An update from our conservation volunteers

Our two volunteers in the conservation studio have been with us since October last year. Both Fiona and Sandi have contributed blog posts before, but these were relatively early on in their placements. Now that they’ve been here for a while, have undergone extensive training and have started working on their own individual projects, this week’s blog includes their reflections on their volunteer placements to date.

From Fiona...

I have been a fortnightly volunteer here for six months and I feel quite confident in the work I am doing now. I am working to my own schedule, with Ruth always there for advice and help if I need it, and have tackled some really interesting repairs.

Much of what I have been doing for the last few visits has involved tear repairs and infills, and that has led to an understanding of how to make an item more secure and stable for people to be able to handle it in the future. For instance, one piece I have just finished is a technical drawing for the construction of a medical instrument. It was very fragile along one edge especially - it felt like fine suede to touch and was fragmented into tiny shards, held together only by a few fibres. Several pieces along the edge and at the corners were missing also. With patience and care, I have filled in the gaps with Japanese paper (a fine, fibrous paper) and wheat starch paste, and used some strips of the Japanese paper on the back of the item to hold all the tiny pieces together along the edge. It now feels strong and stable when I handle it, meaning people will be able to do so for a long time to come.

Today I am learning how to join together two parts of an architectural plan which have become completely detached. It involves making small strips to temporarily hold the two pieces where you want them, a bit like stitches in a wound, and I have been shown me how remove wheat starch paste when necessary too. When I looked at the pieces of the plan a fortnight ago, I was fairly sure it would be beyond me to fix it, but actually, by applying some of that special virtue which I am often short on - patience - I have been able to carry out a good repair and recreate a plan which was very hard to look at before. It is so satisfying!

I love planning out my day, laying out a room full of my work in progress - some tear repair jobs with drying paste, some which are ready for rehousing, others which need further repairs or which need to be pressed. I have finished the Edinburgh Fire Plans conservation project and am amazed by the difference I have made to it. It is all very enjoyable and I really look forward to my visits!

Fiona with her work in progress

From Sandi...

I have had the privilege to be working on some of the Carmichael Watson (CW) papers which Edinburgh University Library has in its Centre for Research Collections. These papers date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and are transcriptions of secular songs collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.

I practised surface cleaning and rust removal on some sheets of test paper before doing the same with the CW papers. This is a long process as there are 548 sheets to be worked on and I’ve been doing this for some months now, having worked on just over a third of the pages. Ruth showed me how to clean the paper first with a chemical sponge and then use a piece of eraser to clean even more. Some of the pages are really dirty and it’s very satisfying cleaning off the surface dirt. However, this has to be done with care as some of the pages are torn. Rust which has accumulated as a result of pages being stapled together has to be removed very carefully with the tip of a scalpel. This is where I put on magnifying glasses - essential to see the paper close up so as not to scrape the actual paper away instead of just the rust.

Today I’ve learnt how to do tear repairs and infills using Japanese paper and wheat starch paste on what is termed our sacrificial pages (waste paper with tears and losses lovingly made by Ruth!). Much practise is needed before I can be let loose on pages of any worth. Again, this is a fairly tricky business but satisfying knowing that I will have helped in bettering the condition of these papers for future researchers.

Sandi learning how to repair tears on some scrap paper

Royal Edinburgh Hospital Case Book Database Project

This week saw the beginning of our new project which aims to create a database of all patients admitted to the Royal Edinburgh Hospital during the period that case books were kept from 1840 to 1932. The case books hold detailed information on a patient’s social and medical background, and chart their progress during their time in the Hospital. They are a rich source of social and medical history and are heavily used in genealogical, medical and academic research. In total there are 120 volumes, each with the records of up to approximately 200 patients contained inside.

The database will record the name, sex, admission and discharge or death date for each patient, along with other information if available including age, diagnosis, previous and/or subsequent admissions, and occupation. It will be an invaluable finding aid, capable of speeding up searches for individual patients, and providing a short cut to identifying numbers of patients diagnosed with particular diseases, or by age, sex and occupation. It will complement an existing database of post-1932 patients created from patient case notes (at this time the format changed from the case books to an individual case note file for each patient). The database is being populated by volunteers and forms a new strand of our vibrant volunteer programme. Claire, Arturo and Sandy have so far created entries for 89 patients and we look forward to the next 23,900 or so!

REH Case Book entry from the 1880s



No Laughing Matter

A recently completed task has been the re-housing of LHSA’s collection of glass plate negatives which relate to the teaching of Obstetrics at Edinburgh University from the 1950s to 1970s. These were designed to be used with a lantern box to project the images onto a wall or screen.

An interesting slide found in this collection shows a poster from 1845, advertising ‘A Grand Exhibition of the effects produced by inhaling nitrous oxide, exhilerating [sic], or laughing gas!’ (LHSA ref: P15346). Tickets are priced at ‘12½ cents’ suggesting that it originates from North America. In case people thinking of going were worried of potential risks to their safety, the poster reassures them, ‘The gas will be administered only to gentlemen of the first respectability. The object is to make the entertainment in every respect, a genteel affair.’

Laughing Gas exhibition poster, 1845

After over 40 years of being used only as a sideshow amusement, nitrous oxide was finally considered for use as an anaesthetic for minor operations from 1847 onwards. This was a great development, because during the early 19^th century surgery was greatly restricted by the patients’ capacity to suffer pain. Operations were also carried out using the stronger anaesthetic, ether, from 1846. In Edinburgh, Professor of Midwifery, James Young Simpson sought an alternative to ether as it was found to be unpleasant and an irritant for patients to inhale. By means of dangerous experiments, inhaling various chemicals with his assistants, Simpson found that chloroform was stronger and more pleasant to inhale so he began using this for his operations from November 1847. Today, a wide variety of both general and local anaesthetic drugs and muscle relaxants are used to ensure patients can be operated on safely. Careful monitoring of patients’ responses means that the doses of them can be controlled and the risks minimised.

