by Alicia Thornton

The prospect of finding a link between my own work (infectious disease epidemiology) and the collections in the UCL Art Museum seemed somewhat daunting at first. However, looking through the collections catalogue, I recently came across a portrait which instantly intrigued me.

The artist is Walter Westley Russell, a painter born in Essex in 1867.[1] The reason I was drawn to this portrait is the setting in which the man is pictured. He appears to be in a laboratory and is depicted standing next to a dog which seems to be either undergoing some kind of surgery, or is the subject of an experiment. As a scientist, I was interested in finding out what this experiment or surgery had been about and why the subject, Professor EH Starling, had been pictured in this way.

Starling became Professor of Physiology at UCL in 1899, where he became well known as an enthusiastic experimenter. One of his most important discoveries was the role of a hormone in pancreatic secretion. Pavlov had previously conducted experiments, for which he later won a Nobel Prize, showing that when gastric acid was present in the large intestine pancreatic juices were secreted.  He believed that this was entirely under the control of the nervous system:  when gastric acids were present in the intestine, the nerves sent a message from the walls of the intestine to the pancreas, via the brain, and the juices were released.

Starling, along with his brother-in-law William Bayliss, conducted an experiment where they stripped away the nervous tissue surrounding the large intestine. They found that when the nerves were removed the pancreatic secretions still occurred. This raised the possibility that the secretions were controlled by another system (what we now know to be the endocrine system). Starling and Bayliss hypothesised that the presence of gastric acids in the intestine caused the release of some kind of soluble substance into the blood which in turn cause the pancreatic secretions to occur. To test this theory their next experiment was to remove a small portion of the lining of the intestine of a dog. They crushed the tissue, added acid to it (mimicking the presence of gastric acid in the intestine), and injected it into the blood of an anesthetized dog. Pancreatic secretion duly followed.  So clearly the nervous system was not responsible for triggering these secretions and in fact the intestinal tissue did not even need to be in situ for the secretions to occur. This indicated to Starling and Bayliss that some substance was produced by the intestinal tissue, in response to the acid, and was carried in the blood to the pancreas where release of pancreatic juices was then stimulated. They named this substance, produced by the intestine and carried in the blood stream, secretin.[2] This was only the second ever description of any kind of endocrine substance.

Starling has, in fact, been credited with the introduction of the word hormone into the English language. After a dinner at a Cambridge college he and his colleague, the biologist William Hardy, were discussing their recent work and agreed that there was a need for an appropriate word for those agents which are released into the blood and cause activity elsewhere in the body. They consulted classicist WT Vesey who provided them for the Greek word for “I excite” or “I arouse”: ormao. Thus they settled on the word hormone which Starling first used in a lecture at the Royal College of Physicians in 1905.[3]

E.H. Starling, by Walter Westley Russell (1926). UCL Art Museum Collections; Image supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

It appears therefore, that the dog in this painting is a reference to Starling and Bayliss’ important experiment and their discovery of secretin. However, it is possible that the importance of Starling and Bayliss’ discovery is not the sole reason that the professor is pictured with a dog in his portrait. Bayliss and Starling conducted many of their experiments as demonstrations to students. Unbeknownst to them their classes had been infiltrated by two women from Sweden who were anti-vivisection activists. The women believed that the dog had not been appropriately anesthetised and showed also that the dog had been used for more than one experiment contravening the 1876 Cruelty To Animals Act. The testimonies of the women lead to a heated political argument. Bayliss and Starling were never tried under the Act. However, the arguments did not end with politicians, and anti-vivisection campaigners decided to erect a memorial to the dog in Battersea Park with a plaque which read:

In memory of the brown terrier dog done to death in the laboratories of University College in February, 1903, after having endured vivisection extending over more than two months and having been handed from one vivisector to another till death came to his release. Also in memory of the 232 dogs vivisected at the same place during the year 1902. Men and women of England, how long shall these things be?

