Designing Brains

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Long before each exhibition opens at Wellcome Collection, we begin the process of designing the gallery to display the objects, taking multiple sources of inspiration, including the objects themselves. Museum and exhibition designer Calum Storrie explains how our Brains exhibition came to look the way it does.

Very quickly after reading the brief for the Brains exhibition and meeting the curators I revisited an old idea lifted shamelessly from the work of the Dutch architect Aldo van Eyck. This was the sculpture pavilion designed for the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo in 1966, composed of a series of parallel walls in concrete block. By pushing and pulling the shapes of the wall van Eyck suggested individual rooms and spaces for the sculptures. As one of the key concepts of the Brains exhibition as expressed by the co-curator Marius Kwint was ‘slicing’, I applied the idea, quite literally, to the plan. It was an idea that, as I explored the detail of the exhibition, solved a number of problems. It provided a structure to contain a diverse group of exhibits and it suggested an organized route around the exhibition while also allowing the possibility of disrupting that route. By making doorways and windows in the walls it allowed me to refer to links between the exhibitions themes and links between parts of the brain. As we got closer to a definitive list of objects the size of the exhibition grew and, at the same time, the layout became more complex.

Half way through the process I stopped thinking about brains. At this point the exhibits became shapes that needed to be accommodated on walls and in showcases. It was only when the first objects (films, medical apparatus, books and, eventually, real brains) were delivered that I began to consider the exhibition’s content anew. All exhibitions are, for me, like a laboratory experiment and there is a moment when the initial idea for the design bumps up against the many practical considerations and, if everything is in place, a kind of fusion occurs. Negotiating and facilitating this fusion is my job… acting as an intermediary between ideas, objects, space and people.

The making of an exhibition involves collaboration between curators, exhibition organisers and designers and the conversations we had in the development process were crucial in defining the form of the exhibition. Throughout the process of design I worked closely with the graphic designers Lucienne Roberts+. One of their initial ideas was for the treatment of the title and the texts within the exhibition. These took as their starting point storage, labelling and archiving. This offered another rich layer of complexity to the mix and helped me focus on what the 3 dimensional elements could achieve. One particular way in which this part of the design influenced my work was in making the exhibition structure monochrome… concentrating the use of strong colour on the title at the entrance.

The layout that emerged from the process of design allows for long views down the gallery and it emphasizes the idea of splitting and cutting. Long stretches of wall have been deliberately left ‘empty’ to give the exhibition a comfortable pace and to clarify how the material is read for those that choose to follow the sequence. The finished design incorporates both a clear diagram and an element of choice and maybe even chance.

This is the third exhibition I have worked on at Wellcome Collection and I never fail to be impressed by the energy of the team and their commitment to the design of their exhibitions.

Brains: The mind as matter is open until 17 June. Find out more about Calum Storrie’s work at calumstorrie.com.

The Museum Mile revisited: Part 2

Glass cases (Grant Museum) by IanVisits, on Flickr

In the Museum Mile revisited: Part 1, we left Natalie Coe at the British Museum, having rediscovered the Rosetta Stone. Now, she continues her quest to visit all twelve museums on the Museum Mile in one day….

By now it was 1pm and a good time to head back to the Grant Museum. On entering, you are welcomed by some friendly-looking skeletons looming over the second floor balcony. Inside, it very much feels like a teaching collection with chairs and tables in the centre and an area where UCL students and staff can opt to curate small displays on art and science, in line with the Wellcome Collection ethos. Attempts to engage with the public are also evident and done well, like the QRator project (complete with iPads for visitors to use) and the opportunity to ‘adopt’ your very own animal or specimen. I won’t reveal the chosen object for the Grant Museum, but let’s just say it is so odd that it apparently made Darwin question the existence of God!

Outside again, passing several blue plaques, I made my way to the next stop. This museum was a far cry from the publicly accessible atmospheres of the first five; I had trouble finding the entrance and on entering needed a visitor pass from the security guards. Nonetheless, I was pleasantly surprised that you can visit this very grand building, the Freemason Museum, at any time. The curator (and podcast narrator) here, Mark Dennis, is not a Freemason, which may surprise those who think of this organisation as a secretive sect. He chooses to discuss an 18th century ‘Freemason lodge in a bottle’. At first glance, it looks like an earnest portrayal of a Freemason lodge in action, but the curator speculates that the maker was probably mocking the lodge master by depicting him as very short and with wildly red bushy hair, helpfully highlighting the human side of the Freemasons, which I would not have thought about otherwise. However, I still couldn’t refrain from worrying that people would be suspicious of my note-taking!

