This series contains watercolours that do not have print counterparts in Mayhew’s “Illustrated Horse Doctor” or “Illustrated Horse Management”.
I have recently had the opportunity to look more closely at the almost 400 watercolours by Edward Mayhew that we acquired in 1990 and which are now available to view on our Vet History site
Edward Mayhew (1808-1868) was the brother of Henry Mayhew, founding editor of Punch. It is thought he spent his early years in the theatre before enrolling at the London Veterinary College in 1843 when he was in his 30s. He qualified as a member of the RCVS on 6 February 1845 and became a member of RCVS Council just over a year later.
Reports of the meetings in the three years Mayhew spent on Council show him to be a man who was not afraid to speak his mind, especially where the Professors at both the London and Edinburgh veterinary schools were concerned. His rather short obituary in The Veterinarian (November 1868 p810) says very little about him except “He was well known as the author of several veterinary works.”
It is for two of these veterinary works, Illustrated horse doctor and Illustrated horse management, that the watercolours were prepared and most of them have counterparts in the published books.
The drawings, which were converted into woodcuts for publication, reveal a man of no small artistic talent.
The collection includes illustrations: of diseases including the stages of laminitis
methods of treatment – inserting a tube into the stomach of a horse
and show how horses, and their keepers, should be housed
They also reveal something of the social conditions at the time – including this ‘Peep into the Grooms Home’
My favourites are the ones which show Mayhew’s sense of humour – for example this drawing titled ‘Never mount a strange horse in a crowded place.’ I particularly like the ‘flying’ dog on the bottom right!
Update (25/8/15)
Whilst researching for my lastest blog post on Mayhew I found an interesting account of the Mayhew family in George Hodder’s Memories of my time: including personal reminiscences of eminent men (London: Tinsley Brothers, 1870)
The section on Edward Mayhew (pp58-62) gives information on his health when producing these illustrations and mentions that his brother Julius, an architect, helped with the illustrations and designs for the stables.
Links to digitised images
Images used in Illustrated Horse Doctor
In a paper read before members of the Veterinary Medical Association (probably in 1849) Thomas Gowing said
“I have …experienced great difficulties in many required operations on the teeth [of the horse] from the want of proper dental instruments.”
His solution? To invent a set of instruments which “I flatter myself, will be found useful… [and] I venture to recommend them to you with confidence.”
The set included: large and small forceps; a sliding chisel; a guarded chisel; lateral repellers; posterior repellers; a gum lancet, and a tooth rasp.
Thomas Gowing’s dental instruments
His paper was later published as An essay, descriptive and pathological, on the diseases incidental to the horse; containing remarks upon operative dental surgery and the instruments required. The 13 page essay contains an illustration of this dental set (above), some discussion of the possible causes of tooth disease in horses and explanations of how to use the instruments.
List of dental instruments donated by Thomas Gowing
Thomas William Gowing 1810?-1888 was a London practitioner who qualified from the London Veterinary College in 1847. He served on RCVS Council for over twenty years, including periods as Vice President and was one of the Primary Fellows elected in 1877.
He gave a slightly modified set of these instruments to the RCVS Museum in 1866 – as recorded in a note which is bound within a book of pamphlets in our collection alongside his paper to the VMA.
I have yet to find any other illustrations of mid 19th century dental instruments in our historical collections but images of teeth appear frequently, usually as part of discussions on how to age a horse.
The ones I like best are those drawn by Edward Mayhew – a couple of which are shown below.
The teeth of a three year old horse
Illustration by Edward Mayhew showing the teeth of a three year old horse
and the first plate in Mayhew’s book The Horse’s mouth: showing the age by the teeth
Illustration from Edward Mayhew’s The Horse’s mouth: showing the age by the teeth 1849
In our collection of watercolours by Edward Mayhew there is only one featuring dogs.
The top image is captioned ‘Dog with retracted eye – near the termination(?) of distemper’ and the bottom ‘The lasting effect left by nitrate of silver when applied to an ulcer on the eye of the dog.’