Medical students in London were angered by the plaque, believing that vivisection was vital to their studies and the advancement of medical science. They repeatedly attacked the memorial and protested against it. The climax of what is now known as “The Brown Dog Affair” occurred in December 1907 where riots broke out both in Battersea and central London and the medical students clashed with police and anti-vivisection campaigners. Eventually the council took the decision that the cost of policing the memorial to the Brown Dog was too great and the statue was quietly removed in 1909.[4]

Starling is pictured in his portrait conducting an experiment on a small brown dog. Whether this is the same brown dog which caused the riots cannot be known but certainly conducting these experiments was central to Starling’s contribution to medical science, whilst also angering many who believed that what he had done was wrong. Discussions about using animals in scientific experiments continue today and though there are now a range of alternatives, animals are still used in certain circumstances. My own research uses data from human subjects. Like all clinical research, it must be approved by an independent ethics committee before being conducted. While the process of having a research study approved may sometimes seem painful and tedious, stories like this one remind us of the importance of having research proposals reviewed by those who may have different attitudes to those of the scientists involved in experimental research.

References

[1]  Oxford dictionary of National biography:  http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35887

[2]  Bayliss, W.M. & Starling, E.H. (1902) The mechanism of pancreatic secretion. Journal of Physiology 28: 325-353.

[3]  Henderson, J. (2005) Ernest Starling and Hormones: An Historical Commentary. Journal of Endocrinology 184: 5-10.

[4] Mason, P. (1997)  The Brown Dog Affair.  Two Sevens Publishing.

by Sarah Chaney

Henry Scott Tuke was a student at the Slade School of Fine Art in the 1870s, winning a three-year-scholarship in 1877: sadly, this was twenty years too early for his prize-winning work to have made it into the UCL Art Museum. The Tuke family had a number of connections with UCL, however: Henry’s elder brother was a medical student at University College Hospital.

Although biographies of the Newlyn painter often mention his doctor father, little is made of this connection – Henry remains a figure of interest for art and cultural historians, and his father for historians of medicine. Yet parallels between art and psychiatry were often emphasised in the late nineteenth century. Daniel Hack Tuke, Henry’s father, was a governor at Bethlem Royal Hospital from the 1870s until his death in 1897, and art was an important topic at the asylum, for patients and staff alike. Daniel’s obituary in the Hospital Magazine, Under the Dome, concentrated on his well-known son, noting that:

The early death of his eldest son, who was a brilliant student of University College Hospital, was a painful blow to Dr. Tuke, but no doubt he found some amount of solace under this loss in the successful career as a painter of his other son, Mr. H.S. Tuke. The latter has been a foremost member of the Newlyn School, and like most of his brother artists of that school of painters, has lived a good deal on his boat on the coast of Cornwall, and, we remember, that about three seasons since, Dr. Tuke, upon his first visit to the Hospital, after his autumn holiday, said to the present writer that he had much enjoyed it, having in good part spent it with his son upon the latter’s studio-boat. [1]

From this remark, it would seem that Henry and his father were close. It may be interesting to pay closer attention to the fact that Henry Scott Tuke is best remembered today for his Impressionist style paintings of male nudes, becoming a cult figure in gay cultural circles. Was this connection also made in his life? Certainly, homosexuality (or ‘sexual inversion’ as it was more commonly known at this time) was a topic of interest for many psychiatrists, among whom Daniel Hack Tuke was extremely prominent. In Austria, for example, forensic psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing devoted much of his magnum opus, Psychopathia Sexualis (first published in 1886) to the topic, later becoming a fervent opponent of Paragraph 26, which outlawed homosexual acts in German and Austrian law.

English sexologist, Havelock Ellis, meanwhile, had been mentored by Hack Tuke during his own days as a medical student. In the early 1890s Ellis and writer (and self-confessed ‘invert’) John Addington Symonds corresponded about a book they wished to write together on the topic. Ellis complained about the lack of interest from his medical colleagues, in particular that Daniel Hack Tuke himself “wrap[ped] a wet blanket around it [the topic], with averted eyes”. Symonds had similarly been annoyed in a letter to his friend, Edmund Gosse, that when he tried to ‘draw’ Tuke on the topic of ‘sexual inversion’ he “found that he preferred to discourse on ‘hypnotism’.”[2]