Back out on the street, I headed to the London Transport Museum. With all the free museums in London, the £13.50 entrance charge was a bit surprising, but the museum could certainly provide a whole day’s entertainment; I spent my fleeting visit frustrated that I didn’t have longer to clamber on the buses or drive a tube train. The colourful entrance is excellently designed too, and full of examples of underground systems from all over the world that make you question to what extent maps are based on geography and how much their design is cultural or arbitrary. However, as Oliver Green points out on the podcast, London is the only city defined by its transport. Nowhere else has such iconic transport symbols as the underground sign, black cabs, red buses or the user friendly but geographically inaccurate tube map. The cafe and shop are also lovely places to visit if you want a snapshot of what’s in the museum without having to pay! I’ll definitely be back.

Institution number 8 was a far cry from the interactive London Transport museum and very much an art collection – the Courtauld gallery. As Tim Marlow says, you would be forgiven for thinking this is a world famous tourist destination with all its Botticellis, Van Goghs, Renoirs and Gauguins. But the Courtauld is better known as a teaching collection. Indeed, Marlow comically describes his own experience of classes there – he was shown some slides by a lecturer which caught fire and immediately turned into an example of abstract expressionism! The highlighted piece on the podcast is suitably famous, but I was helped to see it in a new light. The celebrity nature of the pieces on display does have the adverse effect of making you feel like a heathen for just running in to look at one painting while ignoring the rest of this important collection! The good news is, it’s free on Monday mornings, so I can come back for a less sacrilegious visit soon.

I was getting to grips with navigating by now and the Hunterian Museum in the Royal College of Surgeons felt easier to find than I had anticipated; it’s such a pleasure getting to know London’s streets. We often suggest the Hunterian for Wellcome Collection visitors expecting a more traditional medical museum with pickled body parts in jars, but I had never actually visited myself. As expected, there were lots of things in jars – at random I spotted the ovaries, kidney and impregnated oviducts of a viper – and the content is accordingly quite old fashioned, but the design and layout of the collection is impressively modern. It also felt great to be in a working institution that serves a purpose way beyond housing a museum and therefore had a ‘behind the scenes’ feeling, just like the Freemason building.

My next famous narrator was Stephen Fry who introduces one of his favourite places, the Sir John Soane’s museum. The home of Sir John Soane is the ultimate time capsule and has a fantastically eccentric collection of curios, including an Ancient Egyptian coffin that John Soane outbid the British Museum for, from an eccentric circus strongman-cum-archaeologist called Giovanni Belzoni. Be warned, this beautiful house is very atmospheric and potentially quite spooky, though this didn’t seem to have daunted the animated house stewards or the students sketching in the many dark shadows of the burial crypt.

Sadly, having only just squeezed through the last entry at the Sir John Soane’s museum at 4.30pm, I found I was too late to reach my final destinations of the Charles Dickens Museum and the Foundling Museum. I was surprisingly upset at being unable to complete the Museum Mile quest. Forlornly listening to the audio segments for the Dickens and Foundling museums, without actually visiting them, just wasn’t the same.

Aside from this absurd consequence of feeling like I’d ‘failed’ in some way, I thought the day had been a success. I would argue ten museums in a day is still an achievement, as well as being a fun way to make a proper adventure out of museum going – I had battled against the February cold, sprained my hand through frantic note taking and lost one pair of earmuffs along the way. On reflection, the Museum Mile podcast, while perhaps not complementary to a social outing, is perfect for a solo day trip. I had enjoyed a lovely walk in the fresh air, been introduced to unfamiliar objects in familiar museums and finally made those trips to the smaller museums, like the Grant Museum, that I had always been meaning to visit. Also, I have subsequently overcome my personal aversion to audio guides and very much look forward to using them more in future, starting with the Wellcome Collection ones in our Medicine Man gallery.

Natalie Coe is a Visitor Services Assistant at Wellcome Collection.

Object of the month: Letting blood

Jan Baptist Lambrechts: A surgeon preparing to let blood by cupping. Wellcome Images

Feeling unwell? Perhaps you’re suffering from a surfeit of blood? William Birnie investigates the curiously long history of a cure that usually left the patient feeling worse.

Molière’s dictum that ‘nearly all men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses’ seems a deadly accurate one for the procedure of bloodletting. Although perplexing for us in 2012 to consider it was ever felt to be advantageous, there are compelling reasons why accomplished men felt bloodletting beneficial to human health.

Bloodletting, a type of ancient therapy based upon a specific concept of disease, began with the ancient Egyptians around 1000 BCE. Spanning antiquity, the custom continued throughout the Middle Ages and ultimately reached its apex at the beginning of the 19th century. Nevertheless, by the end of that century its use as a therapeutic tool had virtually died out.

Previous to the time of Greek physician Hippocrates (460–377 BCE) it was felt that all illness was due to one disease, with varying symptoms. Observations by Hippocrates led to recognition of specific disease states and to the development of the body humours theory. The practice was thought to purge the body and restore balance to these humours, which were linked to the classical Greek elements and comprised of blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile.

