into four criteria: complementary distribution of graphemes, vowel length, word separation and hyphenation and line-final word division. For the purpose, a semi-diplomatic transcription of MS Wellcome 3009 has been carried out, which allows for both a quantitative and a qualitative approach to the study of orthographic standardisation of the text under consideration.

Book Conservation and Digitization: The Challenges of Dialogue and Collaboration ed. by Alberto Campagnolo

Reviewed by: Book Conservation and Digitization: The Challenges of Dialogue and Collaboration ed. by Alberto Campagnolo Nancy K. Turner Keywords digital cultural object, library digitization, project management, multi-spectral imaging, manuscript conservation, book conservation Alberto Campagnolo, ed. Book Conservation and Digitization: The Challenges of Dialogue and Collaboration. Leeds: ARC Humanities Press, 2020. €109. ISBN: 9781641890533. Despite the closure of major libraries and the curtailment of air travel that occurred during the global pandemic of 2020–21, decades-long efforts to digitize rare books and manuscripts have provided humanities researchers with vast resources that have enabled virtual access and opportunities for research. The timely publication of a volume of essays edited by Alberto Campagnolo provides a veritable master class in the work required to make these digital assets readily accessible online to scholars around the world. Alberto Campagnolo is that uncommon individual whose expertise combines the interdisciplinary fields of rare book and manuscript conservation and digital humanities. For this volume, he has brought together a number of his former tutors, project collaborators, and other colleagues to share their individual personal digitization experiences from various libraries, archives, and museums. Organized into three sections, the book includes contributions authored by over a dozen eminent conservators, library heritage preservation experts, and specialists in digitization and imaging. The key words in the volume’s title—dialogue and collaboration—are emblematic of the book’s support for the central role of book conservators at the outset of any digitization project, no matter how large or small. Campagnolo’s introduction and first section, entitled “Books as Objects and Their Digitization,” along with the nine case studies given in Section 2, [End Page 357] Manuscript Studies make compelling arguments for how collaborative digitization projects ought to be structured and why the involvement of conservators needs to be front and center at all stages. For some institutions this may seem self- evident. But when funding resources are short and pressures mount to get more books online, digitization can compete with conservation when the mandate to digitize is given priority over more time- consuming condition surveys and conservation treatments. There is an urgency to this book’s advocacy, for it cannot be denied that digitization can and does cause material damage. The remedy is to involve conservators and to embed their active participation into the digitization workflow to prevent material loss. Campagnolo’s two long- form chapters in Section 1 make explicit the premise of the book: in “Understanding the Artifactual Value of Books,” and “Conservation and Digitization: A Difficult Balance?,” Campagnolo argues for the need to document by digitization (and associated metadata, such as object descriptions) an object’s “untransferrable features”—that is, the physical aspects of manuscripts not made apparent in a two- dimensional page scan (74). These features often include the physical details and material qualities of historical bindings, parchment, paper, ink, pigment, and so on, and the three- dimensional structure of the codex as a whole. With his extended articulation of what constitutes “artifactual value,” Campagnolo makes clear that the conservator’s role is not limited to preservation and treatment, but also includes unique knowledge and understanding of materials and features, the description and documentation of which require standardized vocabularies (17–48). To this first section must be added Athanasios Velios and Nicholas Pickwoad’s collaborative contribution (grouped among the “Case Studies”), which outlines the seminal resource of the Language of Bindings Thesaurus, a project of the Ligatus Research Centre; their essay provides a roadmap to how those observations ought to be expressed and linked using structured vocabularies. Together these three essays articulate and model ways of thinking about books as objects, arising out of the collaborative endeavors to catalogue, conserve, and digitize rare books and manuscripts. The case studies in Section 2, “Conservation and Digitization in Practice,” showcase the collaborative digitization projects at the Vatican Library, the National Archives at Kew, the British Library, the Wellcome Library, [End Page 358] the Herzog August Bibliothek, the London Municipal Archives, the Library of Congress, and Saint Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai, Egypt. As models, these essays are rich with insights and recommendations. For instance, Almuth Corbach’s review of available book- cradle equipment is helpful to anyone...

Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski

Reviewed by: Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski Aylin Malcolm (bio) Julie Orlemanski, Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, x + 333pp. $69.95 cloth. The events of 2020 revealed the importance of effective communication in healthcare and the potential for epidemics to inspire new narrative projects, concretizing decades of research on the intersections between literature and medicine. Though its publication anticipated these developments by several months, Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects is an important contribution to such discussions and to the study of premodern medicine, a field generally dominated by historical methods. Orlemanski offers a sophisticated new perspective on the entanglements of literature and phisik—a Middle English term that includes both academic approaches to healing and more diffuse local practices—in late medieval England. Her deliberately anachronistic use of "symptom," which she defines as "a somatic disturbance that … provokes interpretation," speaks to the parallels between diagnosing a body and analyzing a text; both projects require one to interpret visible signs in the context of larger semiotic systems, a fact recognized by many medieval writers (p. 16). As her title suggests, the book also considers what Orlemanski calls "embodied subjectivity," characterized by the tension between physical susceptibility and the medieval emphasis on free will (p. 2). Orlemanski is particularly interested in individuals who reflect on their own bodies or pathologies, thereby addressing the "gap between one's materiality and one's experience, or between having and being a body" (p. 3). While Symptomatic Subjects will appeal most to those specializing in the late Middle Ages, its rigorous engagement with both literary criticism and the history of medicine is likely to interest a range of scholars. An evident strength of the book is its careful close readings, which address canonical texts (e.g., Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale) alongside others that are often overlooked (e.g., John Lydgate's "Dietary;" Robert Henryson's "Sum Practysis of Medecyne"). Many of these textual interpretations include studies of individual manuscripts; in particular, the Wound Man (a standard diagram of the various injuries that a physician might treat) in Wellcome Library MS 290 serves as an emblem of Orlemanski's project, embodying her interests in the relationships between particulars and general causes, as well as the tension between human agency and vulnerability. Each text or object is contextualized with generous references, such that the reader trained in a different field will likely require no further notes. Indeed, while the book has a clear overarching narrative, it often recapitulates essential information in multiple chapters; each chapter might therefore be read independently without additional context, a welcome feature in the age of digital downloads. [End Page 231] Structured as four parts of two chapters each, Symptomatic Subjects progresses from an overview of medieval medical knowledge to its effects on literary genres, plot, and voice, with a brief coda on the early modern afterlives of phisik. Orlemanski begins by surveying medicine in late medieval England, where the absence of formal medical institutions produced a diverse constellation of beliefs and practices. Chapter two delves more deeply into four aspects of phisik: the etiological schemata through which physicians ascribed medical conditions to causes, the decentralized and heterogeneous character of medical authority, the tendency for physicians to read bodies as signs with identifiable meanings, and the relationships between content and layout in medical manuscripts. Both chapters offer not only useful information about medical practices, but also perceptive analyses of medical writing, as Orlemanski applies her considerable critical skills to texts not often read as literature. The next two chapters examine satire, which often criticized the obscure jargon and earthly materialism of medical texts, and exempla, or short anecdotes illustrating moral principles, a very common narrative form during the late Middle Ages. The fourth chapter's comparisons between exemplary narratives and medical case studies are especially enlightening, providing clear evidence of the fluid relationship between medieval literature and medicine, and thus of the importance of Orlemanski's work. Central to this chapter is Orlemanski's notion of the "etiological imagination," or the creative process of envisioning causation with...

Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge—Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives. Edited by Vera Keller, Anna Marie Roos, and Elizabeth Yale. [Review

Most extraordinary about this collection of essays documenting the life cycle of archives covering early modern scientific and medical thought, with the exception of one example of born-digital preservation, is that these archives survived at all. Essentially private archives until the papers contained in them had been obtained by institutions such as the Royal Society, the Ashmolean, and the Wellcome Library, the letters, studies, experiments, theories, speculations, and ephemera discussed in the essays underwent unpredictable transformational journeys. The history of these archives will cause archivists, librarians, scientists, and researchers reading the stories to gasp and to pine for lost items. The essays in Archival Afterlives: Life, Death, and Knowledge-Making in Early Modern British Scientific and Medical Archives present eight examples of scientific and medical collections that had been assembled; were transformed through publication, disaster, and handling; and eventually ended up as organized archives that have been preserved and passed on to become an important body of thought informing the modern scientific world. The eight essays, three written individually by the editors, constitute volume 23 of the publisher’s Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions series. The volume is based on a 2015 conference sponsored by the Royal Society in England.

Punctuation Practice in Early Modern English Scientific Writing: The Case of MS 3009 at the Wellcome Library, London

The study of punctuation has traditionally been overlooked by some scholars for being considered haphazard and unpredictable. In medieval manuscripts, every scribe was free to use their own repertory of symbols. However, the establishment of the printing press along with the proliferation of professional scriveners resulted in a process of standardization of the system in such a way that by the end of the 16th century a repertory of punctuation symbols was fully developed (Salmon 1999: 15; Calle-Martín 2019: 179-200). The present study seeks to examine the punctuation system of a 17th-century recipe book housed in the Wellcome Library in London, MS Wellcome 3009. This paper has therefore been conceived with a twofold objective: a) to assess the inventory of punctuation marks in the text; and b) to analyze the use and pragmatic functions of these symbols.

The Idiot as Artist:The Fantasy Boats of James Henry Pullen

The Idiot as Artist:The Fantasy Boats of James Henry Pullen

Medical Recipes in Two Middle English Manuscripts: London, Wellcome Library, MSS 404 and 5262

Medical Recipes in Two Middle English Manuscripts: London, Wellcome Library, MSS 404 and 5262