Animating the archives

(Sally Todd) For our final session with the Shelford Dementia Support Group, everyone invented the wonderful story of Taffy and the Stork’s Nest.

We started with a clay model of Addenbrooke’s hospital and decided that a miner called Taffy got a job at Addenbrooke’s to clean the chimney. Amazingly, John, the visiting pianist had been the quantity surveyor in 1967 when the chimney was built and remembers how people who lived in Long Road came home from their holidays to find an enormous new structure behind their gardens.

(by Sally Todd)

We met again with the Shelford Dementia Support Group and together with Steve’s support, everyone created a beautiful funny story with the clay. The highly sociable session involved making a clay elephant and a clay model of Frank who became the protagonist of the tale……a tale of a journey to Africa on Frank’s pension where he met a baby elephant on safari playing in the mud. Frank gave the baby elephant called Dumbo a bath to clean him up then took him back to Nellie the mother elephant and offered her a dead fly biscuit when she really wanted a bun!…so the big elephant bit him on the leg and he had to sit down and he thought, I need to go to the bunnery to buy her a bun…and see the doctor! so Dumbo flapped her big ears and flew Frank to the doctor where Frank remembered he was a good cook and made his own iced bun to give to Nellie who said sorry and they became firm friends.

(by Sally Todd) We started our next session for the Shelford Dementia Support Group with a potted history of Addenbrooke’s Hospital by Archivist Hilary Ritchie who also brought some objects in to share with the group. We looked at nurses badges, belts and bonnets and wondered about the reliability of the old blood pressure gauge. The talk prompted thoughts about care and the hospital.

I’ve been in Addenbrooke’s for three operations… they looked after me in there and every patient had their own nurse. Ray

I worked in the female wards. I looked after the patients and they were happy to employ me, I was the only male carer . Frank

The morning was full of unexpected anecdotes including pet guinea pigs being taken in to a London hospital in a bicycle basket to comfort patients and the announcement by Ray that he had installed the first telephone at the new Addenbrooke’s site in 1958!

Wonderful creations emerged from the clay; a baby bath, medicine bottles, pestle and mortars, guinea pigs and pigs too, as well as cats and elephants!

I used to enjoy carpentry and loved doing this. It made me concentrate and focus on what I was doing. It was good exercise for my fingers as well and I found it therapeutic. Frank

(By Sally Todd) Theatre-maker Steve Tiplady joined me to begin our sessions with the Shelford Dementia Support Group. We spent a wonderful playful morning chatting with participants and their carers as we all explored the properties of clay.  In no time at all, models were made of roller coasters, dragons, castles, a barbecue with a puffer fish and even the new train station for Addenbrooke’s!

(by Sally Todd) Over two days in April we had the pleasure and privilege of working with a group of young carers from the Carers Trust Cambridgeshire, inviting them to engage with the Addenbrooke’s museum.

Hilary the Archivist gave an introduction to John Addenbrooke’s legacy and then, with a nod to the ancient Greek Gods of medicine and healing and thinking of young carers as modern day heroes, we drew inspiration from the collection and created some amazing and eclectic images around the theme of medicine and health.

The group spent time experimenting with different art materials and had the additional excitement of a visit downstairs to the basement archive where they tried on nurses cloaks and had a closer look at objects in the collection.

Work from the two projects with classes of children from Queen Edith’s Primary School and St Philip’s Primary School has now been drawn together for an exhibition in the Treatment Centre Corridor. This is on display until June 1st.

It includes a collection of imaginary insects with special healing powers and a panel of bedsheets with words to comfort:

Thinking about the past has led naturally to thoughts of the future too for some of the children at Queen Edith’s Primary School. Here’s Aleena’s nurse of the future and Kayleigh’s potion poem written in response.

Ben is fascinated with spiders and was inspired by the idea of bugs and healing in medicine. He wanted to make a hospital for all the sick spiders he finds.

There are two dead bugs inside the giant spider…bloodletting. He has teared up to one million creatures with his bang on deadly fangs. The spider’s pale blue blood shall enter the patient’s body and the blood will sense where the person is injured and shall go to the cut, wait for a couple of days, and shall heal.

Ruminating over X-rays from an earlier session left its trace on depictions of staff and patients and the curiosity of what lies under the skin:

(by Jane Monson) I invited the children to think what they would you like to find in their pocket after a challenging operation, either as a surgeon or a patient. Perhaps a scene portrayed in a few carefully chosen words that you wouldn’t normally see in a corridor, ward, waiting room or operating theatre? We asked the children to write a pocket poem for anyone they felt needed one, whether working or waiting.

Many of the responses were touchingly tender,  based on landscapes both here and abroad. Archie wrote the sea is blue, I wish it was glued onto me whilst Adi wrote of a sun set where the wind blows leaves away and field grass moves like waves.

(by Jane Monson) Using two of the medical instruments chosen by each child in the museum archive and drawn or painted later in the sessions with Sally, we asked the children to form pairs and create a conversation between the two objects from their point of view. Drama, humour, and ordinary yet bizarre interactions followed.

I am the red and black cloak of Nurse Frost...with the wind in me as she runs off down the corridor.... and I am angry because I keep being dropped on the floor!

I am suppository. What’s your name? Syringe....

You can only imagine how the conversation continued between these two objects! The wonderful twist to the poetry here was in the drama Tom and Jackson proceeded to take to the floor and be each object.

