Spades, Hearts, Diamonds

A game of cards. Oil painting by Stephen Jenner. Wellcome Library no. 47409i

In England in 1840, Queen Victoria married Prince Albert, Charles Dickens published The Old Curiosity Shop, and a certain E. Estridge passed the time by drawing on playing cards. He (or she, but perhaps more probably he) took a complete pack manufactured by the firm of Hardy & Sons, and doodled contemporary scenes on each of the numbered cards, using the pips (the spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs) as human heads. Each of the royal cards carried a letter or number which together spell out "E. ESTRIDGE 1840".

The complete pack was acquired by the firm of Abbott & Holder from whom the Wellcome Library has acquired three cards, thus adding a new and bizarre species to the variety of genres represented in the Wellcome Library's collections. In the Wellcome Library they have the number 780448i and they can be found in the Wellcome Library catalogue here.

The Two of Spades (left) must be either a meeting or a confrontation between two black figures (since Spades and Clubs are black). Estridge has shown them as two black pugilists exercising the science of boxing. Many books had been published about the science of boxing, including Captain John Godfrey’s A treatise upon the science of defence of 1747 and Thomas Fewtrell’s Boxing reviewed; or, the science of manual defence, displayed on rational principles, London, 1790. And at some stage boxing acquired the sobriquet "the sweet science". The Oxford English Dictionary also gives as the meaning of spade “Slang (orig. U.S.) depreciative and offensive. As a term of contempt or casual reference among white people: a black person, esp. a black man. Formerly (among African Americans): a very dark-skinned black person.” But as the earliest quotation given is American and dates from 1928, it would surely be incorrect to read that meaning into this English drawing.

The Three of Diamonds (right) contains three figures: what about two people helping a third? Estridge does that by showing two men carrying an injured person on a stretcher "To Guy’s", i.e. to Guy’s Hospital, then as now in Southwark, near London Bridge. This patient there follows in the tracks of those Southwark residents who had recently been taken to Guy’s and immortalised in the pages of Richard Bright’s Reports of medical cases (1827-1831).

The Ten of Hearts suggests a team game with ten players or a well-ordered ceremony of some sort. Estridge makes it a post-mortem examination (above), conducted by a Georgian surgeon in a wig, in the presence of eight other witnesses. Several other scenes in the pack also show people in Georgian dress, suggesting that Estridge was old enough to recall life from before 1800. His post-mortem examiners are not modern medical coroners of the Thomas Wakley generation, but perhaps members of the old Company of Surgeons, dissecting a body in Surgeons' Hall in the Old Bailey, and living on in folk memory into the reign of Victoria. The subject has certainly given the artist a lot of amusement in turning hearts into heads, with the closed eyes of the deceased contrasted with the staring eyes of the watchers.

An outbreak of Mad Cow Disease in the archives

The Wellcome Trust ’s mission is to foster human and animal health. Sometimes these two areas converge. The BSE crisis of the late 1990s was one such occurrence.

Sir John Pattison, former vice-provost of University College London School of Health, and National Health Service Head of Research and Development, was right at the centre of this crisis. As Chairman of the Government’s Spongiform Encephalopathy Advisory Committee (SEAC) from 1995-1999, Sir John had a unique view of the political decisions taken at this time.

SEAC provided advice on a number of issues, including the safe consumption of meat and milk, and the suitable treatment of animal carcasses by slaughterhouses. The committee remained in operation until 30 March 2011, when it was replaced by the ACDP Transmissible Spongiform Encephalopathy Risk Assessment Subgroup.

In December 2010, Sir John Pattison presented a memoir of his time in charge of SEAC to the Wellcome Library , along with a set of committee minutes, and supporting documentation. The minutes, and the documentation that Sir John used in compiling this memoir are now available to Wellcome Library researchers. The memoir itself will be available in the near future, once we have put in place facilities to allow user access to born-digital archival material.

The supporting documentation includes correspondence with politicians, members of the public, and the families of patients with Creutzfeldt–Jakob Disease (CJD). There are also press releases issued on behalf of the committee and other bodies, as well as information on potential tests for, and causes of, CJD.

More information on can be found via the Archives and Manuscripts online catalogue. The reference for this collection is PP/JPN .

The SEAC website can be accessed through the UK Government Web Archive .

New Post: Specialist, Medieval and Early Modern Medicine

Applications are welcomed for a new post at the Wellcome Library as a Specialist in Medieval and Early Modern Medicine.

Candidates should have a higher degree in History with specialisation in pre-modern medicine or science and must be able to demonstrate the following:

- A strong academic profile
- Knowledge of relevant collections, including those outside the Wellcome Library
- Knowledge of current academic work in fields relevant to the Library's pre-modern collections
- Excellent communication skills, both written and oral, including the ability to engage non-specialist audiences
- Strong influencing and persuading skills
- Good networking skills
- An aptitude for collaboration and team-working
- A reading knowledge of Latin and at least one other relevant foreign language.