The health of the body (the microcosm) was determined by the balance of these humours, just as the state of the world (the macrocosm) was determined by the four elements of earth, air, water and fire. This perhaps somewhat simplistic view of body humours was later formalized into four qualities (warm, cold, moist, and dry) and also the four seasons. For example, black bile was cold and dry, phlegm was associated with winter, and yellow bile was coupled with fire: too much fire made your temperament choleric.

Of all these humours, blood (air, spring, warm and moist) was the principal one that needed the most management. It was believed blood could stagnate in the body’s extremities and as a consequence, bloodletting was used to prevent and treat many illnesses. The seeds of Galen’s ideas can be found in the Hippocratic Corpus, but they had grown into something far more cogent by the time of Galen. His discovery that veins and arteries are full of blood, and not air as was previously supposed, meant a complex system developed regarding the best time to blood let. How much blood was to be removed depended on a number of things: proximity to the affected area, geographical location, weather, and, reassuringly, the patient’s age and constitution. Sessions of bloodletting would often not stop until the patient began to swoon, with fainting seen as the natural conclusion of the treatment.

In discussing the followers of Greek philosopher Chrysippus and physician Erasistratus and their reasons for opposing bloodletting, Galen expressed their dissatisfaction in terms of bloodletting’s harmful side-effects rather than the practice itself. Interestingly, the principle of bloodletting itself was not seen as wrong by these followers; it just had to be administered correctly, with excessive bloodletting deemed murder. Other practical objections included cutting an artery instead of a vein, an inability to stop the bleeding and the occurrence of cases where the patient never woke up. As mentioned earlier, bloodletting was a certain type of therapy, one based on the patient as a being very distinct from the disease.

A number of techniques and devices were used during its practical application. One early technique required a vein to be cut (venesection) with either a knife or a lancet. In our Medicine Man gallery we have a number of these devices including a scarificator (not to be confused with the body modification technique), a bleeding bowl and a cupping set. One of the scarificators in Medicine Man is multi-bladed and contained within a box. A spring mechanism releases the blades, which would rapidly disappear after an incision had been made. Cupping was a later approach that required the use of heated cups, with the heated air inside creating a vacuum and thus encouraging blood to flow. This appliance was often used in association with the concealed scarificator previously mentioned (those in Medicine Man are part of a set).

The leech was also established as a reliable means of venesection, and is particularly revealing in how its uses were phrased. Using the leech to bleed a patient was markedly advantageous for those considered to have ‘delicate constitutions’. Read into that what you will.

The idea of the Greek humours in relation to bloodletting fell out of use as more was discovered and understood about the body. In a clear demarcation of their roles, physicians would recommend the treatment of bloodletting, while barbers would perform it. English physician William Harvey (1578–1657) disproved many of the theories underpinning the practice of bleeding with his publications on the circulatory system, yet he was resolute that bleeding had a salutary effect:  ‘vitiated states and plethora of the blood, are causes of a whole host of diseases; and the timely evacuation of a certain quantity of the fluid frequently delivers patients from, very dangerous diseases, and even from imminent death. In the same measure as blood is detracted, therefore, under certain circumstances, it may be said that life and health are added’.

Although many of his contemporaries ignored the consequences of such findings, and continued to bleed patients, doubts began to creep in to the hypothesis of blood acting as the vital force of the body, seat of the soul, with all weakness and insanity attributed to a defect in this fluid. By the 19th century, doubts were quite vocal, with Scottish physician Dr John Bennett writing in 1855 that he doubted whether bleeding a patient from the arm would do anything except reduce their strength and impede their recovery.

Although falling in and out of favour throughout the ages, with bloodletting virtually dismissed as quackery with the beginning of the 20th century, attachment to the practice persisted by some. For example, Sir William Osler recommended it in his 1923 publication Principles and Practice of Medicine. Now that the practice is no longer used as the therapeutic tool it once was, parallels can still be drawn, and it is intriguing to note that the amount taken during blood donation today (just under 500ml) was the amount usually removed during bloodletting’s heyday.

In writing about the practice, which she described as killing in two fashions, in the court of Louis XIV, Nancy Mitford was explicit when she stated: ‘After being bled the patient always felt much worse, and this was considered an excellent sign. The Comte de Toulouse, having bravely endured the operation for stone, was bled four times in twenty-four hours. Strong and young, he recovered. Twenty-six years later he received the same treatment for the same complaint, and died.’

Need I say more?

William Birnie is a Visitor Services Assistant at Wellcome Collection. You can contact him at w.birnie@wellcome.ac.uk.

A brainy book

Brains: The mind as matter

Accompanying our current Brains exhibition is a new book, featuring more than 100 astonishing images from the exhibition, as well as illuminating essays from art historian Marius Kwint and neuroscientist Richard Wingate. Barry Gibb takes a look inside…

Humans are governed by the thought that if we look long and hard enough at something then its purpose and function will become evident: planetary motion, DNA… The brain, however, seems to happily evade such scrutiny. We see folds, channels, pigmentation and, on much closer inspection, neurons. But the gulf between what we see and what this thing allows us to be still seems utterly intractable.

