Introductory post

Decided that it might be a good idea to have a blog linking to my website. People have asked me whether there's any way to find out when pages on my site are updated, so this can be a place where I note changes and updates to Lesley Hall's Web Pages. It's also a place where I could post updates on my academic activities - publications, forthcoming conferences etc I'm attending, media appearances, etc (NB the media don't always tell me when my 30 seconds of fame is going to go out).

Over the course of time this blog has got a bit more discursive than the above might suggest, and now includes occasional book reports, impressions of conferences, seminars  and other events attended, and thoughts more generally on archives, history, and other matters within the general remit.

Very tempted to head off to New York in the autumn...

Extraordinary Women in Science & Medicine: Four Centuries of Achievement
At the Grolier Club
              September 18 – November 23, 2013

The Grolier Club is pleased to present a landmark exhibition exploring the legacy of thirty-two remarkable women whose extraordinary scientific accomplishments in physics, chemistry, astronomy,mathematics, computing, and medicine changed science. Extraordinary Women in Science & Medicine: Four Centuries of Achievement will illuminate the often little-known careers and accomplishments of these female scientists, examining their work and lives over four centuries. More than 150 original artifacts, including books, manuscripts, serials, authors’ separates, Ph.D. theses, and laboratory apparatus(such as that used by Marie Curie during her earliest work o nradioactivity) will be on view, providing a remarkable overview of the scientific contributions of this eminent group.

Included will be numerous items with special attributes and provenance. Of particular interest will be Emilie Du Châtelet’s 1759 translation of Newton’s Principia with the bookplate of Talleyrand; copies of all of her other scientific publications; a mathematics workbook and a letter, both in her hand; and materials about her fourteen-year relationship with Voltaire, including a book she co-authored—although without her name on the title page. A scientific breakthrough in genetics written on a brown paper bag is displayed. The exhibition also serves to announce a falsely attributed firstedition due to a typesetters error in the seventeenth century and a variety of other bibliographical discoveries.

Extraordinary Women in Science & Medicine: Four Centuries of Achievement highlights such luminaries of the physical sciences as Marie and Irène Curie, Marietta Blau, Lise Meitner, Maria Goeppert Mayer, C.-S. Wu, Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, and Rosalind Franklin in physics and chemistry. Astronomers  include Maria Cunitz, the most advanced scholar in mathematical astronomy of the seventeenth century, and Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, whose Ph.D. thesis in 1925 was the beginning of modern astrophysics. Among the mathematicians highlighted are Sophie Germain, Sophie Kowalevski, Emmy Noether, Emilie Du Châtelet, Maria Agnesi, and Florence Nightingale—for her work in statistics. Grace Hopper, the creator of many fundamental concepts in digital computing, is featured. Represented also are Laura Bassi, Hertha Ayrton, Marie Meurdrac, Marie Thiroux d’Arconville, Elizabeth Fulhame, and Ada, Countess of Lovelace.

Among medical scientists, the exhibition features Gerti Cori, instrumental in unveiling the fundamental mechanism of metabolism; Gertrude Elion, the first to design medicines effective in the cure of cancer and viral diseases; Rosalyn Yalow, developer of the powerful analytic tool, radioimmunoassay; and Florence Sabin, whose discoveries form the basis for our current understanding of cellular immunity. Two game-changers in medical science are Rita Levi-Montalcini, discoverer of nerve growth factor, and Barbara McClintock who discovered that genes are not fixed but move—the key paradigm shift in modern genetics. Great and influential clinical physicians include Louise Bourgeois Boursier, midwife to King Henry IV and Marie de Medici of France; the pioneering pediatric neurologist Mary Putnam Jacobi; and Helen Taussig, designer of the life-saving “blue baby” operation. 

The exhibition is designed to pose questions about women’s recognition—or lack thereof—in the sciences. Topics treated include educational opportunities, role models, the use of social capital, individual styles of doing science, and gender issues associated with society norms of the periods. The viewer may consider such questions, for example, as who deserved and who received Nobel Prize awards among the modern women. The intention is to raise awareness about how women’s roles have been limited in the development of the sciences. 