Full details of the post - and details on applying - are available from the 'Current Vacancies' section of the Wellcome Trust's website (direct link).

The closing date for applications is 21st December 2011.

HIV/AIDS at 30: Spreading the Word

To mark World AIDS Day (1 December) this year, BHIVA (the British HIV Association) held a World AIDS Day Event in collaboration with the Wellcome Trust on the theme HIV/AIDS at 30: Back to the Future. 2011 is the thirtieth anniversary of the first description of AIDS -- a milestone in the continuing epidemic that has claimed the lives of millions of people worldwide. While reflecting on the experiences and work of the past 30 years, eminent speakers reviewed today's challenges, and looked ahead to consider how the knowledge of the past will inform future strategies.

One aspect of the epidemic that was considered was the way in which health authorities, activists and charities around the world have tried to prevent its spread by publicity, including posters. The Wellcome Library now has over 3,200 AIDS posters from many countries. The exhibition Spreading the Word: AIDS Posters from Around the World is a selection of 24 posters chosen and interpreted by Dr Sarah Graham of Leicester University, and shown earlier this year at the New Walk Museum in Leicester.


The posters emphasize the range of graphic techniques adopted and the variety of ethnic and social groups at which they were directed. Spreading the Word was also on display today at the BHIVA/Wellcome Trust meeting (left) and was much appreciated by those attending.

Below: Wellcome Library no. 778362i

The latest AIDS poster to enter the Wellcome Library catalogue (right) must be one of the most allusive and discreet in the entire collection. It was published on World AIDS Day in 1994 by UNESCO in Paris, for Hispanic populations in which drug use was a source of transmission of the virus. Unlike the crashingly explicit posters (mostly from Germanic and Anglo-Saxon countries), it refers to open discussion within the family and use of counselling to help drug users, with no obvious indication to the casual passer-by that its end-purpose is to save them from contracting HIV through needle re-use.

Among the work publicised at the conference was a recent volume in the series Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine, which was published in November 2011. It concerns the controversial National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (NATSAL) which was launched in 1990. "A proposal that the UK Department of Health would fund it, after scientific scrutiny by the Economic and Social Research Council, was vetoed at government level – some say by Mrs Thatcher herself – on the grounds that this would be an unacceptable intrusion into private lives. This decision hit the headlines (first in The Sunday Times), as did the decision, some four weeks after the story broke, by the Wellcome Trust to step in and fund it instead. There is a similar story to be told of obstruction from the Bush White House,which forbade funding from the National Institutes for Health (NIH) for the American survey" (pp. xxi-xxii).

The phrase "some say by Mrs Thatcher herself" is backed up on p. 67 by a separate statement in the book (Appendix 3, pp. 66-68) by Dr Peter Williams, Director of the Wellcome Trust at the time, who received that account of events in a phone call from the Chief Medical Officer, Sir Donald Acheson. A note by Professor Virginia Berridge (p. 61) suggests that the reality behind the scenes may have been more complicated, but that at any rate Downing Street was happy to go along with the veto. More of the raw materials for this episode are set out in the volume, in the usual Witness Seminar manner: the spoken memories of people who were involved in the events at the time, provided with scholarly commentary and often with competing points of view. It makes compulsive reading. It is available in hard-copy from booksellers and Amazon, and available free of charge on the web as a PDF. [2]

[1] Overy C, Reynolds L A, Tansey E M. (eds) (2011) History of the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles. Wellcome Witnesses to Twentieth Century Medicine, vol. 41. London: Queen Mary, University of London. ISBN 978 090223 874 9

[2] http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/research/modbiomed/wellcome_witnesses/index.html

Music of the blind

Blind musicians in Paris. Detail of lithograph by Martin Sylvestre Baptiste, 1828. Wellcome Library no. 16519i

An article by Ingrid Sykes in the latest issue of Medical History considers the blind in Paris from an unusual angle: their sound. One might think that the blind would sound the same as the sighted, but no, not in Paris in the years before and after the French Revolution. [1]

There was in Paris a mediaeval institution called the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts, founded by King Louis IX in the thirteenth century. The Hospice was a self-governing community of 300 (quinze-vingts, or 15 x 20) blind and partially sighted men and women, their spouses and their children. The hospice's autonomy and antiquity, its often truculent and anarchic spirit, the fact that it was founded by a king and protected by a cardinal (the Grand Almoner, Cardinal de Rohan), all brought it into conflict with the new spirit of improvement and control in the French Enlightenment.

The character of the Hospice was expressed in its sound. The musicians of the Quinze-Vingts could be heard in Paris on the streets, at fairs, and at an all-night café. Fiddlers, woodwind performers and vocalists produced a raucous popular sound in which successive members would perform as soloists followed by a chorus in which all performers would join. The results were variously described as "depraved", "threatening", and even as "une scène si déshonorante pour l'espèce humaine" (a scene dishonourable to the human race). The politer sort would give them some small change in order to make them go away. The print above shows one of the Quinze-Vingts bands in their outlandish costume about to have a brawl on the street with a rival amputee musician.