Brains: The mind as matter, the new book accompanying Wellcome Collection’s latest major exhibition, unashamedly eschews both scientists’ and the media’s contemporary fascination with brain scanning and neurological function. Instead, it gets straight to the meat of the matter, the brain as a physical object.

It’s a pleasant departure. A timely reminder that, while today’s electronic brains at the heart of machines allow scientists to probe the secrets governing the flows and tides of information throughout the brain’s iconic architecture, for centuries it remained a largely impassive, impenetrable mass.

By way of introduction to this vast subject, the book begins with a brief, entertaining history of our culture’s growing understanding of the organ from Marius Kwint – a lecturer in Visual Culture – taking in everyone from Galen to Frankenstein. Richard Wingate, a neuroscientist, then moves much closer to the subject matter, giving a richly deserved nod to the painstaking and insightful work of Ramon y Cajal – a giant in the field of neuroscience who first revealed the cellular architecture of the brain.

But it’s the photographic study from Daniel Alexander that really sets the tone for the remainder of the book, split into four logical sections taking us deeper into the brain and what it means to be human. Brains weaves the brain’s greater history into a collection of sometimes macabre, often striking and frequently hypnotic images taken from art, science and that fertile cauldron in between.

This is a book for anyone with an interest in this mythic organ extending beyond the now, and for those interested in taking a step back from how the brain does what it does and, quite simply, marvelling at what it is and the enigmatic road we are still travelling to comprehend ourselves.

Barry Gibb is a Multimedia Producer at the Wellcome Trust and author of The Rough Guide to the Brain. Buy Brains: The mind as matter online at Blackwell’s.

The Museum Mile revisited: Part 1

Rosetta Stone by skëne, on Flickr

Last year, Wellcome Collection’s Natalie Coe attempted to visit all twelve museums on the Museum Mile in a single day, but was distracted by student occupiers, good quality espresso and too much culture in general. With greater resolve this year, she set off again…

After my first measly attempt at a two hour version of Museum Mile last year, I recently hit the museum road again on a cold February morning to try it out properly, this time using the Museum Mile’s own downloadable audio guide podcast where various notable narrators shed some light on particular objects in each of the 12 museums featured. Coincidentally, our own new audio guide was launched at Wellcome Collection recently, so it was a good time to be exploring museums via an audio guide.

The podcast introduced Museum Mile as a way to discover the lesser known gems not found in your average guidebook. While I’m not entirely convinced that any of these museums have escaped all guidebooks, it did stay true to its claim to feature big, small, quirky and mainstream museums and inspire me to re-look at museums I thought I’d already ‘done’. The podcast also helpfully guides you on a logical route from one museum to the next, unlike the scheme’s leaflet. I recommend downloading each museum track individually if you’re using a device without a forward or rewind function (unless you want to hear ‘Welcome to Museum Mile’ one too many times)!

The first stop was the ‘Cathedral of Knowledge’, the British Library, with my first guide, David Starkey. I love the ‘cathedral’ description: there is currently much discussion over whether museums are the new temples where people come to worship art and objects. After marvelling at the central old Royal library, Mr Starkey introduced me to the 13th century Magna Carta. Could there be a more famous object to begin with? I admittedly had no idea it was there and had never been in the John Ritblatt ‘treasures’ gallery that holds it, so it was wonderful to be directed to an object that Starkey described as no less than the ‘beginning of liberty and freedom’. And the British Library display was great at demonstrating how monumental it was in reining in the power of the King. It also conveyed the more mundane nuggets of interest, like how words were abbreviated to save on expensive parchment. It is interesting to think about how it was re-interpreted, too; from applying only to ‘free men’ to being used to call for the right to a free trial for all men. Amazingly, it’s still cited in courtrooms today and a copy sits proudly alongside the Bill of Rights in Washington.

So already I’d discovered something new in a place I’d visited before. On to the next destination and the discovery that the podcast punctuates your walk between institutions with little facts about the area. Did you know that the Euston Road was the first urban bypass in Europe?

The second museum was somewhere you would think I’d already seen from every angle, the Wellcome Collection. But the podcast proved me wrong. I was delighted to hear my place of work described as an elegant respite; perhaps the contrast of Euston Road actually enhances the visitor experience. Francis Wells, a heart scientist and artist, described an illuminated manuscript in the Wellcome Library which I hadn’t come across before despite the fact that it sat by Queen Elizabeth I’s bed. Objects with such celebrity associations always raise the question: does their value come from aesthetics or their provenance? I would vouch for celebrity provenance if the success of our Wellcome’s Hall of Fame tour is anything to go by!

