The Case of Charles Altamont Doyle

Charles Altamont Doyle’s artistic career never quite took off during his lifetime. His brother Richard ‘Dicky’ Doyle on the other hand, was a frequent contributor to the London magazine ‘Punch’ and even designed the publication's masthead. Charles would also never reach the levels of fame bestowed upon his son, the much celebrated author Arthur Conan Doyle. Although a gifted and creative artist, his chances of success were no doubt hindered by his declining mental health, his epilepsy and struggles with alcoholism. These all played a part in him being interned (or as he would write, ‘imprisoned’) within a total of three asylums - Sunnyside Asylum (Montrose Royal Lunatic Asylum), The Royal Edinburgh Hospital (REH) and Crichton Royal in Dumfries, where he would eventually pass away.

"Honey Suckle, how unlike any other plant. But it's a creeper/Another sort of creeper not so nice as above"
Page from 'The Doyle Diary' by Charles Altamont Doyle and Michael Baker

During the 2020 lockdown, I stumbled across one of Charles’ drawings while sucked in to the usual time-killing, rabbit-hole internet searches. I quickly became fascinated with his sketches of flora and fauna, his propensity for puns, his dark humour, and his whimsical depictions of supernatural beings such as fairies and elves. I went on to purchase the book ‘The Doyle Diary’ which reproduces one of the sketchbooks Charles kept while he was a patient at Sunnyside Asylum.

My trusted second-hand copy of 'The Doyle Diary'

"9th April 1889 Delightful walk at Sunnyside" 

Living in Granton I can relate on a personal level to this drawing.

Page from 'The Doyle Diary' by Charles Altamont Doyle and Michael Baker

Fast forward several months, and I am the Modern Apprentice at the Centre for Research Collections, being given a socially distanced introduction to the varied collections at Lothian Health Services Archive by Louise Williams, the archivist for LHSA. She shows me a great deal of fascinating collection items, including a case book from the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. I am reminded of Charles Doyle’s sketches and I ask her if there might be anything relating to him within the case books. She said there should be a case book entry for him, as he was a patient for a time at REH, shortly before his death 1893. She invited me to contact LHSA to gain access to the records. I had meant to do so for a long time but never got a chance.

Fast forward again to almost two years later and I currently find myself working at LHSA as their interim Access Officer and I decide that the time has finally come to look at Charles’ case book entry (which definitely felt like a circle closing!).

The case books are invaluable resources for researchers and genealogists as they contain a wealth of precious information on past patients such as; dates of admission, profession, marital status, home residence, religion, description of illness, duration of attack, treatment carried out, updates of their condition and dates of discharge or death. Even appearance is recorded in some cases. For Charles we have that he was “Tall, thin. Dilated capillaries on nose” with “Greyish yellow" eyes and “Dark grey” hair."

Case Book
LHB7/51/56

Doyle was interned within the asylum involuntarily as suggested by his certification paper, which was filled out by his wife Mary Foley Doyle. 

Certification Paper
LHB7/52/706

"Mary, my ideal home ruler/ No repeal of the union proposed in this case"
Drawing depicting Charles and his wife Mary. Doyle was of Irish background and this drawing alludes to the Irish question.
Page from 'The Doyle Diary' By Charles Altamont Doyle and Michael Baker

He would be a patient at the REH from 23^rd January 1892 to 26^th May 1892. He was then transferred to Crichton, the last case book entry stating: “Transfer Certificate, His memory and general intelligence are very much enfeebled".

I was hoping that there might be some artwork in the archive that Doyle made while a patient at the REH but unfortunately nothing of the sort has been unearthed as of yet.

"Something queer both in head and heart/Lost 'em both./By no means unusual"

Page from 'The Doyle Diary' by Charles Altamont Doyle and Michael Baker

There were also a couple of enclosures which originally lived in the case book but for preservation purposes, have been neatly re-housed in melinex folders. The enclosures can range from photographs of the patient, correspondence, various types of ephemera, medical charts and more. For Charles there is a letter from the assistant medical officer at Sunnyside to his physician at the REH, regarding his transfer.