Symonds and Gosse were both certain of the ‘character’ of Henry Scott Tuke’s art (i.e. homosexual). Perhaps this was also why Symonds felt that Daniel would be a natural ally, in addition to the doctor being an old friend of his father’s. In 1891, he sent the psychiatrist his philosophical text on homosexuality, A Problem in Modern Ethics, but informed Havelock Ellis that Tuke “shrinks from entertaining the question in any practical way.”[3] A year later, Symonds was made ‘angry’ by Daniel’s attitude, seeing it as evidence of the refusal of English Medical Psychologists to discuss the topic at all. Tuke, Symonds claimed, was “unscientifically prejudiced to the last degree.”[4] Today, we may well feel that Symonds’ anger was justified, and that Daniel Hack Tuke should have lent his well-known name to a project, in support of his son. Or we may feel that the “sentimental” psychiatrist (as his colleagues described him) was the very worst person for Symonds and Ellis to approach, and that the topic of sexual inversion might, to him, have appeared personally painful. He may have worried that his involvement might reflect badly on his son’s career or, alternatively, he might not have regarded the topic as falling into the field of pathology at all. We can conclude, however, that Ellis and Symonds felt that Daniel Hack Tuke’s personal connections should encourage a commitment to exploring homosexuality both medically and politically, and that the quiet, serious doctor did not.

He did, however, keenly support his son’s career, attending exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Art – and, perhaps, at the Slade before that. While there is no work by Henry Scott Tuke himself in the UCL Collection, the Art Museum includes work by his teachers. The artist studied under Sir Edward Poynter, depicted here in a portrait by Alphonse Legros, another of Henry’s teachers.

Sir Edward Poynter by Alphonse Legros (1837 – 1911) from the UCL Art Museum

by Suzanne Harvey

Apes in Art

For anyone interested in images of primates in the visual arts, Solly Zuckerman’s seminal book The Ape in Myth and Art is a must-read. Hidden in the back pages amidst the postscript is Ohara Koson’s print, Trained Monkey Looking at an Insect, somewhat inaccurately described as a “Chinese water colour of a monkey sniffing a flower, unknown artist.”  It is in fact a woodblock print of a trained Japanese macaque (a species better known for its preference for bathing in hot springs) looking at a bee, and can be viewed at the UCL Art Museum.  Koson is one of the best known artists of the Japanese Shin Hanga or ‘new prints’ movement, and 257 of his prints are listed by the Hanga Gallery. But what of the ape subject who appears in this portrait?

Whilst the pink face is natural, the pink waistcoat certainly is not. As he is described as trained, it seems likely that Koson’s monkey is part of the tradition of Sarumawashi, or monkey dancing, which has been a Japanese tradition for over a thousand years. The concept is so ingrained in society that there exists a single noun, 猿回し, meaning ‘showman who trains performing monkeys’.

Apes in Museums

Whilst these performing monkeys were trained to mimic human behaviours on stage, Koson’s print depicts a tethered, costumed animal following its urge to be inquisitive – a natural, rather than trained, ‘human’ quality. Do we need to train monkeys to demonstrate human-like traits? As various primate species have been shown to use such complex behaviours as deceit and manipulation, as well as the ability to learn, play and communicate, I would say no. Yet, when exploring the representations of primates in UCL museums and collections, anthropomorphism arises as a clear theme. There are of course many examples of primate specimens, including baboons and macaques, mounted to reflect their natural behaviour in the Grant Museum of Zoology, but the presence of primates in UCL museums isn’t limited to the zoological collections. As well as the Art Museum’s trained macaque, at the Petrie Museum, there are figurines of baboons playing harps, drinking beer and even performing gymnastics.

