Welcome to Alice and Marlena!

In this week's blog, we welcome two new interns to the team! LHSA has been running a programme of paid internships for some years now, offering different levels of experience to aspiring archivists before, during and immediately after taking professional qualifications. This year, we're running two internships at the same time, one around engaging more people with our collections through online outreach (Alice Manning), and another designed to increase cataloguing skills - so, the way we describe and order records to make them accessible (Marlena Nuernberger-Walle). Here's Alice and Marlena to introduce themselves:

Alice (left) and Marlena (right) in the store

Alice:

Hi there, I’m Alice and I’m one of the new archive interns working here at Lothian Health Services Archive (LHSA). Full warning, there are lots of acronyms in this post!  

I am originally from Yorkshire, but moved up north to study. This was initially for my anthropology degree at the University of St Andrews, and it’s been hard to stay away from the Scottish sea ever since. Though it was getting involved with an archive back in West Yorkshire, as part of summer research for my undergrad, which gave me the archive bug. After finishing my degree I continued volunteering in archives as well as getting to know how current records are created / handled at the British Red Cross as a casework volunteer. Then, I worked as the graduate trainee archivist at the National Records of Scotland (NRS) in 2018, so have had good experience in a customer facing archival role. I always enjoyed answering enquiries, and through which doing research to get better acquainted with the different records held at NRS. There’s nothing like finding the right records to help piece together family history!

I have just started studying with the University of Dundee for a Masters in Archives and Records Management, so needed practical work experience to go along with this. As I had previously been to a crowdsourcing conservation day at the Centre for Research Collections (CRC) last year, helping to rehouse the Thomas Nelson collection, I had some insight into the work that goes on at CRC (of which LHSA is a part). So when the internship at LSHA came up I saw it as an ideal opportunity to get more experience, and here I am!!

My internship here is focused on creating a source list which highlights women within the LHSA collections; an intimidating task given Edinburgh’s impressive history of women in medicine. Indeed, the recent media attention regarding the Edinburgh Seven’s posthumous degrees meant I had read about women in the collections here already. So far, I have been trying to look at a range of collections, scoping what is held so as to get a good overview for where I want to focus.

Whilst looking at records regarding Elsie Inglis, who was a doctor who opened the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (the pot-war funds from which helped to found the aptly named Elsie Inglis Memorial Hospital), I came across letters with reference to Inglis’ Serbian Red Cross medal. This just added to reasons Dr Inglis was an impressive woman. It was fascinating that she was awarded this Serbian medal for her work overseas, and that my previous work with the Red Cross has an overlap!

Whether it's been nurses' training records, oral histories, women’s health campaigns or records on individuals there’s so much material. One thing is definitely true, it’s quickly become clear that that it would be impossible to cover everything. Getting a focus has been key. With so many interesting records at LHSA I could spend the entire time reading rather than creating the source list! I have been focusing on trying to cover women in different medical professions; surgeons, nurses and doctors, as well as women who spearheaded important campaigns. I’m looking to create an interactive source list which can be used by a range of audiences.  

My internship ends a few days before International Women’s Day so I have also been thinking ahead of a good way to celebrate women in the collection for the worldwide event too. The theme this year is ‘I am Generation Equality: Realizing Women's Rights’, so hopefully there’ll be a blog post (squeezed in before I leave) linked to this multigenerational campaign later on!  

Marlena:

Hello! I’m Marlena and I’m one of the new archive interns working with LHSA. I am currently doing a distance-learning master’s degree with the University of Dundee and hope to become a ‘fully fledged’ qualified archivist next year. I have wanted to be an archivist since a school visit to my local archive (I’m from Hanover, Germany) back in 2010, so I am incredibly excited for this internship. I have a little bit of cataloguing experience from previous project; before moving here, I completed an archive traineeship last year at Windmill Hill Archive at Waddesdon Manor, in Buckinghamshire, where I answered enquiries, updated item descriptions, and catalogued a small accession to one of our collections.

Over the next few weeks, I will be cataloguing a collection donated to LHSA by David Gow, the bioengineer behind i-Limb, which is considered the first ‘bionic hand’. While this isn’t my first time cataloguing records, it is the first time I will be processing records into a completely original arrangement. For any non-archivist readers, arrangement isn’t just physically grouping and storing items, it’s also about working out how things relate to one another, and how to fit the material into a structure that makes it easier to find in the future. I am really looking forward to this opportunity to create something new, and hopefully bring some semblance of order to the chaos! I love figuring out how things work, link and connect, and it’s exhilarating to think that my efforts might help make this exciting collection more accessible.