There is also a newspaper article, written shortly after his death. The article does not mention his internment within the asylums, simply stating that he “gave up residence in this city”, suggesting his actual whereabouts was kept from public knowledge, perhaps to avoid scandal. The article recognises Charles’ artistic talent but not without knocking his technical abilities: “While possessing a great force of natural genius as an artist, his colouring and composition were somewhat crude, but in expression of humour and pathos he had a great facility”. The article goes on to say that “Personally, he was a most likeable man, genial, entertaining, and amusing in conversation. Possessing a fertile imagination, it was always enjoyable to listen to his anecdotes”.

Enclosures
LHB7/51/56

The case of Charles Doyle is rather a sad one. It's likely he lacked self-esteem and perhaps felt over-shadowed by the more illustrious members of his family. To have spent the last years of his life isolated from friends and family must have been incredibly difficult.

Self-portrait of C. A. Doyle.
 "Busting out"

"Trying to get out of quod (prison)"

"Succeded"
Pages from 'The Doyle Diary' by Charles Altamont Doyle, Michael Baker 

I’m pleased that over time, interest in his art and life has piqued. Personally, his story has served as a rather nice segue into my new role at LHSA, combining three of my big loves: Art, archives, and research!

Lauren McKay

Further reading: "What became of Arthur Conan Doyle's father? The last years of Charles Altamont Doyle" by A Beveridge

Introducing Speaking Out!

 

Hello! My name is Louise Neilson and I am Project Archivist on LHSA’s Wellcome Trust funded project Speaking Out: Cataloguing advocacy, support and empowerment in the Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard archives. If you are a regular reader of our blog or you have contacted us in the past you may recognise my name as I have been Access Officer here since April 2018 and will be conducting this project as a secondment and returning to that role in April 2023.

What am I doing?

Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard (LGLS) opened on 2 March 1974 and was the UK’s first gay helpline and Scotland’s first gay charity. It was an activist-run mental and physical health service for LGBT+ people in the Lothians and beyond, yet despite this pioneering history, LGLS archives remain largely invisible to researchers due to their current uncatalogued state… which is where I come in!

As Archivist for the Speaking Out project I will be working hard over the next 11 months to open up the collection through cataloguing, rehousing and selectively digitising the LGLS collection. The process of cataloguing will allow confidential records to be identified and closure periods applied where necessary, but it will also allow non-confidential material to be opened for access by researchers.

I will also be working collaboratively with local LGBT groups to produce a public exhibition based on the LGLS archive which will also exhibit new work created as a response to the collection. In additional to this I will be hosting a series of workshops in the Centre for Research Collections from creative writing to zine making!

Switching the Changes, Gay Scotland, Issue 26 (Mar/April 1986)

Information about Edinburgh Gay Switchboard

What have I done so far?

I am now four weeks in to the project and to get started I thought it would be best to scope the collection, get a sense of what’s in there, and then create a detailed box list. After looking through the 44 boxes, folders, and box-files (and getting completely engrossed in almost everything I came across) I have created a structure that will allow me to begin cataloguing the collection.

The collection is in very good condition but before cataloguing starts I will be checking in with LHSA’s Manager and accredited conservator, Ruth Honeybone, to bring up any concerns and to discuss the best way to store the different materials that form the collection.

What is in the collection?

The collection comprises of records created and collected by LGLS which includes things like minutes, correspondence, call logs, resources for volunteers and promotional materials.

Reading minutes and correspondence has been helpful in getting a sense of how LGLS was organised and how it operated. It has also been useful to read through the press cuttings collected by LGLS volunteers and editions of Gay Scotland as these provided a wider context of LGBT+ lives, activism and politics across Scotland and internationally during the 1990s and 2000s.

Gay Scotland, Issue 21 (Jul 1985)

Call logs form a large proportion of the collection and capture one of the core functions of LGLS – to provide a listening service for people struggling with issues or difficulties relating to their sexuality.

