200 years young

Next week sees the start of an eight-part lecture series to commemorate the bicentenary of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital. NHS Lothian commissioned the series, and we’ve helped organise it, with the support of the Wellcome Trust and the Scottish Government.

The lectures will run from October (the first one is next Wednesday) to June 2013 and will cover a wide range of topics to illustrate various aspects of the Hospital’s history, from patient art to the treatment of soldiers after battle, with discussion of gender, sport and the Empire in-between! It promises to be a really interesting series, and tickets are free to try and encourage as wide an audience as possible – we hope you’ll sign up to one or two, or all eight! The lectures have already proved popular, with just a few seats left for the keynote lecture next week to be held in Edinburgh Council Chambers.

We’ve also been involved in the promotion of the lecture series. You may have already seen the recent addition to our homepage detailing the series (the image from the homepage, showing the Hospital in the 1950s, is reproduced below), and we’ve highlighted the series on Twitter and our Facebook page. We’ve also responded to some press interest and we’re looking forward to seeing an article about the Royal Edinburgh’s bicentenary, and the lecture series, that is expected to feature in the Scotsman on Wednesday next week.

Image (c) The Scotsman Publications Ltd

We’ll also be launching an archive appeal to run alongside the lecture series. We hope that staff, patients and members of the public will search through cupboards and attics to see if they have any items that record the history of this important hospital. These new accessions will complement NHS Lothian’s rich collection of Royal Edinburgh Hospital material that is already held by LHSA. More to follow on the appeal in later blogs!

For more information please see the following links:

For detailed information about the lectures and how to book your free place:
http://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/home/REH%20Bicentenary%20leaflet%20web%20final.pdf

For a potted history of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital:
http://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/exhibits/hosp_hist/reh.htm

For information on the Charter that gave the Hospital the ‘Royal’ in its title: http://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/exhibits/reh_charter/index.htm

For a list of the material already held by LHSA that relates to the Royal Edinburgh Hospital:
http://www.lhsa.lib.ed.ac.uk/collections/LHB7/lhb7_index.htm

Cataloguing the Neurosurgical Case Notes of Norman Dott

A photograph from Dott's work at Bangour General (Emergency Medical Service) Hospital. Personal details have been removed. 

Archive accreditation

This week Ruth and Laura attended a training event in London to prepare for the pilot stage of archive accreditation. LHSA has been chosen, along with 19 other archive services in the UK, to take part in the pilot of the new Archive Service Accreditation Standard, being developed by The National Archives (TNA) in partnership with archives sector stakeholders. It aims to define good practice and will become the UK standard for archive services.

The day gave the pilot participants the chance to work through the draft application form, and to provide comments on its content and structure. The three broad areas against which archives will be measured are: organisational health; collections; stakeholders and their experiences. TNA have asked for submission of applications by December 2012, with assessment due to take place in January 2013. Whilst it is exciting to be involved at this early stage, it is also a little daunting; a feeling that was shared by most participants at the training day! The process of compiling our policies, plans and procedures to show that we meet the requirements begins…watch this space for developments!

For more information on archive accreditation, please visit the TNA website: accreditation webpage

Nursing effects

As part of a recent accession of books, lecture notes and exam papers from a Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh nursing student, LHSA has also received some interesting nurse’s equipment. These are a laundry bag (our reference O553), collar (O552), and a name badge and blue ribbon (O554).

The laundry bag

The bag would have been used to take work-stained clothing to the Infirmary laundry, and it has both the nurse’s name stitched onto it and a special laundry code, ‘H26’. It measures 630x770x20mm and dates from the early 1970s. The collar is made of a denim type material and was worn by first year students. According to the donor, the blue velvet ribbon was to be worn with the blue nurse’s uniform after their final exams were completed. It was therefore to be worn with a strong sense of pride.

The badge and ribbon

These effects give a small insight into the lives of nursing staff in Edinburgh and complement other hospital uniforms, badges and equipment which LHSA already has in its collections.

One week; three pieces of good news!

