Research

A delegation comes from the Wellcome Trust – to hear what we are doing on the medical history front.  It’s a great opportunity to let them hear and see just how strong are our collections on this topic.  Inevitably the medical treatment of wounded soldiers is a running theme in our collections – whether recruiting posters for Red Cross nurses in the First World War or films urging soldiers to protect themselves against malaria in the Second.  But there are wider themes you can explore here too – there are few aspects of war which did not impinge on health also.

The Muswell Hill studio is flooded with sunlight and all around are paintings of flowers in radiant reds, yellows and blues.   I have come to visit Alicia Melamed Adams, the Holocaust survivor whose paintings and whose story I wrote up as one of the chapters of Justice, Politics and Memory in Europe after the Second World War published this summer.  We did the interviews in this studio a year ago, sifting through her old family photographs and going over the details of her family’s horrendous wartime ordeal.