Catalogue descriptions cannot always fully describe the breadth of contents within collection items, especially with administrative records which can contain a multitude of facts and figures. This week’s blog presents the Edinburgh District Board of Control Report, 1914-1923 (LHB44/3/10), part of the Bangour Village Hospital collection, which contains a fine collection of photographs printed on good quality paper bound into the volume.
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| Orthopaedic curative workshop |
These cover the period when the Hospital was used to treat soldiers from the First World War and include images of a soldier being stretchered off a train which has arrived at the Hospital’s own station, ambulances being loaded, and pictures of daily life for patients and staff. The main treatments shown are electro-therapeutics and orthopaedics and there are several images of many soldiers gathered in open spaces and in the Bangour shop, apparently in good spirits. The pages of the report are also twice the size of the previous volumes at approximately A4 size. It therefore serves to be both informative and an advertisement for the treatments used; a complete rehabilitation programme for those who often returned from the battlefields with broken bodies and minds.
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| Open air concert |
The two images selected for the blog are of a crowd of soldiers and nurses watching an open air concert, and of the orthopaedic curative workshops, where patients carried out tasks as part of their recuperation, such as woodwork to improve their dexterity.
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