Recently my wife and I have been trying to declutter our home; an emotional process that threatens domestic harmony and generates both relief and bereavement in equal measure. A lifetime of collected material artefacts and documents entombed in draws, cupboards or cardboard boxes are finally being subjected to the “William Morris test”: is it useful, is it beautiful?  If not, where should it go? Relatives, friends, the sale room, eBay, charity shops, the municipal tip, or a car-boot sale are places where “stuff” can be deposited. In this way, collections become fractured, and objects might lose both their identity and meaning.

This year the BSHM has celebrated collections and collectors through an excellent Poynter lecture “the Doctor as Collector ” by Simon Chaplin which is now available on this website at https://BSHM.org.uk/poynter-lecture/   and by our recent symposium “In Sickness and in Health ” with abstracts and lecture images at  https://bshm.org.uk/events/collections-symposium/

When James Parkinson (1755-1824), of eponymous disease fame, died, his collection of fossils, regarded as one of the finest in the UK, was inherited by his unappreciative wife. Sadly, she allowed the collection to be broken up and disposed of at a public sale. No catalogue exists and very few of the specimens can now be traced. A similar fate befell many other note-worthy “cabinets of curiosity” in the 18th an 19th centuries.

‘Cabinet of Curiosities’, by Domenico Remps, c. 1689

Readers of this blog may, like me, be reviewing their accumulated stuff.  If you have collections or archives that could be of interest to other medical historians please take steps to deposit these in an appropriate repository – archives, libraries or museums – where they can be properly conserved, catalogued and made available to others.

Chris Derrett

Thanks to a grant from the Wellcome Trust, the Historic England Archive has completed a 12 month project to conserve, digitise, and catalogue a collection of photographic prints showing health and social care in Britain between 1938 and 1943.

The Mozelle Sasson High Voltage X-Ray Therapy Department at St Bartholomew’s Hospital, 20th January 1939. (MED01/01/0123)  Source: Historic England Archive

The 4,071 black and white photographs were taken by Norman Kingsley Harrison for the Topical Press Agency, and were only recently rediscovered in the Historic England Archive. The Topical Press Agency, established in 1903, supplied newsworthy photographs to the Fleet Street press and specialist journals. While it is not clear why all of the photographs in the collection were taken, it is possible that some were produced for journals such as Nursing Times. Each photograph is accompanied by a detailed caption written by the photographer, which has been transcribed and supplemented by further research.

A broad range of subjects is covered by the Medical Collection, including medical procedures, child welfare, blood transfusion, and nurses’ training. Wartime healthcare and nursing feature heavily, including auxiliary and military hospitals, improvised wards, and bomb damage.

The collection reveals a snapshot of 1930s and 1940s Britain, and shows a health service responding to the demands of a country at war. Significantly, many of the sites shown in the photographs have changed dramatically or have been destroyed or transformed, giving added significance to the collection as a photographic record.

Captivating oral history interviews with nurses who trained and worked in the 1940s and 1950s also form part of the Medical Collection, and a short film featuring the interviews and photographs has been published on YouTube.

The collection offers insights into the history of nursing, rehabilitation, specific procedures, and healthcare in the years prior to the founding of the NHS. It also provides a fascinating record of the development of social care, and documents ground-breaking medical developments during the Second World War, the beginnings of the National Blood Service, and the nursing of military casualties.

More information can be found at www.historicengland.org.uk/medical, and the digitised photographs can be viewed at archive.historicengland.org.uk by searching “MED01”. Low resolution images are available for free, and high resolution images for personal non-commercial use can be ordered free of charge. For more information about ordering, please contact archive@historicengland.org.uk

Abigail Coats, Cataloguing Officer, Historic England Archive