As the old year passes and the new one comes in, we’ve a
host of behind-the-scenes tasks to complete here at LHSA. It’s a bit of a
frantic welcoming-in to each January, but it’s vital if we’re to be in good
shape for the year ahead.
One of these tasks is to check up on the new items that we
have taken in over the last twelve months. We call these new additions to the
archive ‘accessions’ and we can take them in in two ways, which reflects how
our material is organised. Since we’re the archive for NHS Lothian and all our
holdings are owned by them, the first way we take things in is by direct
transfer from the health service. This could be from individual hospitals or
from NHS administration. For example, in April 2015 we received a wonderful accession
from the Royal Hospital for Sick Children (REHSC), including late nineteenth-century
nurse training records (and this less-than-glowing report!):
Entry in REHSC Probabtioners' Report Book, 1900 - 1902 (from Acc15/007)
Since LHSA collects more general material that can help us
understand the history of health in Edinburgh and the Lothians, we also receive
gifts from non-NHS organisations and private individuals. We take in gifts of nursing
and midwifery badges from Edinburgh-trained nurses quite often, as we did this year:
Every new collection that reaches us has its own story:
sometimes, a hospital building is closing and staff contact us with important
records that reflect that institution’s history – as has happened
with the imminent transfer of REHSC services
from their current site in Sciennes Road to Little France. This year, we hope
to work more closely with our NHS colleagues in order to identify material
that, once transferred to us, can make the archive bigger and better for the future.
In other cases, we can be contacted by individuals or organisations
from our area who may have papers relevant to the understanding of the history
of medicine. For example, last year we added to our papers from neurologist
Ernst Levin with some more personal material about the medic’s life. Levin was
born in 1887 in Berlin, but left Germany in 1933 (he then practised in Munich)
after the rise of the National Socialists. Levin then worked with Edinburgh
neurosurgeon Norman Dott and in the Western General Hospital. Our new accession
covers most phases of his life, amongst the most fascinating of which are his
own photographs from German First World War trenches where he served as an assistant
surgeon:
I’ll be saying more about these images in the Centre for
Research Collections blog, Untold Stories, later this year.
However, it’s important that archives are not just passive
recipients of donations, but also seek out new additions to collections lest
unique histories are lost. Dr Mike Barfoot, one of LHSA’s previous archivists,
saw this very clearly, especially in the chance to collect material about
Edinburgh’s fight against HIV. The combined efforts of the NHS, council bodies,
charities, police and voluntary groups in our region to combat the spread of
the virus and care for those affected had no precedent before or since (a fact
which has been brought home to me by speaking to those involved in early
patient care and HIV prevention). In collecting materials from individuals and
organisations before they were lost, Mike saw a chance to build an unrivalled
set of resources for future researchers.
The determination to collect did not end when Mike retired,
but was carried on by his successor, Laura Gould (who worked towards eleven of
our HIV/AIDS collections being recognised by UNESCO in 2011) – and I hope that
I can carry on this tradition of active collecting in my time here.
This year has been no exception, and some of my favourite
collections record the history of Edinburgh’s services to combat HIV. Firstly,
we’ve been creating archives ourselves in the form of oral histories – part of
a programme of recordings which I hope to add to as 2016 goes on. This effort
was admirably started by Iain Phillips who was with us through a
secondment from John Lewis’ Golden Jubilee Trust programme – but since Iain’s
secondment was completed, I’ve been having a go myself! I started by speaking
to Lothian Regional Council HIV Team education workers, John Young and Kerstin
Phillips who started a pioneering educational programme in secondary schools by
training young workers to pass on their first-hand experiences of relationships
and HIV. Kerstin was kind enough to donate some material used during her work
in the 1990s, including books aimed towards children living in families
affected by the virus:
Children's book explaining a parent's visits to the clinic, 1998 (from Acc15/028)
This year, we’ve also received ten panels made for the Edinburgh
Names Project at HIV and Hepatitis C charity, Waverley Care – these are textile
collages meant to be put together as part of a large quilt to act as a memorial
to those lost through AIDS-related illnesses.
As we move into 2016, I’m already preparing to receive our
first accession of the year. We never know what we are going to be contacted
about next, but I’m sure that there will be more than a few surprises to bring
to you. If you want to see what new material we've taken in over the last few years, you can find us on The National Archives' lists of accessions to repositories (where LHSA accessions from 2015 will soon be up to view).
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