Archival Sounds

A Wellcome Addition

Recently, the Archival Sound Recordings site launched two new collections: Records and Record Players and Scientists’ Lives.

The bulk of our initial offering in Scientists’ Lives is taken up with an oral history of the Medical Research Council’s Common Cold Unit in Harvard Hospital in Salisbury, south-west England.  A unique establishment in British medicine from its formation in 1957 to its closure in 1990, the Common Cold Unit combined laboratory research in virology with epidemiological work and experimental clinical studies on volunteers.

As an addition to this collection of interviews, we present a transcript of a Witness Seminar about the Common Cold Unit held at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine (now the Wellcome Library) in 1997.  It features testimony from many of the people interviewed in Scientists’ Lives, and crucially provides a chronological guide to the history of the Unit.  The transcript begins on page 212 of this web document.

Niall Anderson, Metadata Editor

The Secret History of the African Writers' Club

On our content information pages, we describe the African Writers’ Club recordings as “invaluable to students of African Studies, and in particular to students of the rich vein of creative writing in Africa in the middle of the 20th century.”  While this is true, it does not begin to explain the story of how these recordings came to be made, and why.

While the first broadcasts were made in 1962, the story actually begins in 1950, with the establishment in Paris of a body called The Congress of Cultural Freedom.  The Congress was the brainchild of the US National Security Council, which had recently shifted its European priorities from de-Nazification to anti-Communism.  One of the first fruits of this change of focus was the establishment of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and it was the CIA who would bankroll the Congress...