The exhibition was organized by Curators Ronald K. Smeltzer, Ph.D., Paulette Rose, Ph.D., and Robert J. Ruben, M.D., 

LOCATION AND TIME:  Extraordinary Women in Science & Medicine: Four Centuries of Achievement will be on view at the Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York, from Sept. 18 – Nov. 23, 2013. The exhibition will be open to the public free of charge, Monday – Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. 

CATALOGUE: An illustrated catalogue in conjunction with the exhibition will be available at the Grolier Club. 

And flagging up as a related longer-term project, particularly relating to the UK: WISRNet: Women in Science Research Network and their forthcoming workshop  Fractured Histories – Discovering Women Scientists in the Archive.

National differences, and the possible role of colonialism

I had a query today about clitoridectomy (as one does), with what I think may be a confusion between UK and US attitudes - there is some evidence that this continued to be deployed on girls as a 'cure' for masturbation in the USA into the mid-twentieth century but as far as one can tell, the famous scandal over Isaac Baker-Brown performing this operation at his London Surgical Home in the 1860s led to its rapid vanishing within UK medical practice. I have been told that it was being performed in Scottish lunatic asylums some time in the C19th but as I never got a detailed citation on this, and no specific dates, the jury is still out on this.

I also wondered today whether the British imperial context made a difference. In a number of areas of the Empire female genital mutilation was being practised for religious and cultural reasons and by the mid-1920s in Kenya there was a movement spearheaded by missionaries and supported by a number of feminists in the metropole against this 'barbaric custom'. This must have created an association for the operation with savagery rather than advanced civilisation.

However, there is the additional factor that, although as Rob Darby has delineated in A Surgical Temptation, male circumcision made the transition from a minority religious requirement to a hygienic recommendation against self-abuse and other ailments in the course of the C19th, it never became as routine a practice as it did in the USA, which may also have inflected attitudes.

Sex in the local record office

Found via that invaluable historian and documenter of LGBT history and its sources, Rictor Norton, a useful little page from the Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre on sources for LGBT history in local record offices.

I am particularly interested to note that they recommend caution in assumptions that lunatic asylum records will be a fruitful source  - my own impression from the records of private lunatic asylums held in the Wellcome Library is that any such cases were few and far between, and such instances as I've come across of individuals incarcerated where there appeared to be some same-sex component to their behaviour manifested other issues which must have contributed probably even more strongly.

The sexual practice that crops up most frequently in records of C19th asylums is (as one might predict) self-abuse, mostly in terms of the strategies for its prevention.

One of the reasons why I would not expect men who had been engaging in same-sex activity to be found in poor law and voluntary asylums would be that non-elite men would have been primarily subjected to the various criminal and vagrancy penalties and thus be dealt with within the judicial system rather than the emergent discipline of psychiatry.

The situation is somewhat fuzzier if one considers the class which could have afforded to keep family members perceived as deviant in a private institution. Nonetheless, as already mentioned, these constitute a statistically meaningless number of cases (this is borne out by Charlotte Mackenzie's meticulously detailed analysis of the copious surviving records of Ticehurst House in the Wellcome Library, published as Psychiatry for the Rich). Perhaps the disgrace of having a certified lunatic in the family, and its impact on, for example, the matrimonial prospects of other family members, led those who could afford it to seek other expedients to contain potentially scandalous relatives, for example sending them to live abroad as 'remittance men'.

Phoenix seeds spread by the wind

Nearly 2 weeks ago I had the honour to be one of the keynote speakers at a conference in Berlin, Das Erbe der Berliner Sexualwissenschaft: Eine Fachtagung sexualwissenschaftlicher Archive
held in the impressive surroundings of the Humboldt University Graduate School, formerly the Imperial Veterinary College. This took place on the exact 80th anniversary of the destruction of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft by the Nazis in 1933.

I gave a brief summary of the matters I addressed in my talk over on the Wellcome Library blog  in a post on Sexology in the Wellcome Library.

This was a fascinating, wideranging and interdisciplinary day, as the programme indicates (although sadly Erwin Haeberle was unable to be there) dealing with a range of issues around Hirschfeld and his institute, the continuing problems that beset institutions building up research collections in what can still be a controversial area, and the wider impact of his legacy. There were also some excellent and thought-provoking panel discussions involving speakers and the audience in lively interchanges. While my German is, alas, too rudimentary to keep up with scholarly papers and debate, the organisers had very kindly provided me with an interpreter whose services meant that I was able to follow the outlines of what was being said.