This was one example of many where the humour, drama and poetry collided and it was moving and inspiring to see so many of the children take on the task with such wit and enthusiasm. The other side of the tale was also memorable - some children who said I can’t do words ended up trying and finding that they could do them beautifully.

(by Jane Monson) Although without exception the children feasted upon the opportunity to create drawings, paintings and collages, one of my challenges in these two sessions we had together was to harness that energy and focus based on the images they had really enjoyed making and turn their hands and minds towards playing with language. While many were confident with verbal responses, others were less confident about putting those words to paper. I was curious to learn how they would respond to image and words at the same time, as well as to see how they were both stimulated and challenged when presented with words as another material.

Some had fun creating pictures with language by placing words or phrases directly on images they had already made:

(by Jane Monson) As a poet, to be invited to take part in a community-based project which focused on a medical theme was immediately inspiring. From the beginning, I loved hearing about and seeing the artistic responses of the children to the Hospital Museum and then working with those responses back at the school where we set about playing with words, images and ideas.

When I asked the children: ‘what do poetry and medicine have in common?’ this is what quickly came back:

poetry calms you down
poetry is healing like medicine
poetry makes you feel better

I set out to work with the children as a poet, but my role morphed unexpectedly into so much more than simply bringing my primary practice to the project. The responses of the children enabled us all to think again about how poetry comes to be poetry in the first place and how it relates to so many other forms and sensibilities, among them painting, drama, humour, frustration, fear, hopes and triumphs.

Instead of just working towards a polished poem or poems at the end of the project, the children opened up the machine of poetry, threw it apart and restyled/remade it completely. When I mentioned that William Carlos Williams (a doctor then poet) had said the poem was a small machine made of words, the children understood why immediately: a machine is made of different parts and it all has to work. A poem too. The whole in the end didn’t matter as much as the parts. Understanding how to write a poem didn’t matter as much as each child learning to play with one, two or more words and seeing what they could do with language and/or images.

As a way of playing with words found in the Museum itself, we read aloud the ‘Bedmaking Procedures’ (themselves set out uncannily like verse and noted as such by one of the children) and invited the children to make their own bed sheets including words that would comfort them:

(By Sally Todd). Following their visit to Addenbrooke’s last week, class four at Queen Edith’s Primary School have plenty of questions about the hospital in the early days:

(By Sally Todd) As with our group from St Philips Primary School, we revisited the theme of insects and healing. Inspired by the museum’s amazing leeches jar and the role of leeches in medicine, we asked the children to invent their own insect healers that might help the medical profession in the future.

(by Sally Todd) We’re now working with Queen Edith’s Primary school and in our introductory session, invited Class Four to visit the museum and explore what’s in the collection. Through direct drawing, the children spent time actively looking at the weird and wonderful display of artefacts. Interesting juxtapositions and tiny details emerged in their drawings, revealing clues about the history of medicine and of Addenbrooke’s.hospital.

(by Sally Todd) For our final workshop together we focused on the people at Addenbrooke’s; from the founder and pioneering medical staff in the museum photographs to the many people involved there today, Nearly everyone too felt connected to the hospital in some way, over half of the class were born there or knew someone who worked there or had been a patient at Addenbrooke’s.

We thought together who they might be and made a list. Many of the children were struck by hearing that there are special dogs that can visit patients and created a new role for them too:

Mr Brook, Trolley Man/Woman, Cook, Hilary, Midwife, Limb Clinic People, Magicians, Clowns, Pharmacist, Artist, Waiter, Doctor Bandage, Arm Doctor, Child Nurse, Foot Doctor, Hairdresser, Dog Doctor…..Dogtor

My Nanna used to work there and help men and women who were very old
My Nan used to work at Burger King in the hospital
My brother was born in Addenbrooke’s
My aunty works at DIB…she does all types of stuff mostly in the theatre

We wondered how many people work in Addenbrooke’s today?

I think there’s about one thousand people an hour going into Addenbrooke’s…Four thousand…five hundred and forty-five…one million

(by Sally Todd) The next session with St Philips class of seven and eight year olds was at the school, and I was curious to find out which objects from the museum visit had made an impression on them. The children didn’t hesitate to tell me:

the bun, the big book, the microscope, leeches, the wheelchair, dolls, the stethoscope, the tonsil gun, cups, the teddy in nurse uniform, the legs and arms, the special nurse cloak, the old music player, the knife thing with sharp spikes, the thing you put your head in, the spoons…..oh we forgot the poison, the trophy, the pill maker that looks like a nut cracker.….I was surprised to see the soldier’s sketch book there!

I asked the children if we could create our own ‘medical’ cabinet in the school and to make what they thought would be important to go inside it, for now and into the future.

Bold and detailed objects, inspired by the museum archive, were created with significant adaptations such as the ‘medic-scope’, the ‘treetmants’ book and ‘Adam Brooks poisons’

By Sally Todd

A class of six to eight year old children from St Philips Primary School were invited along to celebrate the opening of Addenbrookes museum and take a closer look at some of the extraordinary objects now on view in the Hospital. Accompanying them on their visit was the Hospital Archivist Hilary Ritchie with her fascinating insights and knowledge of the collection. I asked the children to draw an object that intrigued puzzled or surprised them. They drew microscopes, surgical knives, stethoscopes and also:

The grabby thing that lifts the baby's head Alma

The machine in the olden times that flicked your tooth out Leas

The forty-two year old 'cake'.......its more interesting when its more years old to keep something!