Call logs come in different formats including bound log books and individual index cards. Each log contains a summary of the call including notes on what advice was given, updates on subsequent calls, or details of any in-person meetings between caller and an LGLS befriender. By the nature of the service LGLS provided the logs can contain confidential, and often sensitive information. Anonymised transcription will be used to allow access to a selection of call logs while ensuring we adhere to data protection legislation and maintain the confidentiality that was so crucial to the work of LGLS. 

First Log Book (1974)

It is going to be a privilege to work on opening up this collection and spreading the word about this ground-breaking organisation and its important place in LGBT+ and Scottish history. Keep an eye on our Facebook and Twitter pages, and of course this blog, for further updates (and plenty more pictures)!

Introducing our new digital resource list on the history of nursing

In this blog we hear from Lauren McKay who joined the CRC last year as a Modern Apprentice. Lauren will be telling us all about the fantastic new resource list on the history of nursing that she created. 

You can find the list on our website: http://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/exhibits/histnursing.htm

Nurses on a balcony at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh

My name is Lauren McKay and since September 2020 I’ve been working at the CRC’s user services as their current modern apprentice.

During the last January lockdown, the majority of our services moved to ‘remote only’ which meant I was working almost solely from home. Tasked with creating an online resource list for LHSA, I was sent a list of topics to choose from and found myself gravitating towards one topic in particular- the history of nursing.

Before starting this project, my knowledge of nursing history had only one portrait within its hall of fame and that was Florence Nightingale’s. At present, that same hall of fame has been embellished with the addition of many more portraits of proud pioneers and fearless women.

One of the women I was particularly captivated with was the nurse turned explorer Kate Marsden. She went to Siberia in the 1890s to investigate an alleged herb which was said could be used as a cure for leprosy and wrote the wonderfully titled book about her travels: On Sledge and Horseback to Outcast Siberian Lepers which I managed to find online through internet archive. The journey took her 11 months in total! Unfortunately, she did not find the cure she was looking for but instead set up a hospital for lepers in a town called Vilyuysk. She faced criticism, however, from people who did not believe the veracity of her exploits but worse still, her reputation was thrown in to ruin when rumours started to spread claiming that Marsden was only doing these good deeds as a means to cover up for her homosexuality and financial schemes. This scandal erupted around the same time as the doomed Oscar Wilde libel trail, a time in which ignorance and hysteria surrounding sexuality and gender roles was particularly rife.

One highlight in terms of a visual resource was the nurse Ethel Miller’s digitised scrapbook which contains autographs, poems and sketches done by the patients at Craigleith Military Hospital. It’s a truly precious item as there is something very moving about virtually flicking through the sketchbook, reading the often humorous poems and admiring the cartoons:

 

You can find a digital copy of the scrapbook here: https://bit.ly/2RSeM0d

 The history of nursing in the British Empire By Sarah Tooley (1906), which is digitised and available on internet archive, was also one of my favourite resources. I was consulting it to better understand district nursing in the 19^th century when I came across this passage:

The auld lichts of the " profession " sniffed the air in disdain at " them Bloomsbury nurses," to whom they probably added the epithet " bloomin' " not in a complimentary sense. " If I was you, I wouldn't send for the parish doctor," counselled one of the fraternity to a poor woman with a wound in her leg ; " because the first thing he'll do will be to send for one of them district nurses from Bloomsbury Square, and if they come here you'll have to keep your room clean and open your winder, clear out the things from under your bed, and they'll turn the whole place topsy-turvey so as you won't know your own home ; and you'll feel just as if you was in a horspital

The irony is that the individual is describing with contempt what we would now perceive as basic good cleanliness practices. It’s quite interesting to note that such practices were not always considered welcome, or even good for that matter.

https://archive.org/details/historyofnursing00tool/page/n9/mode/2up?q

Nursing, as I now know, played a huge role in the improvement of medical practices, progresses in public health, and individual nurses even played a substantial part in advancing recognition of women’s rights. Sophia Duleep Singh, daughter of the last Maharaja of the Sikh empire, godchild to Queen Victoria, was a VAD nurse during WW1 while also an incredibly outspoken suffragette and activist. Or Gertrude Townend and Catherine Pine, who both helped set up a nursing home for suffragettes recovering from force feeding and imprisonment. I was expecting to discover a lot of incredible women, for a profession largely championed by women, but I found myself in complete awe while uncovering their stories. Their sheer intelligence, skill, resilience, bravery, and their collective drive to improve the world and care for its people was simply put: breath-taking.