So far so good. But the next museum proved more problematic: the Grant Museum is only open 1-5pm and it was still the morning. (I thought this implied Museum Mile was not meant to take all day but this later proved to be wishful thinking!) So I skipped onto the Brunei Gallery at SOAS instead. Last time I was here, I was stopped in my quest by a picket line of protestors, so I was pleased that I could actually go in. On the way there, Aly Mir, indmidtown’s walks guide, informed us that the area’s famous Bloomsbury group was known for living in squares but loving in triangles – a reference to their complicated sexual relationships! The SOAS collections are accurately described as ‘extensive, diverse, and surprising’. Nonetheless, it was satisfying to just be looking for one specific object, an approach I’ve not really taken before. In this case, a missionary portrait of David Livingstone that John Hollingworth, from the Brunei Gallery, explained was routine for missionaries who weren’t necessarily expected to make it home. He also shed some light on the origins of the phrase ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume’, but I’d better not give the whole of the podcast away…

Back outside I battled through the cold to my next stop, the biggest and most ‘mainstream’ institution on my route, the British Museum.

I was, as always, in awe of the magnificent Grand Court at the heart of this epic building, even more so with the acquired knowledge from the podcast that it is the largest covered square in Europe. Having recently taken a ‘highlights’ approach to the British Museum with relatives visiting from abroad, I was hesitant to go again to see perhaps the most famous object there, the Rosetta Stone. Also, as Grayson Perry referenced in his exhibition ‘The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman’, Ancient Egyptian collections are almost too famous – it is the first thing that children learn to associate with the museums and he sometimes ‘dread[s] seeing the crumbling stage sets of popular imagination’. But my resistance proved unwarranted as I was delighted to actually be able to see the Rosetta Stone this time, away from the weekend crowds. Plus, for the first time, I really understood how important it was in unlocking Ancient Egyptian culture. I found having someone ‘bringing alive’ the object for me on the podcast conveyed a far more memorable message than reading the label on the wall.

We must leave Natalie here for now. Will she succeed in her ambition of visiting all twelve museums in one day? All will be revealed in Part 2…

Natalie Coe is a Visitor Services Assistant at Wellcome Collection.

Should we pass on the clever pills?

Capsules. Anna Tanczos/Wellcome Images

If we can drink coffee to improve our concentration, why not take cleverer drugs to make us cleverer? At our discussion event about cognitive enhancement in February, Lydia Harriss was on hand to consider some thorny issues.

Would you take a pill to help you pass an exam?

“Definitely not!” I hear at least some of you say, bristling with indignation at the mere suggestion. That would be cheating, like an athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs before a competition. But are there occasions when using cognitive-enhancing drugs – which improve mental functions such as memory, attention and information processing – would be acceptable, or even desirable? A lively discussion at ‘The Clever Pill’, in February’s series of events on neuroethics at Wellcome Collection, made me think that there might.

What if cognitive-enhancing drugs (let’s call them CEDs) could be used to restore cognitive function in people who have lost some of their mental ability through injury or illness? Arguing against their use on purely ethical grounds, I think, would be difficult. Cries of ‘unfair advantage’ would seem churlish if a drug had the potential to improve a person’s quality of life, particularly if it were compensating for the loss of an ability that they’d originally had.

How about non-therapeutic situations? Are there some professionals who we should allow to use CEDs under certain, tightly regulated, conditions? Panellist Dr James Rowe, Clinical Neurologist and Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow, suggested that surgeons working on nightshifts could be good candidates. Perhaps they should have the option of taking CEDs to improve their attention and judgement for emergency night-time operations, when patients’ lives depend on accuracy and clear thinking but surgeons are likely to be more tired. That could be a win–win situation: the patient benefits from an operation that is performed as well as it can be, and the surgeon is elevated to a level of heightened skill.

But would it really be that simple? It would be difficult to claim that surgeons would have an ‘unfair advantage’ in this scenario, given that patients would be the main beneficiaries. However, there are other, more sinister, potential consequences… can you hear those slithering noises? They’re coming from a shiny can labelled ‘side-effects’. I’m afraid to lift the lid, as I suspect there are way more worms in there than I can deal with, but let’s be brave and take a tiny peek.

Side-effects are always a consideration where drugs are concerned. Researchers can do clinical trials to investigate the effects of a drug over a few years, but it becomes much harder to look at how humans respond to it over decades or a lifetime. So, realistically, there’s probably always some possibility, no matter how remote, of a person having an unintended reaction to a drug.

When drugs are taken as medical treatment, the potential benefits (which are often substantial) can be weighed against the possibility of adverse side-effects. But is it fair to allow our hard-working surgeons, who are running themselves ragged trying to save lives, to accept the risks associated with CEDs if there’s no personal benefit to their own health?

We could leave it up to individual surgeons to make a personal decision (assuming that the CEDs in question have passed the efficacy and safety tests required for new drugs). Surely professionals should have the freedom to decide whether CEDs are a useful tool that can help them in their work?

However, there’s another possible consequence rearing out of the increasingly murky waters of this debate – coercion. If more and more surgeons take CEDs, it seems likely that some individuals who would otherwise not want to take them could feel compelled to, under the weight of social expectation or the fear of falling behind in their careers.

