Findlay, George William Marshall (1893-1952)

Identity Statement

Reference code(s)	: GB 0120 GC/14
Held at	: Wellcome Library   Click here to find out how to view this collection at http://wellcomelibrary.org/ ›
Full title	: Findlay, George William Marshall (1893-1952)
Date(s)	: 1941-1945
Level of description	: Collection
Extent	: 5 boxes
Name of creator(s)	: Findlay | George William Marshall | 1893-1952 | pathologist

Context

Administrative/Biographical history:

For details of G W M Findlay's life and career, see Who Was Who 1951-1960, Munk's Roll Vol V and obituaries in The Times, British Medical Journal and Lancet.

Content

Scope and content/abstract:

'Memorandum on Yellow Fever in Africa' [1941]; notebooks on tropical medicine, including case histories of blackwater fever among military personnel in West Africa, 1941-1945, and anthropology and history of Africa.

Access & Use

Language/scripts of material:
English

System of arrangement:

The description of the notebooks by R Finlayson, Wellcome Museum of Medical Science, follows:

"The notebooks have been numbered from 1 to 42, but the numerical sequence is not chronological. Nos. 22 and 23 are probably the first and second of the series. In the main, notebooks Nos. 1 to 36 contain abstracts of the medical literature written by Findlay and covering a huge range of topics. Occasional notebooks appear to have a central theme such as viruses, yellow fever, rickettsia, historical or a time sequence (e.g. 1944-46) but others, on first inspection, appear delightfully eclectic. Although much of the material in the notebooks is a culling from the medical literature, small segments of unpublished work, such as tables of incidence of various diseases in West Africa and short case reports of 14 cases of yellow fever, sparsely intersperse the abstracts. A few letters to Dr. Findlay lurk in the notebooks.

Six of the notebooks (Nos. 37-42) are labelled Blackwater Fever, Vols. 1-6. These detail the many case histories of blackwater fever occurring in military personnel in West Africa 1941-45. The notebooks are arranged chronologically, are well-indexed and form a valuable record. The clinical histories and autopsy reports of six of these cases could be matched with six histological preparations in the W.M.M.S. Collection (M 1662-67) that hitherto lacked clinico-pathological date."

From a brief examination of these notebooks it would appear that the ones lower in numerical sequence tend to be more general while the ones with higher numbers concentrate more, if not exclusively, on yellow fever. The notebooks contain a great deal of anthropological and historical material, mainly to do with Africa, as well as items of more purely medical interest. The first entry in each notebook has been used for reference.

Conditions governing access:

Open. The papers are available subject to the usual conditions of access to Archives and Manuscripts material, after the completion of a Reader's Undertaking.

Conditions governing reproduction:

Photocopies/photographs/microfilm are supplied for private research only at the Archivist's discretion. Please note that material may be unsuitable for copying on conservation grounds, and that photographs cannot be photocopied in any circumstances. Readers are restricted to 100 photocopies in twelve months. Researchers who wish to publish material must seek copyright permission from the copyright owner.

Finding aids:

Wellcome Library catalogue online.

Archival Information

Archival history:

Immediate source of acquisition:

This collection was received by the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre from Dr A J Duggan, Wellcome Museum of Medical Science, in August 1983. These notebooks and the file have been added to Dr Findlay's unpublished typescript Memorandum on Yellow Fever in Africa (n.d. c 1941), which was presented to the Wellcome Institute Library by Dr Hackett in 1952 and transferred to the Contemporary Medical Archives Centre in October 1980. The previous references are; Accession no 96183, Western MSS no 6181.

Allied Materials

Related material:

Publication note:

Description Notes

Archivist's note:
Entry compiled by Barbara Bal from the Wellcome Library online catalogue.

Rules or conventions:
Compiled in compliance with General International Standard Archival Description, ISAD(G), second edition, 2000; National Council on Archives Rules for the Construction of Personal, Place and Corporate Names, 1997.

Date(s) of descriptions:
January 2009