I sort of wonder what Foucault would have thought of this

Learnt today that the French Ministry of Culture has sent out an appeal for sponsorship to raise 3.5 million Euros to purchase the Foucault papers, which have already been given the status of National Treasure in order to inhibit their export.

Presumably somebody is asking that amount for the papers? this is not clear from the reporting.

I would rather hope that any sum raised will include the consideration of processing costs, an often-overlooked invisible necessity to make archival collections actually usable by researchers.

The trouble with these enormous sums being reported in connection with the papers of super-starry names is that it leads other people who are perhaps not quite such luminous figures in the pantheon to get an entirely unrealistic idea of the amount of money that repositories will pony up for their records.

It has also been my experience, over my years in the archives, that the papers of Big Names, while bringing a lot of cred and media coverage to a repository, may by no means earn their keep in the task of pulling in the punters over the long term, whereas other collections, by names less familiar to the general public, e.g. the papers of Frederick Parkes Weber (who he? probably most people's response), which have been for many years reliably among the most requested holdings in Archives and Manuscripts, Wellcome Library, prove far more valuable to a wide range of researchers.

Enjoyable colloquium

This was not part of the 'get out more' project, as I'd been asked to give a keynote at the 'Civilising Bodies: Literature, Rhetoric and Image, 1700-present day' colloquium run under the auspices of the Centre for Medical History, University of Exeter. It was a rather full (24 short papers in 8 panels + 2 keynote talks) two days, run as one strand without parallel panels, which was an excellent decision, as so many of the papers had things to say to one another, a resonance which would have been lost in parallel sessions.

Everything ran most admirably to time, and there were ample scheduled coffee, lunch and tea breaks facilitating less formal exchanges, as well as an extremely convivial conference dinner.

The speakers were mostly postgraduates and it was very exciting to hear some of the very fresh work that is being done. I was particularly intrigued to observe that Norbert Elias and his theories on the civilising process appear to be making a comeback - though perhaps this was to be expected given the conference theme.

There was a considerable range of material presented, from eighteenth century masquerades to very recent media phenomena such as makeover shows, emerging from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds. Particularly resonant with my own interests were an examination of the 1894 Massage Scandals both in the context of professionalisation and the wider concerns of the period, and an analysis of reports of rapes by medical professionals in the mid-C19th when the profession was going through a turbulent era, with increasing regulation. I was also very interested by the paper on 'Western public toilets and private bodies since the C15th', though unfortunately the author of the paper was not present (it was read out by the session chair) and I therefore did not have a chance to ask how issues of gender inflected this story (in the light of Clara Greed's important work on this topic). But a great deal to think about emerged from all the session.

Mark Jackson's keynote on 'An Age of Stress: myth or reality' was a delicious taster for his new book The Age of Stress: Science and the Search for Stability, suggesting that present-day anxieties about the debilitating pace of modern life as a result of developments in technology reiterate similar concerns expressed in very similar terms going back well into the C19th (at least).

Could this have been Naomi Mitchison?

Glancing through The International Journal of Sexology II/1, 1948, I noticed in the introduction by Norman Haire to a lengthy article by an anonymous young man, the claim that he had expurgated it of at least one Anglo-Saxon monosyllable which would have led to the suppression and prosecution of the journal, and adding:

I remember having to insist on the deletion of that same four-letter word from the text of a paper read, at the International Congress of the World League for Sexual Reform, held in London in 1929, by one of our leading women novelists--no, it was not Ethel Mannin.

Given that, in her discussion of sexual relations in The Home in a Changing World, Naomi Mitchison complained about the conventions that meant she could not speak as directly, clearly and forcefully as she would have liked due to linguistic restrictions, I wonder if she was the 'leading woman novelist' in question (since I can't imagine Vera Brittain, who also presented at the WLSR Congress, ever even thinking of such a thing).