I could go on writing about the resource list all day, but I hope that what I have highlighted gives an idea of the variety of resources which are included. I was surprised by the wealth of information available online and I believe that the list will be a useful tool to consult as starting off point to anyone researching nursing history remotely.

While fully immersed in exploring resources for the list I began to understand its purpose as being threefold:

·       To debunk the many myths surrounding nursing, such as the common held misconception that nursing has always been a vocation rather than a profession which required the traditional ‘feminine touch’ and the self- sacrifice that is believed to accompany it (especially harmful when in popular culture male nurses are portrayed as emasculated). Nurses fought for decades before their educational needs were met and it is because of this that today they are trained to be highly skilled and resourceful individuals.

·       To discover history’s incredible pioneering nurses and the diverse roots of the profession and how it evolved (the resource list covers UK nursing predominantly).

·       To disseminate knowledge remotely in times of COVID-19, when research is made particularly difficult as in person visits have decreased due to safety measures.

I am so thankful to LHSA for this opportunity which has enriched my knowledge, respect and appreciation for this profession- I’ve found a new passion!

 

An Ode to Archivists- Access to Archives Internship Jan-Feb 2021

I’m Farhana Islam, Access to Archives Intern with Lothian Health Services Archive. I have one week left of my one-month placement and I’d like to start off this blog by saying thank you to everyone at LHSA and the CRC team for being so welcoming and supportive, including Laura Beattie, Louise Neilson and Ruth Honeybone. A special thanks to Louise Williams, my mentor/ supervisor over the past month; she was so patient with me while I got used to the new software, and extremely helpful in answering all the questions and queries I had. Before beginning the internship however, I questioned the potential of engagement with a team who lived and operated in another country, but Louise and Laura made Scotland feel like a ten-minute drive (from London); and the wider team through their various talks and presentations have made me really excited to visit the CRC and LHSA to meet everyone and explore the facilities in person (once things go back to normal).

My two main tasks were to input existing catalogues onto the ArchivesSpace software, and create catalogues and transcriptions for oral history recordings relating to Edinburgh’s HIV and AIDs epidemic in the late 1980s. During my first two weeks, I enjoyed developing my skills on the ArchivesSpace software and had the satisfaction of watching roots develop in to trees, and noticing myself become more fluent on the site. Listening to, cataloguing and transcribing oral histories was definitely my favourite, I feel as though I’ve found my calling! As an avid listener of podcasts and audio-books, It was like listening to a really interesting historical podcast, and then being able to contribute towards its preservation; simply magical!

In addition to learning a lot from these tasks, I learnt an immense amount from merely speaking and listening to members of CRC who are all so enthusiastic about what they do. In particular Emily Hick’s Sacred Objects project and the ‘Meet the Conservator’ livestream which was so informative and interesting. [I believe a recorded version can be found online].

Oral History

The work I have contributed towards has made me appreciate the strenuous nature of archiving and preservation so much more. From the attention to detail required during cataloguing, to the patience and methodical approach to recording and then transcribing oral histories and of course making it accessible to the public. It is so easy to overlook the several hours of effort behind the preservation of photos, historical documents, images, artefacts, oral history recordings and archives in general.

The image on the right is an example of one of the applications which can be used to make cataloguing and transcribing oral history easier. ExpressScribe, in its most basic form, is a transcription software which allows users to upload recordings and adjust audio clips and provides a space for transcribing as you listen.

 

In the oral history interview with Jacqui Mok, Helen Zealley describes creating books for children who were affected by HIV. ‘It’s Clinic Day’ (GD22/14/1/62) aimed to normalise the experiences of the children who might have been distressed by regular hospital appointments, home visits, and all sorts of medical examinations. As much as this information moved me, it was so refreshing to learn of the efforts made on the part of healthcare professionals in the 1980s in helping not only treat those clinically affected by the virus, but taking time out to care for the children’s emotional wellbeing. LHSA’s preservation of the historical fight against HIV and AIDS has definitely put things in to perspective about the effort that goes in to caring for people with a virus which, to this day, carries the burden of societal stigma.

