CRC Summer School!

Last week we had the pleasure of welcoming this year’s Centre for Research Collections Summer School attendees who came to the centre to gain a sense of the different areas of work that we do here. The summer school aims to help those who are interested in a career in the heritage, museum, and libraries sectors and they were provided with a week-long schedule of activities including tours, talks, and practical exercises.

At LHSA we decided to treat them by introducing them to the world of enquiries. We receive hundreds of enquiries every year from people wishing to learn more about individuals, hospital history, local history and the history of medicine. Many of the people who contact us here at LHSA are family historians who wish to learn more about their relatives who perhaps were patients or staff in a Lothian hospital. We decided to let the group do the research for a selection of family history enquiries in order to see how much information they could find.

The Summer School group were split into four groups with each group given a set of records and an enquiry to solve.

One group was given records from the Royal Edinburgh Hospital and asked to find out as much as they could about a patient who was admitted there in 1902. From the General Register of Patients, Register of Deaths, Certification Papers and a Casebook they were able to learn about how he came to be admitted to the hospital, the nature of his illness, the cause of his death, and even details such as hair colour and weight.

Another group were asked to find information about a woman who worked as a housemaid at Rosslynlee Hospital. They were not given a specific date but were told that she stopped working there in 1908 when she married. Using the Register of Attendants Leaving and Register of Attendants Engaged and working back from 1908 they were able to find her employment record. They also read the rules and regulations for staff in order to provide the enquirer with a little background information on what it would have been like for their relative to work in the hospital.

A lot of the feedback received from the group was that they were surprised at the amount of detail in some of the records, particularly the Royal Edinburgh Hospital casebooks. Others described the difficulty in deciphering the handwriting and talked of their relief when finding some of the records were typed. Overall it was a really enjoyable afternoon and we hope that it has inspired a few people in the room to consider a career in the archive sector!

Happy Birthday to You!

This week, we've been very busy celebrating a very special birthday. Over to Archivist Louise...

Yesterday marked 70 years of the National Health Service in the UK - a health system controlled by government, funded by taxation, free at the point of use, committed to universal care and offering comprehensive coverage. When we learnt that proposals were being taken for potential displays to fill our exhibition spaces here on the 6th floor of the Main Library, we couldn't resist suggesting an exhibition highlighting how our region and the health of its people has been transformed in those 70 years.

Our exhibition - Dawn of a New Era - opened in April, and you can see it here at the Main Library until 15th August. But for the anniversary of the NHS Appointed Day yesterday, we wanted to do something extra-special by hosting a talk on why we chose what we did for the exhibition, and to give people an opportunity to see some extra archive material that didn't quite make it into the display cases.

It was wonderful to see so many people come along to hear how our collections tell stories of changing healthcare over the years, from the treatment that was available before 1948 to cutting edge breakthroughs in bioengineering. It was particularly lovely to welcome members of NHS Lothian staff past and present, including members of the Pelican League of nurses trained at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh School of Nursing, some of whom came along wearing their prized Pelican badges!

The talk covered Edinburgh's pride in its high quality voluntary hospitals, funded entirely by public donations and fundraising...

Small flag badges were sold on pageant days to raise money for the voluntary hospitals that were funded entirely by public donation before the NHS (LHB1/35, c. 1930s)

and the precedents for state control of healthcare in Scotland that made both medical staff and civil servants more prepared for 5th July 1948, particularly wartime initiatives such as the Department of Health for Scotland-run Emergency Medical Service.

Ward 32, Bangour. Formally part of Bangour Village Hospital, this villa was taken over as part of the wartime Emergency Medical Service. It offered neurosurgical specialist services to troops, but also treated civilians.

We also looked at the structure of the Health Service in Scotland...

Diagram of the National Health Service in Scotland, from a booklet posted to every Scottish household (GD1/112, 1948)

and some of the innovations of its early days, such as locally-transforming campaigns for mobile x-ray screening for tuberculosis and health visiting:

Badge given to each participant in Edinburgh's 1958 mass miniature radiography campaign, screening against tuberculosis on the move.

Health visiting, organised by local authorities in the new National Health Service structure, helped promote the good general health that was seen as essential to the success of a nationalised health service (Acc16/009, 1960s)

As we looked at the different themes represented in the exhibition, some of the attendees' favourite items were the recent donations that we've received from the Edinburgh Children's Hospital Charity. In 2016, Writer in Residence Linda Cracknell and Illustrator in Residence Cate James produced a series of books designed for child patients in the Royal Edinburgh Hospital for Sick Children. With titles like Cathy the Friendly Cannula and Edward the Nervous Medical Notes, the books are designed to make the hospital experience less intimidating for children, by helping them to understand how treatment works, pictured below:

It was a pleasure to spend an afternoon looking back at the past 70 years, and how LHSA material both marks unique local breakthroughs, and fits into narratives of healthcare in Scotland and the UK as a whole. But if you couldn’t make it to meet us yesterday, there’s plenty of time to visit Dawn of a New Era before 15^th August!

Me with one of our slides!