Overlooked Stella letter

In looking through Edward F Griffith's files relating to his work as UK editor of the Bombay-based journal Marriage Hygiene (Wellcome Library, PP/EFG/A.4-7), for an entirely different reason, I came across a rather stroppy letter from Stella Browne, 14 Jun 1936, about being expected to undertake translation work for the journal for free.

This intersects with correspondence I did see and cite between Max Hodann and Norman Himes (the US editor of Marriage Hygiene) and between Himes and Pillay over the question of paying Stella for translator services (the journal itself being so penurious, payment was not forthcoming).

Stella opens in conciliatory style, thanking Griffith for his services in publicising the ALRA conference, and for the notice he gave Abortion: three essays in Marriage Hygiene, especially given that he did not share her position on the subject. She then moves on to Hodann's request for her to translate an article of his on the White Slave Traffic, which 'quite frankly' she is unable to do gratuitously.

What is particularly interesting about this letter (given that she had complained around the same time to Havelock Ellis about the financially unrewarding nature of work for 'causes', and that the Himes papers include correspondence on the issue) is that she quotes the rates she would charge: 3 guineas (equivalent to £167 in present-day purchasing power) for the long article on white slavery, and £2/12/6d (equivalent to £139) for a shorter one on the Icelandic laws relating to abortion and contraception, and requires cash on the nail on receipt of the article to be translated - 'I have constant expenses & difficulties in this way, & cannot give my work, much as I admire & agree with Marriage Hygiene'. This is the only instance I have come across of what she considered a going rate for translations, though I also wonder whether she was quoting a preferential scale to a cause she approved of.

For a change, good news about archives

The impending disastrous effects of cuts to Croydon Local Studies and Archives appear to have been avoided, with what sound like actual improvements to services.

And, from the Voluntary Action History Society, the archives of Oxfam are to go to the Bodleian, with cataloguing funding (v important for large complex organisational archives). Though how familiar and resonant to an archivist is the phrase of 'after several years of protracted negotiation'!

That's not quite what happened

I've just got my hands on the new biography of Rebecca West. I'm by no means a West scholar but as a besotted fan of Dame Rebecca for getting on for half a century, I have read, I think, pretty much all of her work that has been published and is obtainable (including some things that are quite hard to get hold of) and a substantial amount of the biography and criticism.

I have also had occasion to look at the Dora Marsden files relating to The Freewoman among her papers in the library at Princeton University, which the latest biographer does not appear to have consulted.

The standard narrative for the reason for Cicely Fairfield's switch to the pseudonym of Rebecca West, and the one which features in the Prologue to the new biography, has tended to follow her 1926 essay in Time and Tide and to state or at least imply that she chose to publish under a pseudonym because The Freewoman was considered so scandalous that her family (in some accounts, specifically her mother) refused to have it in the house. It is, of course, possible that this version is substantiated by correspondence I have not personally seen in one of the several collections of West papers.

However, according to an early letter to Dora Marsden about writing for The Freewoman, over the signature of Cicely Fairfield, she wrote:

I should like to reply to Lady Mayer's letter, but I cannot do it over my own signature. She is a power on the L.C.C. [London County Council] and it might conceivably happen that my sister [the doctor Letitia Fairfield, employed in the Public Health Department of the LCC] would be sacked for my heresies. If you will allow me to answer it over a pseudonym I will send something in by Monday morning at latest.

This suggests rather different motivations, and a concern for her sister's career that might not have been anticipated given their fraught relationship and much-recorded fallings-out.

It's possible to wonder if she improved the narrative in later telling - the idea of a young woman writing hard-hitting journalism in a shockingly radical feminist publication barred from the house by her mother makes a much better story - or whether, looking back after a dozen years of significant personal turmoil, she simply misremembered and conflated her mother's disapproval of the journal with her decision to take a nom de plume. It's also possible that the reason given to Marsden could have been a face-saving excuse.

STDs in the city

There was an excellent turnout for my Wellcome Library Insights presentation yesterday on 'Sex and the City: The STDs of Old London' and a very good response from the audience. I was particularly gratified that nobody invoked the very problematic 'syphilis/genius' trope, which combines a couple of my pet (faux) history of medicine hates: the dreaded parlour game of retrospective diagnosis (of which there was recently a notable example), and the characterisation of some disease as particularly related to creativity (see also tuberculosis) because, of the millions of people who suffered from diseases which were epidemic in the past, a handful were indeed artists, intellectuals, philosophers, etc. The vast majority were not.

