Hickman, Henry Hill M.R.C.S. (1800-1830), pioneer of anaesthesia

Original material, facsimiles and research notes, mostly formerly held in the Western Manuscripts Department's Autograph Letters Sequence.

1824-1976

1 file and 2 volumes

MS.7625: nos. 4-7 transferred to Library holdings from the 1947 Wellcome Historical Medical Museum anaesthesia exhibition, original provenance not recorded. nos. 9-10, and presumably nos. 1 and 3 also, purchased from Charavay, Paris, May 1932. nos. 12-13 presented by Dr. W.G.H. Leslie of Australia, a descendant of Hickman, July 1967 and nos. 14-16 probably presented by Dr. W.D.A. [Dennis] Smith of Leeds University in 1976 (apparently neither batch of material was accessioned formally). The originals of MSS.8506-8507 belong to Dr Leslie amd were lent to Dr Smith who supplied the Institute with copies (with Dr. Leslie's permission) in 1977; no formal accession details were recorded.

At Wellcome Collection: The Wellcome Archives (WA) document the "rediscovery" of Hickman's work and the exhibition on him held at the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in 1930 (WA/HMM/EX/B). MS.6105, a notebook kept by John Lechmere, a half-pay naval officer living at Hereford, records a visit to Hickman in 1822. See MSS.7984-7986, 8124, 8149-8151, 8312-8315, 8348, 8442-8443, 8530, 8534 and 8573-8574 for more material relating to the medical historian and librarian Charles John Samuel Thompson (1862-1943) who was heavily involved in the rediscovery of Hickman's work. The papers of the anaesthetist Sir Robert Macintosh (PP/RRM) include material on the history of anaesthesia and contain a file on Hickman (PP/RRM/E.5/4).

Database description transcribed from Richard Aspin and Christopher Hilton's typescript supplement to S.A.J Moorat's Catalogue of Western Manuscripts.