Once this collection has been processed into our collections management system, ArchivesSpace, I am hoping to label and repackage the material in acid-free housing, helping to ensure the preservation and access of the records for future users. It will be exciting to think of future users consulting the material I am currently cataloguing!

The collection is focused on research into prosthetics created at the Bio-Engineering Centre at the Princess Margaret Rose Orthopaedic Hospital. The centre, originally referred to as the Bioengineering Unit (sometimes abbreviated as BEU), opened in the 1963 and was focused on supporting children born with limb deficiencies. At the time, these congenital anomalies were a pressing concern after the thalidomide crisis became public knowledge in 1962. Thalidomide, which is still used today when treating numerous types of cancer and skin diseases, was promoted in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a safe drug for morning sickness, anxiety and ‘tension’. Unfortunately, use of thalidomide even once during pregnancy has been associated with a greatly increased risk of limb malformation and other birth defects. The BEU supplied arm and hand prostheses for roughly 60 children during this time, many of which had been affected by the thalidomide tragedy. While electric prostheses were already known in the 1960’s, they were often too bulky and heavy for children to use. Engineers at the BEU, led by David Simpson, were able to create pneumatic prostheses that were powered by gas and air, making them light enough to be worn by children. The centre later continued to adjust and fit these prostheses as the children grew, supporting them into early adulthood.

Aside from the centre’s advancement in children’s pneumatic prosthetics, it also invented aids for long-term care of people with disabilities, such as a tilted wheelchair, and the Simpson-Edinburgh Low Pressure Airbed, which prevented pressure sores in bed-bound patients. Other inventions were the epiphysiodesis tube saw, which prevented uneven leg growth in children with growth disorders, and the Arrow Walker, a triangular walker that provided upright support for children with cerebral palsy. The centre also began researching and later producing lifelike cosmetic gloves using silicone.

In the 1980s, research at the centre shifted towards electrically powered prostheses. Working together with Reach, a charity for children with upper limb differences, the centre began research and development of the first electrically powered hand. The centre achieved their first breakthrough in 1993 when they fitted Kerry Emsley with the ‘Reach’ hand, a battery-powered prosthetic hand operated by a switch at her wrist using her residual thumb, which opened and closed the hand. The ‘Reach’ hand was the first of its kind in that was suitable for amputees with a natural wrist joint, who were too long in the arm to wear previous functional prosthetics.

The advances made with the Reach Hand were crucial for the invention of the first completely electrically powered arm prosthesis, the Edinburgh Modular Arm System, or EMAS. Touted as the first bionic hand, the EMAS was first fitted to Robert Campbell Aird in 1993. Campbell Aird had lost his right arm after a battle with muscular cancer in 1982, but with EMAS went on to achieve international fame, with an entry in the Guinness book of world records and an impressive 14 trophies in clay pigeon shooting.

Article on Campbell Aird and EMAS in the Japanese Magazine Focus, 1998

Despite difficulties in securing funding, Gow and his team at the Bioengineering Centre continued their development of electronically powered prostheses, and succeeded in designing the first artificial hand with independently powered digits which became commercially available in 2008. The hand, known as i-Limb, and its sister product ProDigits, were launched by Gow’s company Touchbionics, which is often described as the ‘first NHS spinoff company'. The crucial obstacle in prosthetic research at the time was overcoming the power to weight ratio of many contemporary motors. Often, motors strong enough to power the whole hand were heavy—lighter motors often meant they were too weak to maintain sufficient grip. The key innovation was David Gow’s decision to power each finger individually, instead of using a motor for the hand as a whole. Unlike the ‘REACH’ hand, which had been operated by a switch, and the EMAS, which Campbell Aird has operated using a special cap, the i-Limb was a myoelectric prosthesis, meaning it operates using electric signals from existing muscle. At last, the world had a ‘real’ bionic hand!

 

Excerpt from promotional leaflet on the i-Limb from TouchBionics, 2006

I-Limb and ProDigits have since been acquired by Ossur, a prosthetics company in Iceland. My first glimpses at the collection have shown connections (visits, correspondence, conferences and more) with research from around the globe—from Russia, Germany, Sweden, China, Japan, Canada and the United States. It goes to show the critical role Edinburgh has had in the advancement of bioengineering and prosthetics worldwide.

Starting with a boxlist with which to gain an overview of the scope and content, my time here so far has been spent on a ‘recce’ mission, navigating the scale and variety of everything as a whole. The collection contains all kinds of different records-- letters, photographs, reports, journals, meeting minutes, scrapbooks, and more. There are all kinds of things! If you can’t tell already, I am incredibly interested in this collection—it has so many potential sources for future users, from disability history to engineering research. I can’t wait to explore the collection more in depth and share my discoveries!