Margaret Rowbottom

The following is an interim description which may change when detailed cataloguing takes place in future:

Papers of and relating to Margaret Rowbottom, including research notes, correspondence, notes on exhibitions, off-prints, copies of the Friends of the Wellcome Institute Newsletter, card index and personal material.

c.1940-1990s

Uncatalogued: 5 transfer boxes

Received in May 2000 from Dr Rowbottom's god-daughter Gwyneth Love of Southfields, London, via John Symons, who was the Rare Books Curator of the library at Wellcome Collection.

Dr. Margaret Esther Rowbottom was born in 1908 and graduated with a B.Sc. in Physics from Bedford College, London. In 1933 she became a junior assistant in the Ethnographical section of the Wellcome Museum, following which she took a second B.Sc. in Anthropology and was promoted to the senior scientific staff in 1939.

During the Second World War she served in the WAAF, working in intelligence and being mentioned in dispatches, and completing an M.Sc. in the history of science in her spare time.

She returned to the Wellcome Museum in 1945, taking over at short notice the task of organising the exhibition on anaesthesia with which the Museum was scheduled to reopen in 1946; thereafter, working as principal assistant to the new Director, Dr. Edgar Ashworth Underwood, she organised many major exhibitions and the day to day running of the Museum and its stores.

She was also a moving force in the British Society for the History of Science, serving as vice-president 1959-1962. Her particular research interests were in Robert Boyle and she completed a Ph.D. on his chemical studies in 1955. After her retirement in the early 1960s she concentrated on the history of medical electricity, publishing Electricity and medicine, history of their interaction with Charles Susskind in 1984.

After an active retirement, in which she regularly revisited the Wellcome Building and in 1987 attended the opening of another major exhibition on anaesthesia, forty-one years after hers, she died after a short illness at the age of 91, in November 1999.

An obituary of Dr. Rowbottom by John Symons appeared in Medical History 2000 July; 44(3): 405-406.

At Wellcome Collection:

Administrative papers of the Wellcome Museum are held in the Wellcome Archives collection as WA/HMM.

Papers of Dr. Edgar Ashworth Underwood are held as PP/EAU.

This collection is currently uncatalogued and cannot be ordered online. Requests to view uncatalogued material are considered on a case by case basis. Please contact collections@wellcomecollection.org for more details.