When the debate swivels around to the idea of making CEDs freely available to everyone, the issues become even more complex. Perhaps CEDs could help us to more fully achieve our potential? They could enable us to be more productive, creative and clever.

Panellist and Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Martin School’s Institute for Science and Ethics, Dr Bennet Foddy, pointed out that a huge number of cognitive enhancers are already in wide use throughout society. They include caffeine, carbohydrate-rich food, exercise and sleep. He suggested that there isn’t a moral distinction between taking a drug and using an alternative form of cognitive enhancement.

That may be true, but it seems to me that most of these other alternatives are widely available. I could choose to go for a run after work to boost my mental processes. If I decide that I’d rather spend the evening crashed out on the couch watching TV, then I’ve chosen to miss out. But if a wonder pill did exist that could significantly boost mental performance, it would probably cost money, and that brings with it the prospect of inequality. Would we find ourselves with an even more profoundly divided society, with intellectual disadvantage compounding existing economic privations? Without a crystal ball, it’s difficult to tell, but I wasn’t the only person in the audience who thought that it might.

I was intrigued to hear Professor Simon Wessely, Professor of Psychological Medicine at King’s College London, give his views on currently available CEDs. It felt like a sharp reality check. He said that the cognitive-enhancing effects provided by today’s drugs are very modest, and that even the longest-lasting effects wear off within about 12 weeks.

According to Dr Rowe, research suggests that CEDs tend to have the greatest effect on people with a below average IQ or those who have a temporary loss of cognitive ability – for example, through tiredness. This could mean that some of the people most tempted to take enhancers, such as high-performing students under pressure to succeed, may be less likely to benefit from them. Dr Rowe seemed to succinctly sum up the situation when he said that the benefits from a good night’s sleep, social networking and exercise will outstrip those from any of the drugs currently available.

Significant and lasting cognitive enhancement through drugs seems to be well beyond the reach of current research. After hearing the knotty issues surrounding CEDs, I’m rather relieved to hear that we don’t have the ability to lever open this particular Pandora’s Box just yet. However, it’s clear that there’s much to consider if one day we do.

Lydia Harriss is a graduate trainee at the Wellcome Trust.

Object of the month: the scold’s bridle

Scold's bridle. Wellcome Images

Although much of Henry Wellcome’s collection was devoted to instruments and materials of healing, some of the objects found in it have a more sinister purpose. Elizabeth Baddeley looks at a tradition of punishment rooted in the fear of female autonomy.

When visitors peer into our cabinet of masks in Medicine Man they are, almost without fail, drawn first to the bright, colourful disease masks from Sri Lanka; to the exaggerated features of the ritual mask from Bhutan; to the almost eerily realistic grinning false face Iroquois mask from North America. It seems almost as an afterthought that they turn to our object here: the matt grey, iron mask of the scold’s bridle. It seems clunky and dull next to the lively features of the more geographically exotic specimens it is displayed alongside. Surprisingly, the history, use and legacy of this and similar objects are a much underexplored subject.

This object is between 200 and 450 years old and is from Belgium, but could be from any part of Northern Europe from the late medieval or early modern period. It is made from heavy iron, and has the caricatured ears of an ass, exaggerated facial features and twisted, cruel-looking horns. It is a scold’s bridle.

The offence of scolding means little to nothing to us today, but in the 16th and 17th centuries, it was an acute insult. It was a uniquely female misdemeanour, and as such it is often compared to that other contemporary, and uniquely female, crime of being a whore. Both were often punished with a round on the ‘cucking stool’ – a mechanism where the accused was dunked into a river or pond while secured to a seat – and both are often viewed as female crime in a male-dominated legal system. A scold was, after all, ‘a troublesome and angry woman, who by her brawling and wrangling amongst her Neighbours, doth break the publick Peace, and beget, cherish and increase publick Discord’ according to William Sheppard in 1675.

The gendered nature of this crime has led to historians discussing whether it was a male way of limiting women’s powers of expression and activity. Indeed, the prevalence of accusations against scolds seems to have peaked between the mid-16th and 17th centuries, and in Britain has been linked to the wider social upheaval surrounding the English Civil War. Punishment with a bridle like this one, or ‘branks’ as they were also known, is less well recorded, but we know that it was done, as with the cucking stool, to ridicule and expose the women in front of her neighbours. It could also be painful. The woman would be made to wear the device for a stated time, and it would be heavy, the iron would be very cold (especially in winter), and the strut of metal that went into her mouth to hold down her tongue from further nagging (which has unfortunately broken off this example) would become increasingly uncomfortable. Indeed, on some bridles this was not just a piece of metal but a spike, designed to cause pain.