From images of performing monkeys, to figurines depicting physical feats monkeys could never achieve, each museum contains objects invaluable to researchers interested in social attitudes towards primates. These objects provoke unexpected and interesting questions: for instance, why might Ancient Egyptians have decorated their homes with beer-drinking baboons? Look out for my next post to find out why…

by Felicity Winkley

Initially, my response to the challenge of finding a link between my research and the zoological specimens in the Grant Museum was one of dread and panic. Such a thing could simply not be done – it would be impossible to engage a member of the public for long enough to travel the conversational distance from a dissected Thylacine to British archaeology. On closer inspection, however, I was to find that the museum which houses Grant’s collection of some 67,000 zoological specimens, is not, in fact, dissimilar to those great anthropological collections that were also assembled during the 19th century. The shadowy corners and densely-packed glass cases are reminiscent, certainly, of those at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, where the shelves overflow with ethnological artefacts.

And yet the similarities go beyond the simply aesthetic. Both Robert Edmund Grant ( 1793-1874  – pictured left) and Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers (1827-1900 – pictured below) were undoubtedly, if unconsciously, influenced by a long-established tradition of collecting in England, which since the 17th century had been a gentlemanly pursuit acceptable to the social elite [1]. Indeed, for ambitious scholars it was even a method of propelling oneself up the social charts. Elias Ashmole (1617-1692) was the son of a saddler, but with a good eye and some wily investing he was able to accumulate a collection that when bequeathed to Oxford University (along with its own custom-made premises), would provide a lasting legacy to maintain both the collection and his own prestige [1]. But Ashmole was only one of any number of ‘Antiquarians’ as these collectors were soon to become known; men who, for Sweet, “were important actors in that explosion of print and ideas, that thirst for knowledge and understanding with some have called the British Enlightenment” [2].

The rise of the antiquarian popularised the collection of all kinds of objects and artefacts, from coins and medals, to maps and even fossils; the over-arching motivation was simply a thirst for information about the past, and particularly information that was not provided by the historical record. This lack of concern for the ‘what’ that was being studied, often meant that focus was instead placed upon the ‘where’, so that authors would compile an in-depth study of the local parish or county – a regional framework which brought their work into obvious connection with natural historians compiling similar studies. The connection between antiquaries and natural historians was cemented further still by their agreement on epistemological models, and a sympathetic “culture of inquiry” according to Sweet [2].

In order to find a link between my own research and the Grant Museum collections, I determined to find out whether this undeniable spirit of discovery which so connected antiquarians and natural historians during the 17th and 18th century persisted into the 19th century also – and I was very happy to discover that it did. Whilst the methodology had been modernised into a recognisable early archaeology, and the investigative locations had moved from the local county to the more exotic, there was still an undeniable relationship between antiquarian and natural historical research. Just as the history of the local parish had been a relative unknown several hundred years previously, by the 19th century researchers had begun travelling further afield to collect archaeological information alongside samples of foreign flora and fauna. And this is where Darwin comes in.

Charles Darwin (1809-1882) had studied under Robert Grant during the 1820s and was much influenced by his ideas; however, his focus was by no means limited to the comparative anatomical interest they both shared. Written records show that even later on in his career, Darwin was contributing to funding for voyages that would provide evidence for archaeological investigations as well as natural-historical studies. A trip, funded in part by the Royal Society (then The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge), to Borneo in 1878, had the archaeological aim of finding evidence for early human occupation, but plainly also had great implications for Darwin and his colleague Alfred Russell Wallace as a potential source for proving the evolution of anthropoid apes [3]. Wallace had already visited Borneo in 1855, where his observation of orangutans native only to that island and neighbouring Sumatra, prompted his composition of the very paper that would inspire Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Darwin pledged a sum of twenty pounds to the voyage [3]. Any discovery, whether made by an archaeologist, anatomist, collector or naturalist, was seen as a contribution to enlightenment. As testament to the limitless horizons of this quest for knowledge, signing off his letter, Darwin adds:

“I wish someone as energetic as yourself [John Evans] would organise an expedition to the triassic lacustrine beds in S. Africa, where the cliffs are said to be almost composed of bones.”

Evidently, he was already planning the next adventure! [3]

[1] Swann, M. (2001) Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press

[2] Sweet, R. (2004) Antiquaries: The Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain London: Hambledon and London (pp. xiv)

[3] Sherratt, A. (2002) Darwin among the archaeologists: The John Evans nexus and the Borneo Caves Antiquity 76 pp.151-157