The fact that there is only one painting of dogs could be considered somewhat surprising as Mayhew wrote regularly on canine matters. For example
In the 1848 article Mayhew reveals that his practice dealt mainly in dogs – ‘[the] public have favoured me by consulting me largely upon the disease of dogs”. His writings on dogs culminated in the 1854 publication:
Dogs: their management: being a new plan of treating the animal based upon a consideration of his natural temperament (London: George Routledge).
The title page states the work is ‘illustrated by numerous woodcuts depicting the character and position of the dog when suffering disease’ but the illustrator is not named. Was it Mayhew? If not were they based on originals by Mayhew like his later books on horses?
A possible clue to the illustrator can be found in Volume 4 of Frederick Smiths Early History of Veterinary Literature and its British development where he describes two works by Mayhew published in 1854 – the one listed above and another Dogs: their management and treatment issued under the pseudonym F. Forester. However Frank Forester is now known to be the pseudonym of Henry William Herbert (1807-1858) a novelist, journalist and illustrator who emigrated to the United States in 1831.
Searching for Forester and dogs quickly lead me to a revised edition (published 1857) of a book titled The Dog by Dinks, Mayhew and Hutchinson compiled, abridged, edited and illustrated by Frank Forester. This book is a compilation of three separate, previously published works, on dogs including Mayhew’s which is described as the second American edition. Does this mean that the illustrations in Mayhew’s 1854 book (which are exactly the same in the Forester compilation as in the individually published version) were by Forester? Certainly that is what most people seem to believe according to my internet search.
Further searching on Forester/Herbert led me to the Life and writings of Frank Forester edited by David W Judd (London, F Warne, 1882). The section on Forester as editor states
“As the editor of other persons’ writings … Herbert was little more than a bookseller’s hack, lending his name and making a few annotations to previously published volumes, to secure for them a more rapid sale”
So presumably the version of Mayhew’s book that Smith refers to as issued under the pseudonym F. Forester was simply a repackage for the American market. All of which might be considered to cast doubt on Forester as illustrator of Mayhew’s book.
Whoever the illustrator was the pictures offer an interesting insight into canine practice in the 1850s. They show how to recognise healthy dogs as in the case of the Scotch Terrier below where ‘the coat is by the artist truthfully depicted as remarkably long, full and hairy’.
Scotch Terrier
Illustrate dogs suffering from various diseases
(Note the man running away in the background from the rabid dog)
and show various veterinary treatments
After months of development and tweaking, I am now very happy to show the world our fantastic new Digital Collections website!
My most recent blog posts have described the cataloguing process – with the end result of the online archive catalogue. The Digital Collections site serves the other main aim of the RCVS Vet History Project – digitising our historic material and making it available for everyone to see, from anywhere in the world.
We will be adding more and more content to the site as the project continues, but over 150 works, dating from 1613 to 1912, are currently published. These include original watercolours, photographs, letters and periodicals.
The homepage of the new Digital Collections website
You can visit the live site now at http://www.rcvsvethistory.org/
If you want to know a little bit more about how we got here – this is the story so far…
When I started at RCVS Knowledge in October 2015, there already was a Digital Archive website, which displayed some of the oldest veterinary periodicals in our collections. Whilst this site was suited to the format of periodicals, I could see that it would not work for archive material, such as letters or manuscript notes.
Archive material can be challenging to share online, as you usually need more information about the items before you can understand them. For example, when reading a letter between two individuals, they may refer to each other only by first name, talk about places such as ‘the office’, or ‘the hospital’, or just write ‘Saturday’ for the date. The archivist of a collection will know which people and places are being referred to, and at least an approximate date the letter was written. If this information (or metadata) can be displayed alongside the images, then that provides some context for the researcher. Additionally, if the metadata is searchable, this will help researchers find the material more easily in the first place.
Letter to Fred Bullock from Frederick Smith, 1912 – with final paragraph written up the side
Quite a lot of archive material is also handwritten, which presents another difficulty. Not only can the writing be hard to decipher, it can be written at right angles, in different colours, and sentences can carry on over two pages. To make this as easy to read as possible, you need high resolution, colour images that you can easily rotate and zoom, and quickly navigate between.