Working from Home

I’ve seen quite a few (pre-Covid) blogs posting picturesque images of the view from the University of Edinburgh/CRC, so here’s my attempt at displaying my internship workspace. One of the perks of working from home is, you get to have spontaneous mini snowmen competitions with your siblings at lunchtime.

Virtually exploring the Qit’at- i- Khushkhatt....

As it was a virtual internship, I explored the archives and special collections online. Cameras are notorious for not being able to capture the real beauty of things in front of us, but these scriptures, calligraphy and art pieces were absolutely breath-taking, even on a screen. I thought I’d include them in my blog because seeing them made me really excited and I admittedly spent way too long staring at each of them, trying to read the Arabic.

 

You can view images of the Qit’at- i- Khushkhatt here: https://bit.ly/3pXVTV8

Family History Preservation

My mum recently discovered my grandad’s passport and immigration document, which was so exciting for my family, but the pages were wearing away. Luckily, I had the help of Ruth, who suggested the best methods of preservation for these specific documents. I am really excited to begin my own preservation project for the future generations of my family. It was such a privilege to have the expert opinions of archivists, conservators and curators at my finger-tips.

 

All in all… 

I’ve come away from the internship, excited for a career in archives. I’ve been exposed to several different avenues within the heritage sector, and look forward to continuing my journey in preservation. I have enrolled as a volunteer onto an oral history project (which I begin next week), called the ‘Tape Letters Project’; looking at the unusual method of communication used by working class Pakistani migrants, who recorded cassettes for their families to listen to in Pakistan. Oral history, here I come! I feel truly grateful to have had the chance to work with such crucial, historical information and would like to thank everyone at LHSA for making me feel so welcome and included in the preservation of Lothian’s history.

 

-Farhana Islam

Tessa talks about her experience as one of our very first remote Interns!

 

Hello! I’m Tessa, and for the last four weeks I’ve been the Web Accessibility and Resource List Intern here at LHSA – well not exactly ‘here’, as like all of us I’ve been working remotely, which for me is from my flat in Glasgow. Despite this I’ve had a wonderful experience, and keen to share what I’ve been working on…

My internship was formed of two main parts; firstly, I tested the LHSA’s website against the UK Government’s Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.1). It was surprising to find out this is a mandatory list of criteria that a website must meet in order to enable access to users with disabilities such as visual, hearing, cognitive and mobility.  

WCAG 2.1 is based on the following 4 design principles:

·         Perceivable

·         Operable

·         Understandable

·         Robust

Essentially these principles encompass everything that makes a website accessible for all users, from ease of navigation to appropriate colour contrast. With the daunting thought of over 500 pages making up the LHSA website, I started by testing the main index pages (of which there are 16) as these are likely to receive the highest user traffic. I then further tested internal pages, which contain elements like tables, video and audio sections which I thought would be beneficial to assess. I ended up exceeding my expectations, testing just shy of 80 pages, which I hope will provide a good representation on the types of future improvements to be made. As there could often be many elements to test within one page, the application WAVE (Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool) proved invaluable by cleverly highlighting areas that needed attention and also translating web code into human language!

WAVE in action, testing the LHSA Home page

After about a week of running tests, the second part of my internship was a complete contrast! As the reading room is currently closed, my task was to compile a list of digital resources from the University of Edinburgh and beyond on the history of psychiatry in the UK, to aid research and teaching. Records relating to this subject are often highly requested at the LHSA, and fortunately for me, there was so much to be found online! Among the range of resources I’ve included on the list are three podcast series from the University of St Andrews, and an entire playlist of talks on mental health, recorded at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. Also, it was interesting to see the different and innovative ways institutions are enabling and facilitating remote access to their collections while access is currently limited, and I definitely found myself falling down a few rabbit-holes during my research…

The feeling when you stumble across a page of online exhibitions 

The Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh's online exhibition 'Moonstruck: 500 Years of Mental Health' - https://www.rcpe.ac.uk/heritage/moonstruck-360-degree-tour

As well as these two tasks, I was able to learn about the history and daily operations of the LHSA – talking to Ruth Honeybone about her conservation work, finding out more about Louise Neilson’s role as Access Officer and Louise Williams' work as archivist. These chats have been great for keeping myself and fellow Intern Farhana connected, along with attending the CRC Staff meeting – not least the weekly virtual coffee breaks!