This particular Insights session will be reprised at the Wellcome Library on 13th June.

And also on this theme, a recent post of mine on the Wellcome Library blog on our recent acquisition of the archives of the British Association for Sexual Health and HIV, incorporating those of its predecessor, the Medical Society for the Study of Venereal Diseases, founded in 1922.

Queer London last Saturday

In spite of the horrendously horrible weather (cold, windy, sleet and snow) there was a good turnout for the Queer London interdisciplinary conference at the University of Westminster on Saturday, although alas a few cancellations by advertised speakers.

This was a rich day of thought-provoking papers from a variety of fields and perspectives - the large number of good papers offered meant that all sessions apart from the keynote and the final round table were organised as parallel strands, and I am entirely sure that I missed some excellent presentations through a failure to master the art of bilocation.

A motif raised in Matt Cook's extremely juicy keynote which recurred in a number of other contexts during the day was the significant role of of subcultures or counter-cultures which weren't 'queer' in the sense of being specifically LGBT, but which were unconventional and accepting enough to provide a place of possibilities, a community of support and warmth mixing up different groups.

Similarly, Anne Witchard's exciting paper on early C20th lesbian nightclubs in Soho located these within the relatively late development of a London nightclub scene (by comparison with the cosmopolitan metropolises of continental Europe) and the connection between these and a wider raffish bohemian, 'arty' subculture widely perceived as transgressing conventional barriers of race, class, and gender.

The organisers, who are to be congratulated on the success of the day, hope that this will be only the start of further initiatives on Queer London, and on the basis of last Saturday, there is a substantial amount of interest in taking this further.

Continuing to get out and about

This week there was a lovely book launch at the Artworkers' Guild in Queen Square of Carol Dyhouse's exciting new book, Girl Trouble: Panic and Progress in the History of Young Women (Zed Books):

Horror, scandal and moral panic! Obsession with the conduct of young women has permeated society for over a hundred years. Be it over flappers, beat girls, dolly birds or ladettes, public outrage at girls' perceived misbehaviour has been a mass-media staple with each changing generation.

 O so very true. It just goes round and around. A journalist was asking me about 50 Shades of Grey the other day, and my mind immediately went to a rather obvious, when you think about it, historical parallel, EM Hull's notorious The Sheik, with its sado-masochistic themes and very similar plot trajectory (now available free through the good offices of Project Gutenberg).

From girls to ordinary devoted mothers: yesterday evening to an excellent and very thought-provoking paper by Anne Karpf in the Psychoanalysis and History seminar series, 'Constructing and addressing "the Ordinary Devoted Mother": Winnicott's BBC broadcasts, 1943-62', which I found particularly fascinating for its elucidation of the important part played by his BBC radio producers, Janet Quigley and Isa Benzie, in the production, not just in style but in content, of these broadcasts, which formed the foundation of Winnicott's acclaimed work on motherhood and good enough mothering, and eventually published by Penguin as The Child, the Family and the Outside World. My mind went to a rather tangential place about women and BBC radio, following some archival encounters with Hilda Matheson's work in the 30s and a paper at the Women's History Network conference last year on early women's work at the BBC, and this possible unsung tradition of women pioneers in the field. But it was also interesting about the circumstances of production as very situated within a particular (popular) context rather than within the more elevated realms of psychoanalytic theory.

Ann Oakley, A Critical Woman: Barbara Wootton, Social Science and Public Policy in the Twentieth Century (2011)

I'm woefully behind about posting about things I've been reading recently. I was behindhand enough with actually reading A Critical Woman, because between one thing and another I had it on my to-read pile but was not feeling in the right headspace for a big fat biography of twentieth century woman economist, social scientist and activist.

Even though it did, in fact, turn out to be very readable on the whole (and I did have a few historian-type niggles, like occasionally feeling a need for more chronological anchoring than I was getting). I was very struck by the family origins - far from coming from generations of Cambridge scholars or intellectuals her father came from a humble background yetended up a renowned classical scholar.