Left, Valentin Haüy,with, far left, his brother, the crystallographer René-Just Haüy. Engraving by the brothers Boilly, Jules and Alphonse; Wellcome Library no. 545537i

A performance by a Quinze-Vingts band made a deep, though not favourable, impression on the reformer Valentin Haüy (1745-1822). It was after hearing a performance of the Quinze-Vingts, described by him as "cette atrocité", that Valentin Haüy decided to found a new institution for the blind, organized along more up-to-date lines. [2] This was the Institut des Jeunes Aveugles (Institute for Blind Youth), a typical Enlightenment institution. Secular, educational, managed by the sighted, run by the state and not by the church, the new organization's nature was signalled by its name: not a mediaeval Hospice but a structured Institut.

Aquatint with etching by Marlé, 1805. Wellcome Library no. 545557i

The character of the Institut was also signalled by its musical performances. Instead of the popular music of the Quinze-Vingts, the blind would be trained in the harmonic system of the composer Rameau: the new system was based on Cartesian mathematics and was published in a book ominously entitled Code de musique pratique (1761).

The Hospice had always existed and was there by Royal fiat. The Institut was an innovation and was there for a purpose. In the 1790s attempts were made by the revolutionaries to suppress the Hospice, invoking the inmates' licentious life-style and spirit of independence. Suppression was avoided, but, despite their disparate characters, the Hospice and the Institut were amalgamated in 1805, largely for financial reasons. The print above recording Pope Pius VII's visit in that year shows the more decorous appearance of the blind, their more harmonious means of music-making, and their more regimented organization under the Institut.





















Sébastien Guillié (1780-1865). Left, as a young man: lithograph by C. Motte. Wellcome Library no. 3852i. His initial is given as J by mistake. Right, in later life: photograph by Giraudon, 1865. Wellcome Library no. 12835i

The merger did not last. In 1816 a new director, the despotic doctor Sébastien Guillié (above), determined to rid the Institut of its association with the Quinze-Vingts: he moved it away to a new site where, in the name of progress, he could carry out ophthalmological experiments on the blind children selected as his victims. [3] The Quinze-Vingts musicians continued their performances on the street for some years more, but could not defy change indefinitely: their building is now the site of a modern ophthalmological centre, the Centre Hospitalier National d'Ophtalmologie des Quinze-Vingts à Paris.

There is more to it than that, and more is provided in the article, which is available free online. One last point: the whole story would provide marvellous material for an opera. Richard Strauss and Clemens Krauss wrote Capriccio about different genres of drama and the relation between words and music. Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill included in The Threepenny Opera street songs and conflict with the police. Perhaps the authors of Les Misérables would like to produce a successor to those works, based on the struggles of the Quinze-Vingts? There would be a dramatic conflict between the two types of music, the protagonists on each side would provide plenty of character, and there would be scope for a variety of indoor and outdoor sets. And Victor Hugo himself could have a cameo role: according to the article, he was one of the champions of the Quinze-Vingts in their struggle against bureaucracy.

[1] Ingrid Sykes, 'Sounding the "Citizen–Patient": the politics of voice at the Hospice des Quinze-Vingts in post-Revolutionary Paris', Medical history, 2011 October; 55(4): 479–502. Available free online at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3199644/

[2] Pierre Henri, La vie et l'œuvre de Valentin Haüy, Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984, pp 37-43 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

[3] Zina Weygand, The blind in French society from the Middle Ages to the century of Louis Braille, Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. 261-267 (find in the Wellcome Library here)

Please DO eat in the library

I know, shocking! But for one weekend only, lucky guests at the Wellcome Collection’s Feast to Cure Melancholy on Friday 11 and Saturday 12 November were invited to break the rules and dine in the library’s Reading Room as part of an edible experiment exploring 17th-century beliefs about the four humours.

Each guest spent the evening in the guise of a new character, from melancholic Prudence (a student suffering from anxiousness due living in city away from her rural family, and uncomfortable with the fast pace of city life) to choleric Rowland (a quick tempered City worker, in a pressured environment on a high salary, finding it difficult to wind down after work).

On hand to offer advice were a Physician, Apothecary and Housewife, each competing with the other to provide the most effective and affordable cures for guests’ physical and psychological humoral imbalances.

But if snail scum and fox’s lungs cures didn’t appeal, the edible remedies created by food artists Blanch & Shock were a delight for both the eye and the palate. How could melancholic Prudence not be put in a better mood by the sanguine treat of wild mallard breast and Jerusalem artichoke?

And now the Reading Room is once again a place of peaceful, food-free study, I can’t help wondering, did it all really happen?

Posted on behalf of Helen

Image copyright Mike Massaro