It is clear to me that I have learnt a tremendous amount in the last four weeks, which I somewhat feel is a result of remote working, rather than in spite of the current restrictions. With this, I’ve had to learn to adapt to new challenges, but I’ve felt incredibly supported throughout (a testament to Louise N and the rest of the wonderful LHSA team!) and would certainly recommend any new professionals like myself pursuing a remote internship in the future. I look forward to when I’m able to visit the LHSA in person in the not-so-distant future!

Enjoy Your Sexuality - Safely

On World AIDS Day 2020, we're fortunate enough to be hosting a guest blog from Dr Hannah J Elizabeth. Hannah's a great champion of LHSA, having first worked with us in 2018 during their research on the impact of HIV on women, children and young people in Edinburgh.

Currently, Hannah is a Research Fellow for the Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award 'The Cultural History of the NHS' in the Centre for the History of Medicine at the University of Warwick, researching late twentieth century lesbian health activism in the Midlands. Alongside their research on lesbian health, they are writing a monograph based on their PhD research on representations of HIV to children and adolescents. In January, they will begin a Wellcome Research Fellowship based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Edinburgh titled: ‘What’s love got to do with it? Building and maintaining HIV-affected families through love, care, and activism in Edinburgh 1981-2016’.

‘Enjoy your sexuality - safely’ – learning caution and hope from 1990s lesbian HIV materials

This World AIDS Day there are reasons to be cautiously hopeful. Rates of new HIV infections are dropping across the UK, with testing, PreP and successful treatment regimens lowering transmission risks and improving clinical outcomes. This trend, as has been widely reported, has been accelerated by the social distancing measures required to combat Covid. If we dig down into the statistics though, we come across reasons for caution.

Access to PreP is by no means universal. While improving, many people who are vulnerable still find access to PreP difficult. Successful treatment for those already living with HIV remains dependant on testing and sticking with treatment, something which isn’t always easy. Indeed, the proportion of people diagnosed late remains stubbornly high at 42% according to latest figures. Globally Covid may cause serious disruption to treatment regimes. So evidently, more needs to be done to continue to combat HIV and to lessen health inequalities nationally and globally. We need more money for HIV prevention, testing, treatment, and education!

HIV education has taken many forms over the years. Here I’m focusing on information targeted at lesbians (a fairly rare primary source) because the hopeful-but-cautious tone adopted mirrors how I feel about HIV in the UK today. We shouldn’t be complacent, but we should be optimistic! 

LHB45/2/5/1: Lesbian Sex: Are you as safe as you think? leaflet from Lothian Lesbian Line

‘We want you to be aware of the facts, not the scare stories.’

This leaflet, created by Lesbian Line, part of Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard, captures an interesting moment in HIV’s history. In its pages we can see a turn in messaging from describing people as ‘at risk’ towards describing activities – rather than identities – as risky. It addresses women who have sex with women, telling them: ‘Like anybody else, it’s what we do that determines how much we place ourselves at risk.’ Women who had sex with women played an important role in the history of AIDS activism: advocating for change, working to produce education materials, and supporting people who became sick. But they also produced material like this to address their own needs directly in the face of government silence and ongoing stigma.

Overall the leaflet is frank, admitting when the medical research was unclear and risks uncertain, while offering practical solutions on how to have sex as safely as possible. Indeed, on the final page of the leaflet it explains:

‘We want you to be aware of the facts, not the scare stories: our sexual activities are generally low risk, so enjoy your sexuality – safely!’