Good news #1

Our recipe for invalid fruit tart featured on the Great British Bake Off this Tuesday. We had originally submitted it to the Scottish Council on Archives awareness campaign, the Edible Archive, last year and it caught the eye of the producers of the show. There was obviously quite a bit of interest in the tart following its debut TV appearance as it trended on Twitter that evening.

For those of you that might be tempted to try the recipe below, I can confirm that it is really very tasty having sampled it at an Edible Archive event! For more information please see the special addition to our home page this week, and there's still time to catch the programme on iplayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01mg53s/The_Great_British_Bake_Off_Series_3_Episode_3/.

Invalid fruit tart recipe (1 gill is 142ml)

Good news #2

In January we took part in a workshop to explore the potential for an archive accreditation scheme. There have been significant developments made in this area since and we’re very pleased that we are one of the Scottish archive services chosen to participate in the pilot. For more information please see http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/archives-sector/accreditation.htm


Good news #3

We're delighted to welcome Louise Williams to our team; she will start work on our Wellcome Trust funded project to catalogue our extensive collection of Norman Dott case notes next Monday (for more information please see our project page).

Volunteer perspective

This week’s blog comes from Sara Cranston, the Edinburgh University Records Management trainee, who spent last week on a volunteer placement with us at LHSA.

“I have been visiting LHSA this week to get an insight into the world of archiving. My main tasks have been working on the on-going volunteer project to index the case books of the Royal Edinburgh Hospital, and cataloguing some NHS staff newsletters.

My task with the Royal Edinburgh Hospital casebooks has been to input details of each patient to create an index for each admission. When this is finished it will be much easier to locate records of individuals in the Case Books, which should be of great help to family historians and researchers.  Although I believe there are still around 20,000 patient records to input.

I have found these Case Books really fascinating. The volume I have been working on dates from 1878 – 1879 and contains remarkably detailed information about each patient. It definitely makes me want to find out more about nineteenth century perceptions and approaches to mental illness. Some of the pressures felt by the patients admitted to the Hospital are ones still present in society today. For example the causes of some patients’ illnesses are attributed to stress over lack of work, grief over the death of a loved one, and even the result of banking crises.  One patient is a metal merchant who stops speaking due to ‘mental anxiety’ after losing all his money due to the collapse of Glasgow City Bank. Others are admitted after drinking bouts, or more physically manifest symptoms such as epileptic fits.

Sara with a Royal Edinburgh Hospital case book

As well as this, I have been organising copies of the Messenger internal staff newsletter of the Lothian University Hospital NHS Trust into acid free folders, and cataloguing them. These are much more modern documents dating from between 1999 and 2003. My instinct would be to think that an internal staff newsletter probably wouldn’t be that interesting, but from reading the headlines as I catalogued I notice they contain lots of information and opinions about the changes taking place in the NHS and document the move of the Royal Infirmary out to Little France. 

I’ve also been getting an insight into the wider work that LHSA does, from dealing with enquiries, to outreach (including blogging like this), to receiving records from the NHS, and I am looking forward to learning more about conservation tomorrow afternoon. “

Clinique Photos: a new accession

An excellent run of photographs in LHSA’s collection is that of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh Residents, of which there is almost a complete set from 1880 – 1973, with a number of older and more recent photographs (the oldest dates from 1865). These are an excellent source of images of famous medical staff during their training in Edinburgh. The collection as a whole is fascinating to look at, not only for finding famous individuals or ancestors; but for charting changing styles of dress and appearance, spotting the appearance of women from the 1940s onwards (although the first female resident was appointed in 1920), men in service uniform during the war years, and the odd residency pet!

Mr WJ Stuart Clinique, Winter 1925

A similar series of photographs, which is not so well represented, is that of the Cliniques. In these classes, a number of Edinburgh practitioners taught smaller groups of medical students in their specialisms. A gift of two photographs recently accessioned by LHSA (Acc 12/032) has helped to fill some of the gaps. The photographs show the Cliniques of Mr WJ Stuart in Winter 1925, and Dr Edwin Matthew in Spring 1926. 

A selection of the residents’ photos can be viewed on the following webpage: RIE Residents