Wellcome Library - African posters on health

The Wellcome Library has acquired a substantial number (over a thousand) posters published in thirty African countries to promote health and wellbeing. Dating from 1993 to 2010, they were collected in the latter year from the following countries:


Burkina Faso; Benin; Cameroon; Congo (from 1997); Djibouti; Egypt; Ethiopia; Gambia; Ghana; Guinea Bissau; Ivory Coast; Kenya; Liberia; Madagascar; Malawi; Mali; Mauritius; Morocco; Mozambique; Nigeria; Rwanda; Senegal; South Africa; Sudan; Tanzania; Tunisia; Uganda; Zaire (up to 1997); Zambia; Zimbabwe.

The best represented countries are Ethiopia (286), Kenya (219), Nigeria (130) and Tanzania (120). Some of the subjects represented:

Contraception and reproductive health, sexually transmitted diseases, "backyard abortion", breast feeding, weighing babies, child health centres, vitamins, vaccination, African traditional medicine, protection against communicable diseases including: polio, malaria, AIDS, schistosomiasis, food poisoning, nematode infections, tuberculosis, bird flu, and rodent-borne diseases; and against toxic pesticides and diarrhoea, as well as smoking, spitting, female genital mutilation, tattooing, general health education, environmental pollution, men's and women's roles in preserving health, the health of orphans, the health of camels, appeals to Islamic and Christian values and images, individual responsibility, child abuse, and activism.

The Wellcome Library has started cataloguing the collection with brief, first-draft catalogue records. Individual items will become available in the Library as they are catalogued, but in the meantime anyone wants to see works from a particular country may see them in the Wellcome Library by ordering them from the online catalogue.

The Wellcome's blog post about the collection can be seen here

Anglo-American Conference 2011: Health and History

Anglo-American Conference 2011: Health and History



29th June - 1st July 2011

Venue: Brunei Gallery, Thornhaugh Street, London WC1H 0XG

The Anglo-American Conference 2011: Health and History hosted by the Institute of Historical Research, will feature papers and panels across all periods and areas of the history of medicine.
 
Of interest to researchers in Commonwealth Studies will be panels, including:
 

Healing and religion in African colonial history

•Chair: Kathleen Vongsathorn (Oxford)

•Myriam Mertens (Ghent/Exeter) Medicinal ‘irrationality’ and the social tensions of health care provision in the Belgian Congo during the interwar period

•Nina Studer (Zurich/Oxford) Protective device or a sign of degeneration? The role of Islam in the writings of French colonial psychiatrists

•Kathleen Vongsathorn (Oxford) In the image of Britain: Lake Bunyonyi leprosy settlement as a model community, Uganda, 1931-1951

•Georgina Endfield (Nottingham) ‘No place for a woman’: health, medicine and women's work among missionary wives and female missionaries in British colonial Africa


Military medical bodies: patients, power and practice in the British empire

•Chair: Julie Anderson (Kent)

•Ana Carden-Coyne (Manchester) Men in pain: sociality, brutality and resistance in military hospitals, 1914-1918

•Wendy D. Churchill (New Brunswick) The right to care: military men and British imperial medicine, 1780-1820

•Michael Brown (Roehampton) From Social Darwinism to physical culture: the problem of the medico-military body in the age of new imperialism



Fighting fit: exploring military medicine

•Chair: Ana Carden-Coyne (Manchester)

•Peter Starling (Army Medical Services Museum) Medical education and good wine: the formation of the army medical school and medical education in the British army in the later 19th century

•Mark Harrison (Oxford) Great expectations: the South African War and the reform of British military medicine

•Emma Reilly (Strathclyde) ‘They passed me A1 fit, can you believe it?’: The British Army body and the military medical exam, 1939-1945

•Kathleen Meghan Fitzpatrick (King’s College London) Weathering the storm: Commonwealth combat psychiatry in Korea (1950-1951)



Missionary bodies and medical spaces

•Chair: Peter Webster

•Emily Manktelow (Exeter) Missionary bodies, domestic spaces

•Esmé Cleall (Liverpool) ‘More bad news’: narratives of sickness in missionary writing, c. 1840-1890

•Rosemary Fitzgerald (SOAS) Purdah patients at home and in hospital: transforming female missionary medicine in north India, 1890–1914

 
Public health, colonial space

•Chair: Zirwat Chowdhary (IHR)

•Nicole Bourbonnais (Pittsburgh) ‘Where public opinion is in a mood’: British colonial policy and birth control in the West Indies, 1930-1970

•Shane Minkin (Swarthmore) Foreign hospital, local institution: public health and belonging in late nineteenth century Alexandria, Egypt

•Erica Wald (London School of Economics) Professional societies and the competition for medical authority in India, 1789-1854

as well as individual papers, in other panels

Further information on the conference, the programme and registration available at: http://www.history.ac.uk/aac2011

Vacation hours start 13 June

Vacation opening hours start as of Monday 13th June and are:

Monday - Friday 09.00 - 18.00
and
Saturday 09.45 - 17.30

these vacation hours will contune through until the start of the new academic year

Commonwealth Studies Archives - currently being moved

The Archive collection of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies is currently being moved (today). Please ensure that requests to use archive collections are made at least one day in advance to ensure we can fetch these for you in this periods of moves. Any enquiries and requests should be directed to shl.specialcollections@london.ac.uk

Maps

A reminder that both the Senate House Library and Commonwealth Studies library contain maps of Commonwealth (and other) countries. While collections are not as extensive as British Libray holdings we nevertheless have a good collection of maps which are listed on our catalogue (though not all are catalogued) and encourage readers to ask us about our holdings.
Map enquiries should be directed using the library enquiry form with details of country or area and date and kind of map or information looking for.
Copying facilities are available (copyright permitting).

Senate House Libraries moves - STAGE 2

We will shortly be moving onto Stage 2 of the Library moves, which involves the reorganisation of closed access areas in the Library Tower and Basement areas. While this is largely invisible to our library users, it does affect items that users request through the ‘Stack Fetching Service’. It may mean that specific items in the collections being moved are unavailable for short periods while they are in transit, normally no longer than 1 – 2 days. This will have a limited impact on Commonwealth Studies collections but at times these will be impacted by moves going on around them, limiting staff access to collections.

These moves begin on June 6th and will continue until the end of month. A schedule of these moves will be posted on the library website at the beginning of June. This will enable you to see which collections are scheduled to move on particular days.

Please refer to the library enquiry desk if you require further information or advice. Alternatively you can contact us via the following page: http://www.shl.lon.ac.uk/library/contacts

New Web catalogue launched

We've just made our new catalogue, Encore, live for our readers to search Senate House Libraries collections. We hope you will find the new catalogue clearer and easier to use than the previous one.

Encore is different from the old catalogue, so to help you get started read our page of tips explaining some of the less-obvious (and more powerful) features in the new catalogue. Over the coming months we'll be improving Encore to search over a wider range of resources and better integrate with our other online services.

If you have comments or questions please contact us, or ask at the Enquiries Desk on the 4th Floor