Medical History of British India

The papers of malariologist Leonard Jan Bruce-Chwatt (1907-1989) are now available from the Wellcome Library.
“For an insight into global anti-malaria endeavours from the advent of effective insecticides in the 1940s through the large-scale eradication campaigns of the 1950s and 1960s, and the disillusionment of the 1970s and 1980s, one could do worse than begin with an examination of the papers of Bruce-Chwatt himself, now available for consultation in the Wellcome Library.” (quoted from the Wellcome Library blog. For more information see the blog at: http://wellcomelibrary.blogspot.co.uk/2012/05/let-us-spray-papers-of-leonard-jan.html

This week I have been preparing a talk to give to the Open University in Scotland. I will be presenting how the content of the Medical History of British India website may help students.

The undergraduate courses it particularly relates to are:

A218 Medicine and Society in Europe 1500-1930 (asylums, public health, colonial and imperial medicine, hospital and laboratory medicine, surgery);
AA100 Arts Past and Present (transmission of medical knowledge);
SK320 Infectious Disease and Public Health (historical background on disease control and identification);
SK185 Drugs, Molecules and Medicines.

As a current student with the Open University (S171, Empire of the Micobes) and having passed A218 last year I appreciate that having the time to do extra reading and research is difficult.

Yet the Medical History of British India website offers full text searching and can provide a handy selection of primary sources at the click of a button. I used it to find out more on antisepsis in hospitals at the end of the nineteenth century and printed out a few pages. You can also save pages as pdfs, download the transcripts or paste text into your own notes.

Of course, I feel that the site has plenty to offer all students and academics in the form of freely available colonial primary sources.

Currently I am doing some digital work with the Lunatic Asylum reports files. The tif files have been run through a PhotoShop atn routine to produce jpegs. From these, different sized zoomable files will be produced and the htm (transcript) files from OCR will be ingested into our Digital Object Database.
I attended a SPRUCE Digital Mashup last month which paired me with a developer who made me a tool to match tif, htm and pdf files. It has been most useful.
Leeds University Library launched the Sustainable PReservation Using Community Engagement (SPRUCE) project. SPRUCE’s aim is to inspire, guide, support and enable HE, FE and cultural institutions to address digital preservation gaps; and to use the knowledge gathered from that activity to articulate a compelling business case for digital preservation. This is achieved through creative collaboration at events such as Mashups.
I would recommend attending a mashup to anyone who works with digital collections and manages large amount of digital files.

For more information please see:

http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/SPR/SPRUCE+Mashup+Glasgow
http://www.dpconline.org/advocacy/spruce

1. The Wellcome Trust is the sole funding body of the Medical History of British India Project. Since 2005 the Trust has awarded 5 grants to the National Library of Scotland for the microfilming and digitisation of selected medical volumes from the India Papers.

2. The Wellcome Trust was founded in 1936 under the terms of Sir Henry Wellcome’s will and is based in London.

3. Sir Henry Wellcome (1853-1936) was a businessman, collector and philanthropist. Born in the American Wild West he ended his days as a knight of the British Realm. Wellcome co-founded a multinational pharmaceutical company and the wealth that the company brought him was invested collecting historical objects and funding pioneering medical research.

3. The Wellcome Trust’s mission is to work with researchers to improve human and animal health,  through biomedical science, medical history, public engagement, technology and ethics.

4. By 2008/09, the Trust’s annual spend had risen to over £600 million. It continues to foster and support outstanding biomedical research in the UK and overseas.

5. The Wellcome Collection, in London’s Euston Road, enables the public to explore the connections between medicine, life and art. The venue offers visitors contemporary and historic exhibitions and collections, public events and debates, and is host to the world-renowned Wellcome Library.

Check out the Trust’s excellent website for news, educational ideas, applying for funding and blog – http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/index.htm

(Text and photo from www.wellcome.ac.uk)