Findlay, George William Marshall

The description of the notebooks by R Finlayson, Wellcome Museum of Medical Science, follows:

"The notebooks have been numbered from 1 to 42, but the numerical sequence is not chronological. Nos. 22 and 23 are probably the first and second of the series. In the main, notebooks Nos. 1 to 36 contain abstracts of the medical literature written by Findlay and covering a huge range of topics. Occasional notebooks appear to have a central theme such as viruses, yellow fever, rickettsia, historical or a time sequence (e.g. 1944-46) but others, on first inspection, appear delightfully eclectic. Although much of the material in the notebooks is a culling from the medical literature, small segments of unpublished work, such as tables of incidence of various diseases in West Africa and short case reports of 14 cases of yellow fever, sparsely intersperse the abstracts. A few letters to Dr. Findlay lurk in the notebooks.

Six of the notebooks (Nos. 37-42) are labelled Blackwater Fever, Vols. 1-6. These detail the many case histories of blackwater fever occurring in military personnel in West Africa 1941-45. The notebooks are arranged chronologically, are well-indexed and form a valuable record. The clinical histories and autopsy reports of six of these cases could be matched with six histological preparations in the W.M.M.S. Collection (M 1662-67) that hitherto lacked clinico-pathological date."

From a brief examination of these notebooks it would appear that the ones lower in numerical sequence tend to be more general while the ones with higher numbers concentrate more, if not exclusively, on yellow fever. The notebooks contain a great deal of anthropological and historical material, mainly to do with Africa, as well as items of more purely medical interest. The first entry in each notebook has been used for reference.