The idea of punishing a woman for stepping out of her place is not uniquely British: as mentioned above, scold’s bridles have been found across Europe. This crime of being a scold is represented in the mocking ‘world turned upside down’ rituals of French charivari and Italian carnivals. Men dressed as women, children played bishops and bishops dressed as paupers during the festival; this reversal and ridiculing of traditional norms was used to reinforce the correctness and normality of those norms in everyday life. This was true especially in relation to gender roles: alongside the punishing of scolds was the ridiculing of what cultural historian Natalie Davies calls the ‘woman on top’: domineering wives, especially young brides of elderly husbands or women who abused their husbands. Also linked is the enduring idea that witches were female, often wise old spinsters or midwives. Statistically, we know that a huge number of men were also accused and punished for witchcraft, but the concept of witches and the description of them in contemporary sources is usually purely female and contributes to the general fear of women stepping out of their place. The contemporary fear of powerful women has in the past been linked to a high number of young, unmarried but wage-earning women living away from home as servants and the measure of power and freedom this gave them.

One idea that connects the scold’s bridle, accusations of witchcraft and the ‘woman on top’ is the belief that women were particularly prone to bouts of irrational behaviour, prone to communicating with the devil as they did not have the rational power to stay away, and inclined to scold and nag about unimportant matters. According to early modern medical ideas of the four humours, a theory about the body existent since ancient Greece and changed little by the 16th century, women were cold and damp with little blood. Indeed, this small amount of blood would linger around their uterus, instead of spreading throughout the body  and into the brain. The Greeks even wrote of how the uterus would ‘wander around’ the body if it had too little blood. As such, women were often seen as being ‘led’ by their uterus, a dangerous organ, making them prone to irrational behaviour. Nor was this idea soon forgotten, for the very Victorian illness of hysteria takes its name from the Greek ‘hystera’, meaning uterus. This may seem odd to a modern audience, more used to hearing of men being led by their nether regions than women.

Elizabeth Baddeley is a Visitor Services Assistant at Wellcome Collection.

A game of nerves

Axon

Our new game Axon is now live. It accompanies our new exhibition,  Brains: The Mind as Matter, which opens next week. In this fast-paced game, you must click on protein targets to grow your neuron, connecting new brain regions. Climb through the tissue, outcompeting rival neurons to form the longest connection you can.

Where our last game, High Tea, explored the history and culture of drugs with this one we wanted to get closer to the science. The ‘Brains’ exhibition provided just the right opportunity. We began the process last year, when we sat down with guest exhibition curator Marius Kwint, neuroscientist Richard Wingate and Phil Stuart and Chris Cox from Preloaded for a day of instense collaboration. We wanted to see if we could find a way to ‘play the brain’. Richard and Marius spent the morning showing us the neuroscience (including the extraordinary video of a foetal chick’s neurons forming that you’ll find in the game), and then in the afternoon Phil and Chris explained the structure of casual games and the relationship between goal, jeopardy and score. We discussed the role of competition in forming connections in the brain, and looked at other games whose aesthetic seemed to reflect what we’d seen in the video.

We knew we were onto something, and so the process of development began. This kind of collaboration is key to how we make games: marrying the creativity and imagination of a games agency like Preloaded with the knowledge and critical thinking of scientists and exhibition curators. The result is (we hope) games that genuinely spur engagement with the concepts and ideas embedded within them. We’re particularly proud that Axon contains 27 different links to Wikipedia pages describing different kinds of neurons. Your high score could be just the start of a journey of discovery into how the brain works.

We’re very interested in how games work, and so we’re watching our Google Analytics, conducting a survey (just follow the link from the game) and undertaking interviews and analysis of responses to the game. Further down the line we hope to be publishing an evaluation of Axon, showing what we’ve learned from it, as we did with our evaluation of High Tea. And at Museums and the Web this year, we’ll be presenting a paper on evaluating games, co-authored with colleagues at the Science Museum and the Space Science Institute. The Wellcome Trust is also interested in supporting gaming as a medium through grants and awards for  ideas that bring biomedical science stories to life, as this article in Wired explains.

The game launches to major gaming portals including Kongregate and Newgrounds  this weekend, where hopefully it will find an audience keen to both play a gripping game and find out more about neuroscience. Play Axon now and see how long you can grow your neuron.

Here Comes Good Health: Health and Clothing

Here Comes Good Health! is a new exhibit at Wellcome Collection about the health propaganda films made by Bermondsey Borough Council in the 1920s and 1930s. In their attempt to create healthy lives for Bermondsey’s residents, the borough’s health department touched on subjects well beyond germs and medicine. Patricia Dark looks at a film that’s all about what you wear.

The Wellcome Films YouTube page describes Health and Clothing (1928), one of the Bermondsey Borough Council public health films, as ‘mildly diverting’; at first glance, from more than 80 years’ distance, it seems a generous description. It opens with shots of kittens and of a baby in the arms of a district nurse: as the caption notes, animal babies are born dressed and human babies are born naked. Ponderous demonstrations of Tudor and Victorian women’s fashions follow, then a hapless toddler boy is stripped – twice – so his summer and winter clothes can be weighed and compared. Later scenes point out the properties of healthful clothing: light, warm, absorbent, loose, easily washed, non-flammable, and weatherproof. Sheep being shorn reinforce the point that wool is the fibre of choice. Finally, the film extols the virtues of modern fashion: healthy, cheap, and easy to make at home.