This message, about enjoying ourselves, still resonates today. Much of the sexual health messaging we are used to seeing still insists on a risk first, pleasure second (or not at all) narrative, but in the 1990s this kind of intervention was even more powerful. When we think about public health messaging around HIV it is usually the ‘tombstone campaign’ that we think of. We remember John Hurt’s sombre voice telling us that ‘if you ignore AIDS it could be the death of you: So don’t die of ignorance!’ A scary campaign is a memorable campaign, but as I’ve argued elsewhere, that doesn’t mean it worked brilliantly. As the leaflet above explains, not all sexual acts are as risky as one another, and there are many ways to make sex safer without forgetting about pleasure in the process!

Another important element of the leaflet is its emphasis on personal choice and communication around risk. While the methods available in the 1990s were fewer, and perhaps less technologically advanced than those available to us today, there were always more ways to have safer-sex than using condoms. While PreP is game changer, and condoms, lube, and sex toys have also increased in variety and type, safer-sex has always meant different things to different people.

People found ways to have fun safely in the 1990s. By leaving space for different activities while emphasising communication, the Lesbian Line leaflet strikes an inclusive tone. Indeed, part of this leaflet’s important intervention was debunking the myth that lesbians as a group were not at risk of HIV, while carefully leaving space for pleasure in the process of managing that risk. Which I suppose brings us back to World AIDS Day 2020. Today we still need to know the facts so we can, as far as possible, manage our risk. We also should work hard not to lose sight of pleasure. But we also need to acknowledge that the burden of risk is not distributed equally. And so we must fight on for better education, funding, and treatment for all. 

You can find out more about Dr Hannah J Elizabeth's work here:

Love Carefully and Without ‘Over-bearing Fears’: The Persuasive Power of Authenticity in Late 1980s British AIDS Education Material for Adolescents 

‘Private Things Affect Other People’: Grange Hill’s Critique of British Sex Education Policy in the Age of AIDS 

The Slippery History of the Dental Dam 

Superman vs. Nick O’Teen: anti-smoking campaigns and children in 1980s Britain 

‘Injections-While-You-Dance’: Press Advertisement and Poster Promotion of the Polio Vaccine to British Publics, 1956–1962 

Getting around the rules of sex education 

Selected LHSA material relevant to lesbian health and well-being includes:

Acc09/021, Acc09/027: Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard. Includes information on the Lesbian Line service, and publications for and by lesbian communities, including Dykenosis, and newsletters from the International Lesbian Information Service. The collection features runs of the magazine Gay Scotland. Until January 2022, students and staff from the University of Edinburgh can access Gay Scotland (along with 24 other LGBT publications) online through the LGBT Magazine Archive through a link in this list.

LHB45/2/5/1: Lothian Health Board HIV/AIDS Team and Health Promotion Department. Information produced by lesbian, gay and transgender groups.

LHB45/1/2/2/5: Lothian Health Board HIV/AIDS Team and Health Promotion Department. Terrance Higgins Trust. THT leaflet on lesbian safe sex.

But please contact us for more information: and don't forget our LGBT source list!

Marlena signing off!

Although this year has undoubtedly been an extraordinary one (for all the wrong reasons), one of its highlights has definitely been the successful completion of our internship programme last month. Without these short, paid programmes, a lot of valuable work would go undone, and we wouldn't have the pleasure of meeting so many aspiring young archivists - a hope for the future that we all need at the moment! These are the reflections of Marlena, our Archive Cataloguing Intern, written in the middle of March 2020, as she finished her internship:

Hello everyone, and Goodbye! This week is my last as an intern with LHSA and I thought I would share my thoughts on the last eight weeks here.

As you will have read in my last two posts on the blog, I have been cataloguing a collection on bio-engineering research in Edinburgh donated by David Gow. The collection contains all kinds of fascinating material; there are journal articles, diaries, photograph albums, newspaper clippings, and correspondence, on anything you could think of in terms of bioengineering prosthetics, as well as many wonderful surprises. You might expect the collection to have meeting minutes and technical diagrams (and it does) but we also have records on Russian electric prosthetic hand development in the 1960s, material samples for inflatable mattresses, and some really cute baby pictures. My job has been to organise the material in a way that users can understand the context of its creation, and can easily find records within the collection.

