More on the closing of the Centre for the History of Medicine
As you can see from the comments on yesterday’s post, the closing of the Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine seems unbelievable (or a April Fools Day prank). The Centre’s outreach historian, Carole Reeves, has asked for the following message to be posted:
It is with regret that the Wellcome Trust and University College London announce the decision to work towards closure of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL.
Both the Wellcome Trust and UCL acknowledge the significant achievements of the Centre over the years. The decision follows discussions between the senior staff of both organisations and consideration by the Board of Governors of the Wellcome Trust.
In accordance with Trust practice, the closure of the Centre will be phased over a two year period, allowing time for discussion and planning with regard to the current staff.
The Wellcome Trust remains firmly supportive of the study of the history of medicine and the medical humanities. It is keen to ensure that there is continued access and accommodation available for academics wishing to use the facilities of the Wellcome Library.
I regret that yesterday’s post about the closing of the Centre could be misinterpreted: I wrote that “The decision probably doesn’t come as a surprise to those of us who have followed the Centre closely during the last couple of years”. It’s more accurate to say that “The decision probably doesn’t come as a surprise to those of us who have followed the policy of the Wellcome Trust closely during the last couple of years”.
16 Apr 2010 Thomas
I wouldn’t feel bad about it, it is very confusing. Bottom line, this is not going to hurt the history of medicine in the least. The Centre was on a massive decline. Hal Cook just left, Janet Browne took off to Harvard, Chris Lawrence retired a bit ago. There are some very talented historians there, Anne Hardy and Guy Attwell especially, of course Nutton and Wear. XX is good, but people hate him. The famous XX question ‘Whats the point?’. Well what is the point of your work you egomaniac? Anyways, the centre is not the bees knees, and the historians there never really justified the millions of pounds being poured into it. It was kinda a joke how they hyped themselves up as the world’s leaders in the history of medicine. Seriously? Look at Yale, Johns Hopkins in the USA. Or Warwick, Oxford, Cambridge, and especially Manchester. These places all have amazing history of science and medicine departments, and the list goes on. So to sit around and feel sorry for the Centre at UCL is not appropriate. They brought it on themselves, and are still clinging to this notion that they actually deserve to suck money away from historians and groups of historians who deserve it more. Except for the few starts their like Hardy (and I must admit XX, he is a pain in the rear, but a great historian) what else have many really accomplished consistently compared to other groups of historians of medicine? So don’t buy into this ‘future of the history of medicine’ and how central the Centre was to it. It wasn’t. Important, maybe. But its the propaganda the Centre was so successful at pouring out that made it seem more important than it was, and which the cold eye of economics saw right through.
Dear Peanut Gallery, the person you describe as an egomaniac is quite able to defend himself, but still your comment is pretty close to defamation. I only noticed your comment this morning, so it has been in the public for three days now, but I have nevertheless decided to anonymise the object of your ire. I will be vetting comments more carefully in the future, and will not tolerate further remarks that can be interpreted as defamatory.
I would just remove the entire post by Peanut Gallery.
Well, I think the rest is a fair contribution to the budding discussion about the pros and cons of the Wellcome Centre. I may not agree in all of it, but some points are well taken, e.g., that the closing of the Centre is not necessarily a blow to history of medicine. So I’ll delete the defamation and keep the rest.
There are other errors in that post too – e.g. both Nutton and Wear are retired now (and presumably in the New Regime won’t get desk space – normal universities are not renowned for having enough offices to allow distinguished retired staff places to work).
“The cold eye of economics”, as Peanut Gallery put it, would have *all* the centers named closed in a swift blink. What do historians really, tangibly, contribute to society? According to such funding bodies as the Wellcome Trust the answer seems unequivocal: nothing. And yes, granted, we are not about to discover a new AIDS vaccine, nor are we decrypting the human genome or any other of the worthy causes the Trust supports. Yet I know of few historians who would consider their work worthless.
As ‘mature historian’ accurately states, few ‘normal’ universities (and this includes UCL, whose funding priorities over the last few years have been quite disturbing) would give desk space, let alone offices and support staff, to retired academics. Once you no longer receive a paycheck, you have nothing left to contribute seems to be the maxim. At the center, such academics remained valued members of the community. Not only did they continue to produce valuable work (what does Peanut Gallery think of the center’s last RAE evaluation?) but also Harold Cook’s regime at the center actively encouraged open informal exchange between all members, be they emeritus professors, visiting scholars or lowly undergraduates. Waiting weeks for an appointment to see your supervisor, who is busy writing their latest book? You will find no such stories (common among visiting research students) among the student community at the Center. Not many university departments (and certainly few of the ones known to me) can boast the same.
And no, the center is not the be all and end all of History of Medicine, nor do I believe most of the academics working there would ever have claimed such a thing. However, it was a place open to all, with an exceptionally active public engagement program and generous visitor accreditation policy. Many a thesis, article and book have been completed thanks to a brief or extended stay there, using its facilities as a base to explore London’s unrivaled treasures (The Wellcome Library, just a few floors below the center, being only one of many world-class collections). This, dear friends, will now be history too.
By all means feel smug about the center’s closure, but realize that you are thereby making light of all those like me who are only just starting out, who have not yet carved out a rock-solid career in this field, who rely on places like the Wellcome Trust Center for the History of Medicine to be there to support our forays into the
world of primary sources and who are grateful to the wonderful people, like some of this center’s academics, willing to give up their valuable time to explain basic concepts to an ignorant and wholly overwhelmed visiting research student over a cup of tea in the common room.
I was just wondering, what’s the justification for saying that the Wellcome Library will now close too? It’s not a part of UCL or this department after all…
Hal Cook is now at Brown University in Providence, just down the road from Harvard’s Countway Library collections in Boston, where I suspect he’ll thrive.
http://www.countway.harvard.edu/menuNavigation/chom.html
By the way, Cook’s former department at the University of Wisconsin is not too shabby, either. Their web site can be found at http://www.medhist.wisc.edu
Has Anne Hardy now left UCL and, if so, does she have a current email address?