It leaves modern viewers with more questions than answers. Why is Health and Clothing so overwhelmingly feminine? What does clothing have to do with health? Why would the public health department advocate fashion? The answer lies in the background to the films: Bermondsey itself, and the conditions in which many viewers lived. Clothing and cleanliness, like almost all aspects of household life, was a feminine concern. Even for women who worked outside the home, keeping a clean, tidy, respectable house was a priority. The film’s particular stress on light, simple, easy-to-care-for clothing – especially for small children – would resonate with its audience.

Bermondsey’s housing stock conspired against the borough’s housewives, even years after Health and Clothing was released: much of it was wretchedly overcrowded and appallingly unsanitary. A Daily Express reporter found a family of seven living in one room eight feet square in 1924: a passage two and a half feet wide provided space to dry washing. Howard Marshall of the Daily Telegraph visited Cherry Gardens Pier in 1933: he found 4 families – 18 people in total – living in five rooms, with one tap between them. In 1939, the News Chronicle reported that Wolesey Buildings provided a single sink for 4 families – up to 30 people – that provided each family’s cooking, bathing, and washing water. Wolesey Buildings did have a communal washhouse, but it was derelict. Housewives there, as elsewhere in the borough, either did laundry in their tiny, overcrowded flats or spent more money to send it out to a laundry.

In these conditions, as the Daily Express put it, “[c]leanliness [was] utterly impossible; decency [was] utterly damned”. Dirty clothing irritated skin and provided perfect breeding grounds for parasites like body lice, which transmitted deadly diseases like typhus. But it was also demoralising – a tangible sign of the all-too-often futile struggle of the “honest…ambitious, God-fearing” people of Bermondsey against misery and despair. For the reformers of the Bermondsey Borough Council, clothing was a symbol: of the decent conditions everyone deserved to live in, and of the dignity and decency of the working class.

Snide stereotypes and cheap jibes were simply wrong – given the opportunity, the residents of Bermondsey took as much pride in their surroundings as more prosperous Londoners, and worked harder to beautify their homes and themselves. In 1930, an Evening Standard article called Bermondsey “[t]he most optimistic place in London”; alongside the riot of flowers in windowboxes and front gardens, the reporter singled out the “factory girls…” who “wore their trim little coats and their close-fitting frocks with what the modistes call ‘an air’.” Peter Ritchie Calder of the Daily Herald visited the Vauban estate – once one of the worst slum areas in the borough – in 1934. His report fairly glows with cleanliness – a young mother wearing a “spick-and span overall” hanging out “spotless” laundry on the drying-green, an elderly lady’s white lace curtains – and the power of pride, belonging, and the “moral pressure” of respectability.

Health and Clothing, then, is more than a mildly diverting film, or even a didactic one. At its heart, it is a celebration of the modern: modern dress, modern ideas, and a modern Bermondsey that its residents can be proud of.

Dr Patricia Dark is Local History Library and Archives Manager at the Local History Library, Southwark Culture.

The Bermondsey Borough Council films have been recently digitally remastered with material preserved by the British Film Institute and form part of Here Comes Good Health!, an exhibit running at Wellcome Collection from 22 February to 3 June 2012 together with other health educational materials. The films and photographs in the display have been supplied courtesy of Southwark Local History Library and Archive. For more details contact Southwark Local History Library and Archive, 211 Borough High Street, London, SE1 1JA. T: 020 7525 0232 E: local.history.library@southwark.gov.uk.

Find out more about the Wellcome Library’s Moving Image and Sound Collection by searching our digitised film, video and audio or visiting the Wellcome Film YouTube channel.

Contemporary votive illustrations: A gift greater than any

Our exhibition ‘Infinitas Gracias: Mexican miracle paintings‘ has just closed, but we have a few more contemporary votive illustrations to share with you, based on stories submitted by visitors to Wellcome Collection and to our website. Just as Mexican ex-voto paintings were made by painters to tell stories of thanks, these contemporary stories of gratitude involve an exchange between storyteller and illustrator.

Liz Anelli: A gift greater than any

Liz Anelli’s latest illustration is for this story:

In the spring of 2009, Jessie Bond was kind enough to give me shelter when I was thrown out of my lodgings by my cantankerous landlady, after giving her notice of my leaving. I had nowhere to go and half of my possessions on my back. I called Jessie at midnight and asked her if I could stay on her sofa. It may not have seemed a great deal worthy of thanks to her but at that exact moment, it was a gift greater than any.

Adam Sweeney, Camberwell, South London, spring 2009. For Jessie Bond.

You can find out more about Liz Anelli’s work and explore more votive illustrations on the Wellcome Collection website.