Feature: From the Wellcome Library archives
3 March 2009
The Wellcome Library's extensive collections - which include everything from ancient Egyptian manuscripts to the latest films on biomedical issues - are packed with fascinating items that give us an insight into medicine across the ages and across the world. We asked some of the Library's archivists and librarians to share a selection of their favourite items.
17th-century recipes for success
Perfect for the nosey parkers among us, the Wellcome Library's unsurpassed collection of nearly 300 manuscript recipe books provides a chance to peer into women's households as far back as the late 1500s. The 17th-century recipe books, 74 in total, have been fully digitised and are available on the Library's website.
But forget Jamie, Gordon and Nigella - these recipe books contain more than just food. They cover healing, cosmetics, religious and intellectual interests, family and social networks, and household and veterinary management. The disconcerting mix of culinary and medical recipes in Grace Acton's 1621 volume is typical: her flamboyant recipe for roast peacock is followed by an unappetising cure for bed-wetting that involves feeding a child a mouse boiled in urine.
The manuscripts are accumulations of knowledge passed from one generation to the next, and their numerous annotations give a sense of individual women's experiences. With their limited circulation, they allowed their compilers the freedom to explore their interests in a way unthinkable in published works. Ironically, however, they also served to reinforce social norms, providing a role model for the next generation of women.
Find out more about the recipe book digitisation project.
Christy Henshaw and Helen Wakely
Try this 17th-century recipe for ‘Sugar Cakes’ from Lady Ann Fanshawe's collection:
"Take 2 pound of Butter, one pound of fine Sugar, ye yolkes of nine Egs, a full Spoonfull of Mace beat & searsed [sifted], as much Flower as this will well wett making them so stiffe as you may rowle it out, then with the Cup of a glasse of what Size you please cutt them into round Cakes & pricke them and bake them."
Unearthing the plesiosaur
The 19th century was the golden age of the fossil hunter: there were many new species to describe for the first time, all against a background of fierce debate about what these remains meant for biology and geology. Finding the specimens that fed this debate could be a lucrative business, if you had a knack for it.
One of the earliest and greatest fossil hunters was Mary Anning, born in 1799 to a working-class family in the palaeontologically fertile Lyme Regis, Dorset. She was barely into her teens when she discovered what was later to be named ichthyosaurus, following this in December 1823 with the first complete plesiosaurus.
In two letters to a potential buyer, written a week after she discovered the plesiosaur, she describes the specimen and includes a wonderful pen-and-ink sketch of the bones and their disposition. These letters, along with thousands of others bought by Henry Wellcome, have been fully catalogued and their descriptions are available online.
Chris Hilton
Your character in your forehead
Metoposcopy may sound like an unpleasant medical procedure, but it is, in fact, the art of divining a person’s character by ‘reading’ their forehead. The Library has recently purchased the only known copy of a German pamphlet from 1785 that still contains two original 'forehead-reading' templates.
These hand-coloured templates are designed to fit snugly over the forehead; there is one for males and one for females. Readers would look through the slits to reveal the exact position of lines underneath, and record and measure them. This information would then be interpreted with reference to the seven planets known at that time and their associated mythologies.
The 12 signs of the zodiac were delineated by markings along the lines, so the lines’ beginnings and ends would have significance to the star signs. This is a wonderful example of transposing the ideas of astrology into the area of metoposcopy in a new and fun way.
Such novelties were probably inspired by the runaway success of Johann Caspar Lavater's influential work 'Essays on Physiognomy', published in 1775.
Danny Rees