It's got a bit of an uphill struggle given that Wootton was obviously a very reserved and private woman and it probably quite hard to get know to know her beyond the formal level even when she was alive. I wondered, however, how much of that reserve and forbidding air was a necessary stragety, given that, while still quite young she was widely regarded as an outstanding economist, and as a result was interacting with a lot of much older men, many of them of considerable political or social distinction. How far would her being  a war widow would have discouraged displeasing attentions, quite apart from a reasonable desire to be taken seriously? Her surprise marriage to a much younger man (and the occasional hint at other affairs) makes one wonder if there was a friskier aspect that she kept well-concealed.

I was very taken by Wootton's firm line that the death and devastation caused by the motorcar was a much greater evil it was than many menaces against which contemporaries fulminated,  and her insistence upon on having actual evidence-based data  in order to produce government report on cannabis.

Given her troubled relationship with her mother, and her lack of interest in feminism, I think there's probably a whole study waiting to be done about generations and feminists and suffragist/suffragette mothers and their daughters and how the second generation do or do not consider themselves feminists or different kinds of feminists.

Probably about as thorough an account of a rather opaque woman as one is likely to get, paying particular attention to what she would have considered most important, i.e. her intellectual work and her politics.

Reading with care

Reading with care and attention to historical and topographical detail would prevent people from posting on the internet an account of something that purports to be the menu from an early C20th brothel, with image, with claims that it refers to a London establishment, when the prices are in dollars, the address is 22nd St, and the spellings are US rather than UK usage. It has been suggested that in fact it derives from a fairly recent piece of erotica in pastiche period style.

Some years ago, in an earlier incarnation of  H-Histsex, there was a brief discussion touching on a series of novels with 'Cremorne' in the title, alluding to the famous C19th pleasure gardens, which were said to be reprinted works of Victorian pornography (though other descriptions indicate that the setting is Edwardian). A few years later I received an email from the person who had anonymously authored these during the 1990s... They appear to still be in print and to have taken on possibly new life as ebooks. I don't think I've ever come across them but am now tempted to find one just to see how convincing they are for period.

There is a long-ish tradition of modern pastiches of period works being taken as authentic narratives: a classic instance is Magdalen King-Hall's Diary of A Young Lady of Fashion 1764-65 (by 'Cleone Knox'). In spite of fairly early contemporary exposure of the 'hoax', this work still occasionally crops up being described as an authentic C18th account.

Yet more getting out more

I managed to get to two seminars at the Institute of Historical Research this week.

On Wednesday I went to hear Angela Davis on 'Gradual Separations and Substitute Mothers: The Influence of Anna Freud's Hampstead War Nurseries on Post-War British Childcare Provision and Practic' in the Psychoanalysis and History series.This is part her much larger project on childcare provision and I realised that I had already heard her speak on other aspects of post-WWII childcare provision. This was an excellent paper on the very particular approach taken by Anna Freud's Hampstead nurseries, which were geared towards child observation and research along with care for children in what were often, given the period fairly dire straits requiring it. Apparently it was always heavily oversubscribed with waiting lists. Its findings had a significant impact on post-war nursery policies in the UK (though on reflection, I note that recent opposition to proposed changes in staffing levels in nurseries has focused almost entirely on the physical and organisational problems, rather than the issues around attachment and psychological security that were central to Freud and Burlingham's work).

There was a good deal of lively discussion, including personal experiences such as the very different approach taken in France (where of course there is a rather longer tradition of childcare outside the home), and bad personal memories of another North London nursery at about the same period, run by idealistic Communists with an ideological commitment to collective childcare.

The following evening I attended the Modern British History seminar, at which Selina Todd gave a very rich presentation on 'Post-war British people...was it ever that good? Working Class Life in England postwar', which tended to confirm my own arguments, coming from a rather different angle, that far from being cosy and complacent, the 1950s were a good deal less stable and about the haven of the stable familial household than the usual narrative suggests. Todd's work (I am now longing to read her forthcoming book on the working classes in C20th Britain) indicates that there was an assumption that the full employment of the post-war era and the advent of the Welfare State meant that poverty was no longer an issue and indeed this tended to drop out of discussion. Todd, however, found that while working class families were tending to be better-off than in the 1930s, and more able to purchase consumer goods, this came with long hours of hard work and overtime for the head of the family, fears of job loss, taking less congenial but better paid jobs, 'housewife' shifts for mothers, and the 'never-never' hire-purchase of newly available luxuries under the threat of repossession if payments could not be kept up. Social mobility through education was still low, though parents were determined to improve the position of their children. There were many questions during the discussion session and quite possibly discussions could have gone on even longer.