Last year, Adele and I began a search for existing platforms that met our requirements for image display. We looked at other digital archive websites, but discovered that the choice seemed to be between complicated multi-functional software for huge organisations, or simple online galleries, better suited to photography and online stores. A third option was to build something ourselves, using open-source software, and I loved the look and functionality of the Universal Viewer tool, used by the Wellcome Library, Bodleian Library and British Library. We are on a slightly smaller scale than these institutions, but our needs were the same! So we contacted Digirati, the developers of the UV, and they worked with us to create a modification of the Viewer, and invited us to take part in the pilot of Wellcome’s Digital Library Cloud Services platform.
Screenshot of the Universal Viewer displaying a close up zoom of a manuscript letter.
The Universal Viewer also allows us to link from the images of the material to the library or archive catalogue record. I knew that I wanted users of the Digital Collections website to easily see and understand how one archive item relates to others in the collection. This is helped by linking to the archive catalogue, but we have also included a content ‘tree’ on the website, which users can expand and collapse to see what is on the whole site quickly and easily.
Underneath each Universal Viewer gallery, you can see the location of the currently displayed item within a tree of all content on the website. By expanding and collapsing the branches, you can quickly navigate to other items
As well as providing access, we wanted to encourage engagement between us and users of the site. You can share content by embedding individual Universal Viewer galleries on social media, and contribute additional knowledge and insight by suggesting your own tags.
We hope RCVS Vet History Digital Collections can become an active hub for interaction between veterinarians, historians and the general public eager to learn more about the fascinating past of the profession.
So take a look and let me know what you think! If you would like to be notified of major updates to content, please sign up to the mailing list here.
Hi, my name is Helena and I am the new Archive and Digitisation assistant. My role, like Adele’s before me, is to assist in the digitisation and online accessibility of documents within the archive and historical book collection. I hope to one day become a fully qualified archivist so this role is a wonderful opportunity for me and a step towards that dream. I have recently been lucky enough to be accepted onto the Archives Management MA programme at UCL; so it’s been an exciting couple of months for me. Previously I have been a volunteer in the Stanley Kubrick archives at UAL and I have also volunteered my time with conservation staff at the Royal Museums of Greenwich.
Helena, in the RCVS Knowledge office
You are probably now aware that the website on which you can browse through these collections (hundreds and hundreds of years of veterinary history!) is now live. There are so many interesting and weird and wonderful artworks, letters, and articles to delve into. I’ve read about subjects ranging from singing to hogs to the medical properties of Marshmallow.
The medical properties of marshmallow and liquorice, from ‘The Veterinarian’ Volume 4, Issue 1, January 1831
It’s fascinating to be a part of helping to make this history more accessible and to work with varied material. For example, Frederick Smith’s Boer War letters, even though tricky to read, have been insightful personal accounts into wartime conditions. The website seems to give them a new lease of life, and with the Universal Viewer, you can view the handwriting in amazing detail. A selection of the letters are currently being transcribed. I think the hardest thing for me is to not stop to read too much and get distracted! So far I am finding it a captivating and enjoyable task.
Letter from Smith to his wife Mary Ann, from North of the Tugela River, South Africa, 22 January 1900 [FS/2/2/4/2/8]
Personally my favourite material is the Edward Mayhew watercolour collection – though the artworks detail many unfortunate circumstances, and sometimes his artwork depicting disease and veterinary practice is not for the squeamish!
‘Shyers’ by Edward Mayhew [EM/1/2/1]
There is a great deal more to come and more decisions to be made on what to scan. You can also follow the highlights of the collection on Twitter and Facebook where we regularly post updates, explain the functionality and features, and sometimes ask questions for readers to try and help us answer. Most recently we have been stumped with what the disease ‘Chewgore’ could be, as mentioned in the journal ‘The Veterinarian’, the writers are perplexed themselves.
The Chewgore in Sheep, from ‘The Veterinarian’ Volume 3, Issue 6, June 1830
Please let us know what you think! We value your feedback on your experience with the site. Feel free to join in with tasks like suggesting tags to enhance the searching the collection for other readers. We may one day be able to search within the actual text of printed works with OCR (optical character recognition) technology; though we will keep you posted on this.