'Russian hand' documents from 1965

The majority of my time here has been spent reviewing the material and drafting hierarchical structures by which to sort the records. In the archives world, this is called arrangement. You may already be familiar with the term from my first blog post. It’s important to remember that cataloguing isn’t just database input (although I did that as well!), it’s about expressing how things are connected, why the records were made and stored, and how they can be used. Arrangement therefore is possibly the most important part of creating a catalogue, and I spent over three weeks reviewing arrangement ideas before settling on my final structure.

Final structure

I had kept a list of the material I viewed during the scoping process, with titles, descriptions, and dates of items, so the actual ‘cataloguing’ (that is, the database input) was fairly straightforward, and, dare I say it, a good bit of fun. I had some previous experience with cataloguing with other collection management systems such as CALM, Vernon, and of course Excel, but this was my first time using ArchivesSpace, which I consider to be very user-friendly.

Due to the limited time frame of my internship, a key concern over the past eight weeks has been ‘scalability’. There is simply too much material to squeeze into the time available, so I had to prioritise what made it into ArchivesSpace. If you look at the structure above, you will see the subfonds (term used for different work areas or activities of the record creator) LHB71/1 (Administration), LHB71/2 (Research and Development), and LHB71/3 (Photographic Material). This is what I prioritised. All three of the first subfonds are now in ArchivesSpace, and searchable at item level. That means that if you are looking for a particular item within this group, you can find it by searching the database, which looks something like this:

Subfonds LHB71/4 (Internal Publications) and LHB71/5 l(Publicity Material) are searchable at series level. A series is a group of records that essentially have the same function. That means you’ll be able to find an entry on the content of the groups of these records, but you won’t be able to search for individual items.

My last two weeks have been rehousing the collection, putting everything into acid-free folders and melinex sleeves, numbering and labelling items so they’re easily identified and arranging the items in acid-free boxes with related items (for example, other items in the same series) so they are easy to find.

My greatest lesson learnt in this internship is that everyone, and every archive, is different. I know this sounds clichéd. I realise it’s glaringly self-evident, and it’s something I thought I already knew. There is a difference, however, in knowing something and really understanding it. One of the reasons it took so long to finalise the arrangement was because I had some expectations on what ‘should’ be in the collection, and how the arrangement ‘should’ look. From my studies and my previous cataloguing work, I had come to expect that the first two subfonds would be administrative and financial in nature, but there were few records relating to finance in the collection, and those that did, did not conform to my ideas of what financial records look like. Instead of ledgers, waste books, or accounts, there were grant proposals and a few material quotes as well as some budget estimates and fundraising correspondence—these were all records of what might have been spent or gained but not actually evident of a financial transaction. In hindsight, I was blindly naïve to expect these records to exist and to continue drafting structures that gave them great prominence. The centre didn’t keep those records, as many of the financial transactions would have happened via the NHS and the Princess Margaret Rose Hospital.

My mistake is especially unfortunate considering the subject matter of so much of the collection, which focuses on fitting prosthetics to individual patients. No one person has quite the same disability, and the patients seen at the centre each had a prosthetic fitted to them individually. Some patients had partial hands and needed fingers, others didn’t just need a hand but an arm as well. Some patients needed cosmetic prosthetics (called cosmesis) for important functions like weddings and funerals, others needed a more functional hand for work. And a hand that was made for a teenage boy wouldn’t fit a five-year-old girl. All kinds of things needed to be considered when fitting a patient with a prosthetic. Just like no person has the same fingerprint, no person has the same hand, or the same hand prosthetic! And no archive has the same arrangement, either.

After this week, I will be continuing my studies with the University of Dundee and volunteering with the archive at Glasgow Trades Hall. I have learned so much here that I hope to use in my future career. The past eight weeks have flown by and I have enjoyed every minute of it. Everyone at LHSA and the CRC here at the University of Edinburgh has been so encouraging, supportive, and helpful. I only have one more thing to say, and that is a big THANK YOU to Louise Williams,  Louise Neilson, and Ruth Honeybone, who have made this internship such a wonderful experience.

So long, farewell, Auf Wiedersehen and thank you!