Digitising and Disseminating the Medical Case Notes of Sir Archibald Garrod (360G-Wellcome-095139_Z_10_Z)

This project will be carried out by Kingston University in close collaboration with Mr Nicholas Baldwin, archivist at the Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) archive. It complements the Wellcome Library's strategy to create a digital resource for medical history, and focuses on the theme of modern medical genetics. The project will focus on the GOSH case notes collection of Sir Archibald Garrod, a key contributor to early developments in this field. Garrod held the post of consultant physician at the Hospital in the early twentieth-century, a period when the importance of inheritance in susceptibility to disease was first being posited. This collection is the only surviving record of Garrod's clinical notes, endowing it with special significance. The full collection of case notes will be digitised and those sections containing details of family history and living conditions (a key element in researching the early study of inheritable disease patterns) will be transcribed. A word-search facility will provide researchers with the tools to interrogate this information, while existing indexing tools will provide access to the record as a whole. The images and transcriptions will be made publicly available via the existing free-to-access Historic Hospital Admission Records Project website www.hharp.org. The website contains databases of admissions to four children's hospitals (GOSH, the Evelina Hospital, the Alexandra Hip Hospital and the Royal Glasgow Children's Hospital) constructed from previous RRMH-funded Kingston projects (GN073912, GN084252 and GN087567). They will also be made available to the Wellcome Library digitisation project.