I am hoping to get more involved with promoting the works that I interact with; I will post about my unusual and interesting finds as I scan my way through the collections. The site is filling up fast so I know we won’t be short of things to talk about.
If you are interested, then don’t hesitate to visit the site here. To make sure you don’t miss any of the highlights of the collection, follow our Facebook Page, Twitter account @RCVSKnowledge and also follow the hashtag #vetarchives.
I thought before I leave my role here, and go off to study for my MA in Archives and Records Management, it would be a nice idea to share snippets of my favourite finds and favourite materials that I’ve had the pleasure of working with during my time with RCVS Knowledge’s historical collections.
For those of you who also follow us on social media you might be aware of some of the fun we’ve had using hashtags whilst photographing our daily finds and tasks.
I have enjoyed never having to beat the Monday blues whilst I’ve been working here. In fact Mondays have been every colour imaginable and I’ve been celebrating that with #marbledmondays on our Instagram account
Highlights of our #marbledmondays photographs on Instagram
It didn’t stop with Mondays – #tinytuesdays, #waybackwednesdays, #throwbackthursdays and #finebindingfridays, have all allowed me to engage with our library and archive collections in new ways, and of course, to show them off!
More photographs showing off our collections!
I have also adventured to far-flung lands alongside fascinating people, such as Captain Richard Crawshay, who authored the book The Birds of Tierra del Fuego (published in 1907). His letters are now transcribed and can be viewed via our Digital Collections website here.
Page from letter to Frederick Smith from Richard Crawshay, Useless Bay [Inutil Bay], Tierra del Fuego, [Chile], 29 Jan 1905 [FS/3/3/3/1]
This is one of my favourite quotes from Crawshay’s letters (pictured above):
“The most sensational birds I have – to me at least are a tiny Reed Warbler no larger than a Bumble Bee, a tiny black wren from the depths of the forest at the entrance of Admiralty Sound, a tiny tiny owl from the forest weighing exactly 3 oz, probably the largest bird of prey in the island – an Eagle measuring 5ft 91/2 inches from wing tip to wing tip…”
One of my favourite people to get to know was Henry Gray, an early 20th century veterinary surgeon. I am cataloguing his papers and have learnt so much through the words of his correspondents. Henry Gray’s papers have given me a great insight into the plight of the veterinary professional in the 1900’s. Through Gray and his peers I have learnt about the veterinary surgeon’s tremendous work ethic and their incredible anatomical, clinical, pathological and physiological knowledge. One of the most interesting letters I found in Gray’s papers was one where he had a response from a librarian from the Royal Society of Medicine after requesting Ivan Pavlov’s research into canine hysteria and neurasthenia. It put Gray’s life into a greater context for me – imagine being able to reach out to Pavlov himself for your own research?
Letter to Henry Gray from H E Powell, Librarian, Royal Society of Medicine, 9 Oct 1929
The most recent exciting discovery was a batch of finely detailed 19th century artworks which the archivist found tucked away in a cupboard. The pieces have now been carefully restored and we have an online shop where you can pick up a select few as prints! (You can visit the shop here: shop.rcvsvethistory.org) I enjoyed getting to digitise these amazing paintings and drawings, even though the art is as equally beautiful as it is grisly! Ovet the next few months, we are going to be asking our Instagram and Twitter audience to help us identify the parts of the anatomy we can’t, so stay tuned for that! There are many other amazing artists in our collection and it was interesting for me to find out that some of them had actually practiced as veterinary surgeons too, such as Edward Mayhew and John Roalfe Cox.
Anatomical artwork by Joseph Perry, January 1835. From the Field Collection.
A page from John Roalfe Cox’s sketchbook
Thank you to everyone who has been following along with us. I have had so many great experiences in my time working for RCVS Knowledge. I’ve been here over a year and there is still so much more to discover. I’m so glad to have had a hand in sharing the important historical value of such an amazing profession.
-Helena-
