Archives and Special Collections: Health & medicine

Clydebank was once known as the asbestos capital of Europe due to the sheer quantity that was produced, supplying much of western Scotland with its construction materials. Unfortunately, this title was also given because of the sheer number of victims of the killer dust. Mesothelioma struck Clydebank the hardest between 1976-1991, and by 1996 Clydebank still suffered from a mortality rate up to 11 times higher than the national average. For all the jobs that the asbestos industry provided, it claimed many more lives.

Killer dust was a two year project funded by the Wellcome Trust to catalogue and preserve several remarkable occupational and environmental health archive collections at the University of Strathclyde.

Patrick Geddes (1854-1932) was an advocate for sexual education at a time when the subject’s appropriateness and efficacy were hotly debated amongst varying factions. On the one side were health groups like the British Social Hygiene Council, which happened to count Auckland Geddes, a relative of Patrick’s, amongst its founding members. They insisted that education was integral to the prevention of venereal disease and that ‘the promotion of the high and equal standard of sex conduct for men and women’ was necessary to maintaining a high standard of public health. On the other side were purity organizations such as the National Vigilance Association and the Alliance of Honour which concerned themselves with curbing ‘public immorality’.

Established at the Royal Technical College in 1920 under the auspices of the British Pharmaceutical Society and the Glasgow and West of Scotland Association of Chemists, the School of Pharmacy rapidly grew in prestige and fame becoming the largest School of Pharmacy in the UK in the span of a decade.

This is one of a series of German hand coloured plates from Wagner’s Pharmaceutische-Mediziner Botanik from about 1830, which was used for teaching at Anderson’s University.