The Wellcome Museum Archive
Image: Glass negative, circa 1919, showing a Royal Naval armoured ambulance breakdown in the Caucasus. This is one of a series of glass negatives collected by Surgeon Commander Montague Henry Knapp, Hon. Director of the Naval Medical Section of the Imperial War Museum and exhibited at Crystal Palace in June 1920.
The Wellcome Collection is a free museum and library near to Euston Station in London. It’s a treasure trove, a marvellous archive of medical history (along with a very nice cafe), but it also hosts art exhibitions relating to health. It opened in 2007, part of the Wellcome Trust, a charitable foundation originally established in 1936 with the aim of improving human health through research. As they state: “We believe everyone’s experience of health matters. Through our collections, exhibitions and events, in books and online, we explore the past, present and future of health.” The collection looks after many thousands of items relating to health, medicine and human experience, including rare books, artworks, films and videos, personal archives and objects.
Diary of Captain John Percy Litt.
Among the manuscripts in their collection, there is a diary and a photograph album by Captain John Percy Litt, Royal Army Medical Corps (1887-1947). Litt joined the RAMC in September 1914, served in Salonika 1915-1918, then with the Army of he Black Sea 1918-1920, stationed in Batumi in 1920, and in Constantinople 1922-1923. He received the following commendation for General Cooke-Collis, Military Governor: “Capt Litt has been responsible for the Civic Hospitals in the Province of Batoum and has during the period of his appointment completely restored the sanitary conditions of the town. He has had many difficulties to overcome and has proved ha he possesses administrative ability of a high order.”
Almost opposite the Wellcome building, you will find the London and North Western Railway War Memorial, which commemorates their employees who were killed in the First World War. Some 37,000 LNWR employees left to fight, a third of the workforce, of whom over 3,000 were killed. It was unveiled in October 1921.
