Books, manuscripts, pamphlets and pictures are the lifeblood of historians of medicine - the vital sources on which so much historical research is based. Yet many of these critical sources of historical information are deteriorating in attics and basements because institutions lack the funds to catalogue the contents and make fragile materials safe to use.

Researchers may not even know that a collection crucial to their work exists. If they do find out about it and visit the institution where it is held, inadequate or non-existent cataloguing can make the collections difficult to use and offer little clue to the real extent and diversity of material they contain. As a result, vital knowledge is lost and important research opportunities may be missed.

It was to help address this problem that the Wellcome Trust set up its Research Resources in Medical History scheme, initially administered by the British Library, in 2000. The Trust allocated £1 million for two years to enable libraries and record offices to make collections important to medical history more accessible. Following its success, the scheme was relaunched in 2003 with a further £1 million for two more years and is now administered directly by the Wellcome Trust.

The scheme provides funds for the cataloguing, preservation, conservation, and production of surrogate copies of original material. Cataloguing an archive - placing descriptions of every document it contains in searchable Internet databases - will enable potential users to work out whether a trip to the archives will be worthwhile, and people can notify staff of their needs in advance.

However, once material is catalogued levels of usage often increase significantly. It is therefore vital to prolong the lives of fragile materials and make them safe for readers to handle through preservation and conservation - perhaps by securing loose sections, rebacking books and strengthening spines, even resewing whole books. More recent material will need less drastic attention, but a few prudent steps to preserve books and papers need to be taken. Collections have to be checked for mould or insect infestation, which can spread at an alarming rate through an entire library, and stored in acid-free boxes; iron paperclips have to be replaced with brass ones, which don't corrode and stain. If materials are particularly fragile, surrogate forms may be produced or they may be digitised and made available on the Internet.

Windows on the past

Improving access opens the door to an abundance of historical knowledge spanning many centuries. Although the collections funded by the Research Resources scheme are primarily medical in nature, the information they contain is often far broader and will offer new insights into many aspects of life at different times. These records are part of the documentary record of the whole of civilisation and studying them will help make important contributions to the historical knowledge base.

Cataloguing the vast collection of tracts and pamphlets at the Royal College of Surgeons Library, for example, shows how, in the nineteenth century, new ideas were developed and propagated through debate. Doctors or scientists wishing to sound out a new idea would expound it in a tract of up to 50 pages, print copies and disseminate them to colleagues. The aim was to generate discussion and test the validity of an idea before submitting it to a scientific journal. Copies were also deposited in libraries, where people from other countries or regions would come to find out about the latest thinking.

The subjects covered in the pamphlets - ranging from botany, veterinary medicine, mastectomy, mesmerism and endoscopy to military history during the Raj and the social aspects of medicine - underline the topical, dynamic and international nature of medicine at that time. They also highlight the breadth of disciplines medicine embraced before World War I, after which science became more specialised.

The working collections of two practising medical men being catalogued and conserved at Queen’s College in Oxford take us back farther to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. While the academic writings comprising the collection of Theophilus Metcalfe (1690-1757) offer an overview of the intellectual climate of the day, Sir John Floyer (1649-1734) bought books to help him with particular patients or research interests. The copious notes he wrote on the end pages and in the margins show how he used the books in his research into the effects of cold bathing, asthma, and measuring bodily functions: he was the first person to measure the pulse.

These two collections thus provide an exciting window onto the intellectual climate and medical practice and research 200 years ago. They also give us a poignant glimpse of how hard life could be at that time. Among Floyer’s manuscripts is one entitled ‘Advice to a Young Physician’, written for his grandson who he hoped would be a doctor. Sadly, medicine being what it was then, the child died in infancy.

More modern collections are invaluable sources of information to historians seeking to make sense of today's medical advances within their recent historical contexts. The papers of geneticist Professor Harold Garnett Callan (1917-1993) - the first person to show the linearity of DNA along the chromosome - are being catalogued at St Andrews University, and unveil the thought processes that informed his seminal work.

While Professor Callan’s archive is largely of technical interest, that of the colourful, charismatic Dr Ronald David Laing (1927-1989) at the University of Glasgow includes his letters, diaries, unpublished writings and personal library. Together, when they have been catalogued, they will shed light on the thoughts, readings, social life and daily routine of an important but controversial figure in twentieth-century psychiatry.

Laing’s experiments with people with schizophrenia in the 1960s - such as commune-like environments with minimal supervision and no medication - won him a devoted following, but also many detractors: he was eventually forced by the General Medical Council to resign from the medical register. Today, his reputation is being reassessed, and a perusal of his letters and papers may illuminate how his ideas influenced modern psychiatric management.

Another cataloguing project may help further contextualise Laing’s work by opening up access to in-depth information about an earlier humanising movement in psychiatry, one that occurred nearly 200 years previously. The Retreat archive at the Borthwick Institute holds the records of a private psychiatric hospital in York, founded in 1796, whose pioneering methods for treating the insane had an impact on all UK asylums.

Records from psychiatric hospitals are a veritable treasure for anyone delving into the past - whether social, medical or local historians or people researching family history - because, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, asylums were required by law to keep more detailed records than general hospitals. Case notes in the Retreat archive include detailed and colourful descriptions of why patients were committed: they may have become an embarrassment to their families, for example, and the Retreat provided a comfortable haven away from the world. In addition, hundreds of letters and drawings by patients, stored in the archive, will help readers get inside the minds of the patients and gain some understanding of how they were treated and what they thought about.

Improving access to the Retreat archive will enable comparisons to be drawn between the treatment of the middle-class patients at the Retreat and working-class patients incarcerated in the large Victorian asylums, or between the different ways in which male and female patients were viewed by doctors.

These and many other collections being catalogued, preserved and made accessible by the Research Resources in Medical History scheme will do more than help produce a wealth of new understanding in the history of medicine. With the insights they offer into the social fabric of different communities at different times, and into the hearts and minds of ordinary people as well as pivotal figures in the history of medicine, these archives will be invaluable to anyone interested in exploring their national or local heritage.

See also

• Research Resources in Medical History (Details of funding opportunities)

External links

• Queen’s College Oxford (Details of cataloguing and conservation of the working collections of Theophilus Metcalf and John Floyer)
• Glasgow University Library (Details of cataloguing and conservation of the papers of Ronald David Laing)