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Shared experiences: getting together with custodians of health archives and records

Today we’ve been delighted to welcome members of the Health Archives and Records Group (HARG) to LHSA. HARG was established in the late 1980s and acts as a representative body for archivists and records managers working in the health sector in the UK and Ireland. For more information see their website.

Members from across Scotland and England converged on Edinburgh University Main Library’s meeting room suite for an afternoon of productive discussion, which ranged from ways to reinvigorate HARG through the website/social media and the issues associated with digitisation, to possibilities for project funding and creating catalogues with built-in links to related material. We also found out about the online catalogue for the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh (http://archives.rcpe.ac.uk/calmView/) – a great new resource for research in the history of medicine.

Once the official business of the meeting was over, we offered those attending a tour. Starting off in the Centre for Research Collections reception area (to show off the fabulous reading room facilities), we moved on to the Viewing Room (where the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh Royal Charter, dating from 1736, was on display) and the Conservation Studio to see some architectural plans of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital undergoing treatment.

It was a fantastic opportunity to talk through shared issues relating to the long-term preservation of, and access to, health records and to strengthen professional contacts with those working in our sector: an afternoon well spent!

Visit to Craig House

Yesterday the staff of LHSA was privileged to visit Craig House, the neo-gothic mansion built to house private patients of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, and opened in 1894. It was sold to Napier University in the 1990s and functions as one of their campuses although it has recently been sold to developers. Having worked closely with the plans, photographs, patient and administrative records of the Hospital, it was with great excitement that we headed to the site to be shown around by a member of the Napier University Press Office.

The Grand Hall, c.1900

Despite its change of use in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the building is remarkably similar to how it looked in the photos taken over 100 years ago: it has lost none of its atmosphere or grandeur (especially on a dreich Edinburgh afternoon!). The Grand Hall is immediately recognisable and remains an impressive room with high ceilings, chandeliers, two large fireplaces and polished floor, although the original furniture is long gone! We were led on a fascinating tour back through time into many of the wings, along corridors, up winding staircases into the staff quarters, and past beautifully-tiled walls, stained-glass doorways and intricately-carved door frames. Even some of the original radiators are still in existence! We continued our tour into the grounds to see the other buildings: Queen’s Craig, South Craig and Bevan from where we admired the views back towards the City. It wasn’t hard to imagine the Hospital as a peaceful retreat designed by the third physician superintendent of the Hospital, Thomas Clouston, to resemble a Victorian country house.

 Photographs were taken of Craig House, and the exterior of the other buildings, to capture them as they are today before redevelopment. These will be added to the Archive so that this phase of their story is not lost before the next phase begins. We’ll be adding some of the photos to our Flickr page in due course but for a preview, check our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/lhsa.edinburgh.

The Grand Hall, 2012

TB drawings

We reported last month on a drawing found amongst the Alexander Miles case notes and this week we feature some more drawings from this case note collection. They are highly detailed drawings from 1919 showing the progress in treatment of a patient’s right elbow which contained tuberculosis (TB) in the joint. It is not known whether the drawings were used in teaching, but their discovery alongside the case notes would indicate that they were used solely for the purpose of treatment.

TB is a highly contagious disease, usually affecting the lungs but which can attack other parts of the body. It is spread through the air by coughing, sneezing or spitting. It was very common in Edinburgh throughout the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries, with the poor condition of tenements and overcrowding leading to its spread throughout the population. The health of those affected declined slowly over a period of months and years, if untreated, meaning that they were able to move around the community spreading the infection.

Drawing of TB in joint found in Miles case notes

Dr Robert Philip’s famous ‘Edinburgh Scheme’ resulted in a decline in deaths from TB from 1899 onwards by identifying those with the disease and preventing its spread. Before the discovery of antibiotics, sanatoriums, such as the Royal Victoria Hospital, were built where early onset TB patients could recuperate with plenty of sunshine and fresh air whilst being kept separate from the rest of the population. Colonies such as Southfield and Polton opened to provide recovering patients with work in an environment conducive to their health. A concentrated effort was deemed essential to eradicate the disease and in 1958, a mass x-ray screening of the population for the disease took place. As a result of improvements in treatment from the 1950s there has been a steep decline in TB cases although there are still around 400 cases in Scotland every year.

Drawing showing progress of treatment of TB in joint

Old badges; new website

Last week’s blog touched on the long-term transfer of some of our historic nursing and hospital badges to the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh as part of a new installation celebrating the role of unsung heroes in healthcare. This saw a two-year project come to fruition so we thought it was worthy of another blog post and some more pictures!

The installation is outside Outpatient Department 3 in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh and has three cases set into the wall displaying historic badges alongside contemporary artworks that were inspired by them and the oral history testimony collected from current and retired nurses. A panel produced by noted enamel artist Elizabeth Turrell and some smaller pieces with quotes from nurses are also on display.

 One of the three cases 

Elizabeth Turrell's panel

The installation was launched on 30 March with representatives from the project partners, nurses who had contributed their oral histories (some of whom were wearing their own badges!) and Royal Infirmary staff. It was a great opportunity to celebrate the achievements of the project with them.

The launch of 'Unsung Heroes'

For more information please see the LHSA website, which has just been re-vamped to reflect our social media work better. We now have a brand new home page with a display of images to showcase various aspects of our work and collections, and a new social media page with direct access to our twitterfall and most recent blog posts. We hope that you’ll take a look!