On the twelfth day of Christmas...

...my true love sent to me…twelve months of enquiries.

“The LHSA inbox never sleeps!” With so many ways in which to get in contact, LHSA receives enquiries from all corners of the globe at all times of day and night. By far the majority are received by email, or through our website, but we still receive letters and phone calls, and even one fax this year! We’re also seeing increasing numbers arriving via our social media forums (see the Fourth Day of Christmas), and our enquiries figures are up by 27% on 2011.

One in seven of our enquirers make the trip to the Centre for Research Collections reading room to look at the original records. We receive requests for information from the NHS, the media, academics and students, other archives and libraries, and private individuals looking into local and family history and the history of medicine (from very specific biographical and institutional facts, to clinical research covering vast numbers of records over a long time span). We also provide reproductions from our 40,000-strong image collection and advice to other conservators and archivists, and contribute to archival awareness campaigns. The Royal Edinburgh Hospital has been the most heavily used collection for the past few years – will it be again in 2013? Watch this space!

Our enquiries service is available to all, and we’ll be back to answer more queries in the New Year, but in the meantime our inbox is waiting! We wish all enquirers (and everyone else!) a joyful festive season, and a happy 2013.

Looking festive: the LHSA in-tray with just a few of the enquiries from 2012

On the eleventh day of Christmas...

...my true love sent to me…eleven volunteers.

Over the last 12 months our volunteer programme has gone from strength to strength, and eleven people have benefited from the training and experience they have gained whilst working with LHSA staff and collections.

We’ve offered a range of volunteer placements from one-day taster sessions for those who are interested in the archive sector but have yet to decide whether it is the career from them, through to those who have volunteered with us for the whole year and are building up a body of experience to then go on to train professionally. Our volunteers come to us with different levels of experience and we cater the work to make sure we offer them the best placement possible, and to ensure we get the best use out of their freely-given time!

Our volunteers have been students, members of the public and Edinburgh University or NHS Lothian staff. They have come to us as they see the opportunity to volunteer with LHSA as a means of getting a place on a postgraduate archive studies programme, making a career change or establishing their career path in the archive sector. This year we’ve been very pleased to work with Real Jobs and NHS Lothian to offer placements for users of the mental health service wishing to get back into work.

We are able to offer volunteers placements to develop archive or conservation skills depending on the individual's particular interests. In the case of the latter our volunteers this year have treated a significant number of architectural plans that would otherwise be too fragile to use, and helped re-house new accessions before they are transferred to the store.

Trimming a repair to an architectural plan

One of our conservation volunteers, Fiona, behind some recently re-housed accessions

We will continue our volunteer programme throughout 2013, with the addition of two internships with a small stipend attached. We will be offering one archive internship and one conservation internship, full-time for 10 weeks. We’re excited about the new possibilities this will open up to the individuals who secure the internships as well as the work they will undertake to preserve the collections and enhance accessibility.

Our volunteers often post to the LHSA blog, so regular progress reports will be available throughout 2013!

On the tenth day of Christmas...

...my true gave to me...the piper at Craig House.

I know there is only one piper, and not ten, in this image but it fits in with the song! The caption for this picture from 1951 reads, "Well Known Character at Craig House”. It is not clear what he was piping in celebration of but it was on a lovely sunny spring day.

In April, LHSA staff were privileged to be given a tour of the Craig House campus by a member of Napier University Press Office staff, and took a selection of current photographs of the estate before new developments take place. Craig House was opened in 1894 for paying private patients, as part of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital and in the style of a large country house. This was a very interesting visit, as some of the most popular records in our collection are from this Hospital and it was exciting to see where many of these records were produced, and also to see that so many of the interiors and fittings in the buildings have changed little from their original use.

The piper at Craig House, 1951

On the ninth day of Christmas...

...my true love gave to me...nine types of diagnosis entered into a Royal Edinburgh Hospital database.

A very useful piece of work started this year: the creation of a database of patients and basic information relating to them found in the nineteenth-century casebooks of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital (REH). This is an invaluable resource for LHSA as it can be used to quickly find if a patient was in the Hospital, making the casebooks easily accessible and reducing handling of this unique material. There are now 1977 entries in the database! During the nineteenth century psychiatry was not a very precise science and this is highlighted by no fewer than nine types of diagnosis recorded in the REH database already: Mania, Mania (Chronic), Mania (of masturbation), Mania (Phthisical, i.e. related to Tuberculosis), Acute Mania, Epileptic Mania, General Paralysis, Melancholia and Melancholia (traumatic).

The REH database is part of a wide range of cataloguing work that has been carried out throughout 2012 to help open up the collections for research. We have catalogued new accessions, personal papers, photographs and material relating to NHS Lothian Board, but there has also been a focus of activity on the REH in light of its bicentenary next year...we've completed the listing of all REH casebook enclosures too. These enclosures consist of patient letters, charts and other information regarding patients put inside the casebooks by medical staff. The patient letters, in particular, provide a rare window into their thoughts and feelings. Since the enclosures are often loose they have been stored separately for safe-keeping, and now that they are listed as well we can be confident that all the information is preserved for future generations.