Forthcoming presentations

Contributing at the Queer London Conference, University of Westminster, 23 March.

Debuting a new Insights session at the Wellcome Library on 4 April, Sex and the city: the STDs of old London

Keynoting at the colloquium Civilising Bodies:Literature, rhetoric and image 1700-present day, University of Exeter, 25-26 Apr

And have a bonus crosspost of my recent posts on the Wellcome Library blog: for Rare Disease Day and for International Women's Day and the annual roundup of what archives our readers are using.

Misapprehensions about archives

Following a speech at the launch of Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics which did make it clear that having those archives available to digitise was the outcome of long years involving negotiations and building up good relationships with donors and depositors, and generally indicating that archives usually do not just arrive, someone said to me that they had always assumed that people just gave their papers to archive repositories.

Well, sometimes they do, but it is good professional practice to look any such gift-horses in the mouth, and get the documentation sorted. To begin with, any given repository may not be a good match for a particular collection and there may even be legal issues bearing upon this, as with records generated within the National Health Service. There may even be other papers of the individual or organisation in some other repository, which anything offered should be joining.

We'd like to know exactly what we're letting ourselves in for by taking a particular collection. Is it a gift or a deposit on permanent loan? Some libraries end up with papers that were originally only on loan for the duration of a particular researcher's project. Whatever the status, this needs to be documented.

Does any part need to be closed, either under the Data Protection Act, or because of the donor/depositor's sensitivities? Are they going to want intending researchers to request permission to consult their records? If so, is there going to be a reliable system for researchers obtaining this? What about copyright - are they okay with people photocopying or scanning for private research purposes, even if they want them to come back for permission if they actually publish anything?

What sort of physical condition are the papers in? Do they require de-infestation of insects or mould? Will they need extensive conservation treatment? How large is the collection? How well-organised is it? What sort of resources is it going to require for storage and processing? This is why we like to make on-site surveys before giving a definite commitment.

And finally: do we think this is a collection that has historical interest and value and that researchers are going to want to use?

Unsung work of archivists

It's extremely gratifying to see a substantial article in the FT Magazine apropos of the about-to-launch digital archives project at the Wellcome Library on the history of genetics: “Codebreakers: Makers of Modern Genetics”

However, as an archivist who has been closely involved with many of the collections included in this project, I do wish a line or two could have been given to recognising the absolutely essential professional archive work that had been done, over a period of several decades, leading to the circumstances in which these collections were actually available for digitisation.

Archives of individuals or organisations don't just migrate into the stacks of a collecting repository: there is a process of negotiation with the people or bodies who created those papers, or into whose hands they have fallen, and this can take time and diplomacy to ensure that the transfer happens to the satisfaction of all parties involved.

There's then the overlooked process by which those papers are sorted and organised and described so that they are usable by researchers. It's not just journalists who think that this just somehow happens rather than being a rather time-consuming and intricate job without which it would be pretty much impossible to locate things within a morass of documentation.

Most archivists, I surmise, would not appreciate a 'Hug an Archivist!' Day, but I think the profession as a whole would like a little more recognition of what it does.

Archivists who have seen people using well-catalogued archives in acid-free folders, ordered via a sophisticated online ordering system, in a clean well-lighted search room with facilities to use laptops, scan documents, and use digital cameras, are less than patient when the tiresome 'piles of dusty archives' trope is invoked by individuals who have actually consulted any archives they reference in the afore-mentioned conditions, and have probably never gone into a damp crypt and observed teachests full of precious records covered with waving fronds of white mould like something out of a horror film.

And are also made to laugh, then bang their heads, at accounts of 'hidden treasures' found exactly where one would have anticipated their being in an archive.