Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine

Title: Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine

Description: The Wellcome Library provides insight and information to anyone seeking to understand medicine and its role in society, past and present. With over 600 000 books and journals, an extensive range of manuscripts, archives and films, and more than 100 000 pictures, the Library is one of the world's major resources for the study of medical history. Access is also available to a growing collection of contemporary biomedical information resources relating to consumer health, popular science, biomedical ethics and the public understanding of science. While the focus of the collections is medicine and health this is interpreted very widely and there is much on alternative practice, ethnomedicine, veterinary medicine, and a wide variety of topics bearing on questions of health and disease and the development of the biomedical sciences.

Material on the Caribbean is not a major strength of the Library General Collections (books, journals and ephemera post-1850), although there are probably a hundred or so items of relevance on the catalogue: however, there are significant (and unique) holdings in Special Collections and Visual Resources:

• Early Printed Books: There are c. 500 published pre-1850 works among this collection, in particular in the collection of Medical Americana.
• Archives and Manuscripts: There are approximately 45 manuscripts, and material in 12 archival collections (approximately 15 boxes and 3 oversize folders) which cover a period from the C17th to the C20th. These are listed in a handout, `The Caribbean', and include material relating to Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Cayman Islands, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guadeloupe, Haïti, Jamaica, Martinique, Montserrat, Puerto Rico, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, and the various other Caribbean islands administered by France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States.
• In the Iconographic Collection there are c. 100 prints, drawings and photographs of Caribbean scenes, 1730-1960.

There is some material in the Library General Collections of post 1850 published material (books, journals, ephemera), both primary and secondary. The main sources of material of relevance would however be Archives and Manuscripts and Iconographic Collections:

• Archives and Manuscripts: There is a sources leaflet available online and in hard copy on `Race and Ethnicity' detailing relevance items among Contemporary Medical Archives. The amount is quite hard to quantify - perhaps 10 boxes. The collection also includes papers of Thomas Hodgkin, the early nineteenth century anti-slavery campaigner and human rights activist (c.5 boxes deal specifically with this subject).
• Iconographic Collection includes paintings and prints of black people in England, 18th and 19th century.

Guides and finding aids:
Printed books, journals and ephemera, and visual images can be located using the library online catalogue, http://library.wellcome.ac.uk and searching under appropriate terms.
There is a one-page double-sided, word-processed handout `The Caribbean: archive and manuscript sources in the Wellcome Library', available on application to archs+mss@wellcome.ac.uk, either in electronic form or hard copy.
The sources leaflet 'Race and Ethnic Issues' on material in Contemporary Medical Archives is available online at http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/library/homlib/sources/src49.html and hard copies can be supplied on request. Both these items are available within the Library for visitors to help themselves.
There are detailed finding aids to most manuscripts and archival collections, available within the library.

Strengths: The Wellcome Library holds significant amounts of primary research material on medicine and health in the Caribbean area and, in addition, material on trade and commerce, natural history, social conditions, slavery, military presence, demography and nursing. It also holds the papers of Thomas Hodgkin MD (1798-1866) who was a distinguished campaigner against slavery and for aboriginal rights of native populations. There is also a certain amount of information on issues of `race' and ethnicity in Britain in the twentieth century, largely from the point of view of health and social welfare.

Size: c.600 books, c.100 prints and material in 12 archival collections relevant to Caribbean studies; Material in c.15 archival collections relevant to the history of Black and Asian people in Britain.

Catalogue: Wellcome Library Online Catalogue

Catalogue URL: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk

Main URL: http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/en/1/lib.html

Access: Free and open to the public. ID required for a reader's card. Readers using archives and manuscripts will be expected to complete an additional undertaking, and there may also be restrictions on access to particular archive collections. Loans only via interlibrary loan, except for a small collection of 'Student Loan' books for Intercalated BSc students.

Acquisition dates: The materials date from 1100 BC to the present (major bulk of holdings C19th and C20th).

Note:

Interest: Asian, Black, Caribbean

Complete: Complete

Subjects

Slavery

Medical sciences

Interethnic relations

Human rights

History

Health

Ethnic groups

Environmental sciences

Personal/Corporate names

Hodgkin, Thomas, 1798-1866

Places

Caribbean