A few of LHSA's Royal Edinburgh Hospital casebooks

On the eighth day of Christmas...

...my true love sent to me…eight(y) metres of accessions.

Not the traditional gift from a loved one at Christmas, but for an archivist, a welcome one! Throughout 2012 LHSA has continued to take in new material for the collections with over 50 accessions amounting to c.80 linear metres added to the Archive. As ever, the new items have ranged from the small (one postcard of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh) to the large (77 metres of Bangour Village Hospital case notes).

Before an accession is accepted, it must be vetted to ensure that it fits with our collecting policy: “Lothian Health Services Archive primarily collects records of long-term legal, administrative, epidemiological and historical value produced by the NHS within the Lothian area, including those of predecessor bodies. In addition, non-NHS institutional records and personal papers related to the local history of health care and the history of Scottish medicine are also collected”. Once the accession has arrived, it is assigned a unique accession number and then goes to the Conservation Studio to be checked for bugs or mould, and re-housed in archival standard boxes, before being transferred to the stores. It is then added to our Priority Cataloguing List, to our online list of accessions (available at: http://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/collections/Accessions.htm) and catalogued in due course.

This image is a detail from one of our accessions this year, a page from an "Autographs and Sketches" scrapbook, which is part of Ethel Miller’s nursing papers. The scrapbook contains drawings and poems by military personnel treated at Craigleith Military Hospital, c.1919.

On the seventh day of Christmas...

...my true love sent to me…seven seminars.

As part of our outreach and education programme, LHSA provides seminars to groups who are interested in learning more about our collections, and the research possibilities associated with them. In 2012 we’ve continued to provide a seminar series in association with Dr Gayle Davis of the University of Edinburgh’s Economic and Social History Department, entitled ‘History in Practice’, over three sessions. Students are able to get up close to the collection items and discuss issues such as archival appraisal and the reliability of historical sources to challenge ideas of how history is written. 

Students on the MSc Medicine and Society in Modern Britain

Masters students on two other University of Edinburgh programmes in ‘Working with Collections’ and ‘Medicine and Society in Modern Britain’ were also provided with practical sessions on how to preserve collection items, and how to conduct research in the Archive. Masters students from a nursing course in Germany were also welcomed to LHSA in the autumn to learn about the rich history of medicine collections available in Edinburgh, whilst members of staff from Artlink were treated to a display of material from the Royal Edinburgh Hospital to help focus their research for exhibitions in 2013. In all, about 80 participants have been involved in 2012 and we have bookings in place for 2013 already!

On the sixth day of Christmas...

... my true love sent to me... a Christmas card from six years of pioneering neurosurgery.

From 1939 to the end of the Second World War in 1945, Edinburgh neurosurgeon Professor Norman Dott spent six years performing life-saving surgery on military personnel and civilians in Bangour General Hospital near Broxburn, West Lothian. Bangour General was built in 1939 as an Emergency Medical Service hospital (one of seven in Scotland) in response to the outbreak of the war; it was an annexe to the existing Bangour Village Hospital, a psychiatric hospital opened in 1906.

Dott was given space for a Brain Injuries Unit in Bangour staffed with two neurosurgical teams – one headed by Dott himself, and the other led by G.L Alexander. In this period, Norman Dott was a member of the wartime Brain Injuries Committee, Consultant in Neurosurgery to the Army in Scotland and Consultant Neurosurgeon to the Emergency Medical Service. He was awarded a C.B.E for this outstanding wartime service in 1948.

The records of the unit’s work will be catalogued as part of a current LHSA Wellcome Trust project, and they are some of the most interesting case notes in the Dott collections. Dott’s teams treated serving soldiers, sailors and airmen, women from the auxiliary services and civilians. At the start of the war, military patients suffered from injuries sustained in their camps in Scotland (as a result of road accidents in the blackout or mishaps and illnesses during training, for example) – although as the war went on casualties from battlefields in Europe and North Africa were treated in increasing numbers, as well as a considerable number of men from the Polish army and German prisoners of war.



Dott undertook ground-breaking procedures during the war years, including an operation to treat aneurysms in the delicate anterior communicating artery of the brain by clamping the more accessible larger vessel that feeds it, avoiding the need for direct and risk-heavy surgery. However, what make these case notes particularly fascinating are the stories of wartime lives that emerge from them, such as the tale of an army officer who was a prisoner of war in northern France, but “managed to get hold of civilian clothes and ducked over a wall between guards…” The officer eventually made it back to Great Britain to re-join his unit – via Cannes, Switzerland, Spain and Portugal!

You can find out more about the progress that our Project Archivist Louise is making on the cataloguing of Norman Dott's case notes here.