Here’s a reminder that I will be giving a talk about our Unexplored Riches in Medical History project next Monday, 8 December.

I’ll be discussing how far we’ve come in this project and I’ll also be looking at some of the fascinating medical history trends that we’ve discovered as we’ve gone along. For example: how was The Children’s Society affected by the flu pandemic of 1918? And just what was so unusual about chicken pox?

Please come along to find out more! The talk will be held at Senate House in London on Monday 8 December, starting at 5:30pm. Attendance is free.

Click here for more details.

I look forward to seeing you there!

Want to hear what we’ve discovered in our Unexplored Riches in Medical History project? Now you can!

I’m happy to announce that I will be giving one of the Voluntary Action History Society’s seminars on 8 December where I will be discussing the results of the Unexplored Riches in Medical History project. Want to come along? The seminar will be held at Senate House in London on 8 December, starting at 5:30pm. Attendance is free.

Click here for more details.

We’re drawing ever closer to the end of the Unexplored Riches in Medical History project, and I’ll be using this seminar to discuss just how far we’ve come in the two and a half years since the project began. In particular I’ll be highlighting the historical trends in children’s health and healthcare that we’ve discovered during the project. And, for those of you wanting to take on a challenge, I’m going to talk about the parts of our archive collection that could really benefit from further medical history research. (As with any project like this, we’ve uncovered more questions than we have answers.)

Please come along to hear what we’ve found. It would be great to see you there.

Visit the Voluntary Action History Society website for further information.

“Healing the Wounds of Childhood” That was the name of the conference we attended two weeks ago. It was the annual Child Care History Network conference and this year the focus was on children’s medical history.

You can listen to the talks from the conference, including my own, on the Child Care History Network website.

The conference was held at the Buckerell Lodge Hotel in Exeter, and as we were still in the last throes of summer (despite the fact that it was October!) the day was warm and sunny. What better time to go to Devon?

There was a whole day full of speakers talking about medical history. First up, though, was myself!

I gave the delegates an overview of what we’re doing in the Unexplored Riches in Medical History project, explaining how we’re cataloguing and conserving our records relating to medical history so that they can be used for medical history research. It was also a great excuse to show off some of the fascinating records we have here at The Children’s Society Archive, including a medical book listing the day-to-day medical care given to children at St Cuthbert’s Nursery in Darlington, County Durham, in 1966; and the case file of Annie, a girl who came into care in 1907 aged thirteen, and the struggle of medical professionals to diagnose the condition that left her seriously ill in 1909.

Want to know more? The good news is that you can now listen to my talk and see my slides on the Child Care History Network website. Hopefully video recordings from the conference and slides from some of the other talks will go up in the next few weeks, so keep an eye out for them!

The other talks on the day were really interesting. We heard about the Charity Organisation Society and its 19th Century involvement in healthcare in Oxford. There was a lot of discussion about 20th Century views on children’s healthcare and development, including the child guidance movement, and the work of people such as Truby King and John Bowlby. We heard about historical views on adoption and its effects on children. Finally, we learned about modern practice and how art therapy can be used to help treat mental health problems.

It was all fascinating stuff, as were the conversations held during the tea and lunch breaks about people’s research interests and backgrounds in child care or medical practice. On top of all that, as with the previous conference we went to, we had a stand with leaflets about the Unexplored Riches in Medical History project, where we could talk to the delegates about the project in more detail.

All in all, it was a great day. But you don’t have to take my word for it! Visit the Child Care History Network website to listen to the talks for yourself. And as I said, more slides and hopefully video recordings will go up over the coming weeks so make sure to keep checking the webpage for more.

Here’s a quick reminder that I’m going to be speaking at the Child Care History Network conference next month. It will be held at the Buckerell Lodge Hotel in Exeter on 3 October 2014.

Visit the conference website to book your place:
Healing the Wounds of Childhood – the Medical and Psychological Care of Children: Historical and Current Perspectives

Please consider coming along if you’d like to hear more about our Unexplored Riches in Medical History project. It would be great to meet some of you there.

The keynote address of the conference will be given by Professor John Stewart from Glasgow Caledonian University. Other speakers include Jeremy Holmes, Sarah Hayes and Annie Skinner, and I’ve just heard that another exciting speaker may be added soon.

Click here to see the conference programme and book your place.

Today I am excited to announce that I will be giving a talk about our Unexplored Riches in Medical History project at this year’s Child Care History Network conference. The theme of the 2014 conference will be Healing the Wounds of Childhood – the Medical and Psychological Care of Children: Historical and Current Perspectives, and it will be held at the Buckerell Lodge Hotel in Exeter on 3 October 2014.

Click here for the conference website, where you can find the conference programme and details of how to book your place.

For my talk I’ll be discussing the Unexplored Riches in Medical History project in more detail. As we’re coming closer to the end of the project, it’ll be a great chance to look at what we’ve achieved so far and what medical information has been unearthed in the archive of The Children’s Society. I’m looking forward to sharing some of the great resources and stories we have here in our archive.

Alongside myself, there will be speakers covering various aspects of the history of children’s health and healthcare. This includes keynote speaker John Stewart, Emeritus Professor of Health History at Glasgow Caledonian University, who will be talking about the history of child guidance.

For more information and to book a place, please click here.

Things are rather busy here at The Children’s Society Archive, as we’ve just returned from attending the Society for the Social History of Medicine’s 2014 conference. The theme for this year’s conference was Disease, Health and the State. It was held at St Anne’s College in Oxford over three days, and it hosted a multitude of speakers and attendees from across the world, all of whom had an interest in medical history.

Myself and the head of The Children’s Society Archive, Ian Wakeling, attended to run a stand in the conference marketplace. On our stand we had lots of information about the Unexplored Riches in Medical History project, including some facsimile case files and some posts from this blog that I’d printed out. See the stand and a few of our leaflets below.

It was my first time running a stand at a conference and I have to say that I really enjoyed it. Our aim was to promote The Children’s Society Archive and its wealth of medical information to the conference attendees. This was a big success. We spoke to a lot of people, most of whom hadn’t heard of The Children’s Society before and certainly wouldn’t have realised how useful our archive is for medical history research. They all seemed to be pleasantly surprised!

Not only were we able to give out our details to lots of people who were interested in the archive for research (for themselves or for their students, colleagues and friends), but we were also able to discuss people’s research interests, which were fascinating. It was really interesting to hear about all the research into medical history that’s going on, and to discuss how The Children’s Society archive collection can help.

I hadn’t quite realised, until I started discussing it, what a broad range of medical topics our archive covers. To help me write this blog post, while at the conference I was jotting down the subjects of all the conversations I had with attendees. It turns out that my list is so long that there’s no way I can put it all down here; instead, here’s just a highlight of some of the interesting topics we were talking about:

• Nursing
• Convalescent homes
• Mental health
• Hygiene
• Foster care
• Institutional healthcare
• Rickets
• Phototherapy
• Diabetes
• Deafness
• Drug use
• Funding for medical treatments

Not to mention, there were many times where we discussed how The Children’s Society started and how it got to where it is now, including the whole range of records it created during that time, from children’s case files to records from the individual children’s homes.

I could go on for a lot longer, but I’ll leave it here to say that Ian and I are both really glad that we went along. It was great to talk to medical historians about their research and introduce them to an archive that they may never have considered using before. Thanks to the conference organisers for a great event!

More information about the conference can be found on the 2014 conference website.

The website of the Society for the Social History of Medicine can be found here: www.sshm.org