The Poor Law (Scotland) Act 1845 set up parochial boards in towns and rural areas and a Board of Supervision in Edinburgh. One of their purposes was to build poorhouses for those paupers who were not eligible for ‘outdoor relief’, which consisted of small sums of money given out weekly. The Board of Supervision published […]
Tag: medical history
When the Office Went to War : War Letters from Men of the Great Western Railway
A recent arrival into the Library’s collections gives us a rare insight into soldiers’ experiences in the First World War. ‘When the Office Went to War’ contains letters between colleagues from the Great Western Railway Audit Office. It is suggested that these letters between colleagues are often more honest and open than those which were […]
Shot in the arm for Medical History of British India website
A new collection of medical documents from the British Raj is now available to browse and search on the Medical History of British India website.‘Medicine – Vaccination’ shows British efforts to vaccinate the Indian population against smallpox using the latest 19th and 20th century western scientific techniques.
Madness in British India
I’d like to say thanks to the many people who turned out to hear me talk about the Lunatic Asylums of British India on 10th October. The National Library of Scotland will be making the audio recording available soon on its website so please keep an eye out. There were some interesting questions raised at […]
Broadmoor revealed: then and now
Another Wellcome Trust funded project, access to the historic archives of Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire, England, reveals life in a 19th century British Lunatic Asylum. Broadmoor opened in 1863 and was built specifically to provide refuge for criminally insane ‘lunatics’ of both sexes and of a range of ages. While most of the Victorian asylums […]
Mental Health reports now available online
You may be aware that the ‘Medicine – Mental health’ collection is now freely available online which is incredibly exciting. (hand-coloured print of the Calcutta Asylum 1851 is from www.europeana.eu)
1930s mental health treatments
Early treatment of mental disorders While researching treatments for my MAD5 conference presentation on British India asylums, I came across this video (click link above) by the National Library of Medicine which features chemically-induced convulsions for treating (mainly) schizophrenia.
Great British bed bugs
In the build-up to the London Olympics, with the invasion of Union Jacks, adverts for sport gear and energy drinks, have you considered another invasion – of bed bugs? The Australian bed bug epidemic was most likely to have been caused by the mass influx of visitors to the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Now London […]
CSI: India
I’ve been looking at the Chemical Examiner’s reports, which are among the remaining medical items in the India Papers. The NLS plans to put in a bid to have these digitised and added to the Medical History of British India website. The NLS holds reports dated 1874-1942 from the Punjab, Burma and North-West and Central […]
Joy and insanity in British India
I’m currently working to put 20,000 pages of Lunatic Asylums reports from British India online. Over the next few months the Digital Archive team at the NLS will be checking metadata which accompanies each page, preparing jpegs and exporting database records into XML. My job is to keep track of this and also to research […]