Story of early eastern medicine to be revealed to the world
15 September 2008
The Wellcome Library contains a diverse collection of rare materials relating to both Ancient and Modern Egypt, from papyri to Arabic medical manuscripts and even relics of Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1789.
The Wellcome Library will make these rare resources available in digital form to Bibliotheca Alexandrina, making them universally accessible for the first time.
Audio: interview with Ismail Serageldin, Director of Bibliotheca Alexandrina.
“Without question, the Wellcome Library is one of the most important repositories of treasures relating to the history of medicine in the world,” Ismail Serageldin, Director of Bibliotheca commented during a recent visit. ”For us, this partnership is a major step forward in our vision to make all knowledge available to all. The project will enable manuscripts that are spread in different parts of the world to be virtually reassembled into a complete manuscript. We have the possibility to make this material available to a new generation of scholars, who have been brought up with the internet, on Facebook and on YouTube, who will be able to find the treasures of the past, in the forms of the present and the future.”
Frances Norton, Head of the Wellcome Library explains: “We are delighted to be working with Bibliotheca Alexandrina in this way. Our unique partnership will demonstrate how non-English language digital resources can engage local audiences and experts, deepening our understanding of the materials available here in the UK and making them globally searchable in languages other than English.”
The Wellcome Library’s collections began to be assembled by Sir Henry Wellcome and his agents at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Among other treasures they acquired an extensive array of Arabic and Persian medical and scientific manuscripts. More recently these resources have grown, notably by the addition of the collection of the Lebanese physician Dr Sami Haddad, purchased at Sotheby’s in 1986.
The new stream of documentation, which will eventually become part of BA’s own digital library, consists of visual, documentary, manuscript and printed material in several languages, and will also be available for inclusion in such collections as the World Digital Library - a fully searchable portal to cultural content worldwide, supported by Unesco, Google and the Library of Congress.
The materials include:
- the Wellcome Library’s collection of Arabic medical manuscripts,from the13th to 20th centuries
- 19th-century British manuscript travel journals
- 20th-century correspondence and papers of British doctors and others working or serving in Egypt
- published accounts of Egyptian topography and antiquities
- documentation in French and English relating to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt
- views of Egyptian ancient monuments and scenes, engraved by Louis Haghe, after original watercolours made by the artist David Roberts in the 1830s
- lithographs of Egypt by G Seitz after original paintings by Carl Werner, 1870s
- 18th- and 19th-century portraits of Egyptian subjects.
The Bibliotheca Alexandrina is a major library and cultural centre and is both a commemoration of the Library of Alexandria and an attempt to rekindle something of the brilliance that this earlier centre of study represented.
The Library of Alexandria was once the largest library in the ancient world, and is thought to have been founded at the beginning of the third century BCE. The Library or parts of the collection were destroyed on a number of occasions.
The project is part of an ambitious programme of digitisation taking place within the Wellcome Library.
Image: The Great Sphinx; watercolour; Wellcome Images
Media contact:
Mike Findlay
Media Officer (Wellcome Collection)
T: 020 7611 8612
E: m.findlay@wellcome.ac.uk
The Wellcome Trust is the largest charity in the UK. It funds innovative biomedical research, in the UK and internationally, spending over £600 million each year to support the brightest scientists with the best ideas. The Wellcome Trust supports public debate about biomedical research and its impact on health and wellbeing.
The Wellcome Trust's former headquarters, the Wellcome Building on London's Euston Road, has been redesigned by Hopkins Architects to become a new £30 million public venue. Free to all, Wellcome Collection explores the connections between medicine, life and art in the past, present and future. The building comprises three galleries, a public events space, the Wellcome Library, a café, a bookshop, conference facilities and a members' club.
The Wellcome Library is founded on the collections formed by Henry Solomon Wellcome (1853-1936), whose personal wealth, founded on the pharmaceutical company which he developed and owned, allowed him to spend the last four decades of his life indulging one of the most ambitious collecting visions of the twentieth century.
The new Library of Alexandria, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina is dedicated to recapture the spirit of openness and scholarship of the original Bibliotheca Alexandrina. It is much more than a library.