No matter how much you read, plan, or visualise a practical task, nothing beats the actual doing. A book on sailing cannot teach you how to sail; it can explain the parts of a sailboat and how they function, it can offer practical advice on how to launch, steer, and handle the vessel, and it can provide insights related to best practices on the water. But once you place the life-vest over your head and set your foot onboard, all the words in the world cannot prepare you for the practical requirements – the swing of the boom, the tension of the lines, the muscle strength and bodily balance needed. No book can actually teach you how to sail – for that requires embodied experience (muscle memory) and haptic knowledge (acquired through physical action).
As with sailing, medicine is necessarily taught both tactually as well as theoretically; how deeply to cut with a scalpel, the response of healthy vs. swollen tissue to the pressure of a finger, the give of both suture and skin are all necessarily felt as well as seen. Dissection (on the dead), treatment (on simulators), and supervised procedures (on the living) all form part of training that cannot be done via textual or optical education alone. Instead, it is in the DOING that certain necessary skills are learnt.
Such learning is not discipline specific; and, whether terms it ‘practice-based’, ‘grounded’, or simply ‘learning-through-doing’, the primary tenet is that action itself operates as a pedagogical tool: you do, you make a mistake, and you correct. This is why the long-held tradition of apprenticeships remains necessary when training in an artisanal skill; we not only watch and hear – we actually learn both through and in the act of doing, we practice in order to ‘practice’ (apply what has been learnt).
It should thus come as no surprise that my archival work with the UCT Collection has similarly necessitated an aspect of practice – of practical application, correction, and redoing. Despite all my theoretical preparations (reading, plotting, planning) it is only in beginning to process its contents that any real sense of the collection’s needs have arisen. This is unlikely to be news to experienced archivists, but it is also something that is largely taken for granted in in literature on archiving: books on the processing of photographic archives DO repeatedly refer to how the application of certain methods ‘depend’ on the collection itself; but they DO NOT account for the kind of uncertain eeking out that this entails. For an inexperienced ‘lay archivist’ like myself, the lack of general guidelines or universal principles is incredibly frustrating – the omission of a simple ‘do this, not that, always’ leaves me feeling perpetually vulnerable to error, to self-doubt, and to corrections or re-dos.
In broad strokes
I am currently 4 weeks in, with the contents of Drawer 01 having been given accession numbers, partially described, and organised chronologically (divided into decades). I have a hake brush for dusting, a 2B pencil for writing reference numbers on light-coloured cards and a white pastel pencil for the dark-coloured cards. The loose, unmounted photographs have been removed from amongst the mounted ones in order to prevent them from being bent or crushed and from sticking to one another. To conserve them, I have begun to make small open envelopes of archival-grade glassine paper – not a permanent solution but adequate for our needs of short/medium-term protection, it offers transparency for organisation, and it fits into my budget.*
While all these tools and techniques are part of physically dealing with the material, there is also the matter of describing it (of collecting bits of information that will help me know what-is-where in the collection). This process began in MS Excel; but, needless to say, the input was not user-friendly and the outcome was practically illegible. While I did the entirety of Drawer 01 in this format, I decided to shift to MS Access, following Matthew Strauss’s guidance in ‘A Microsoft Alternative to Archivists’ Toolkit‘. After a full week of (re)acquainting myself with this software (designed for database management) and troubleshooting issues via YouTube, a database was developed with subject categories and a ‘form’ for displaying individual records that may be easily searched and filtered. Although getting to this point was tedious (with various categories being made, deleted, remade, edited and re-edited), after a full drawer of trial and error I seem to have found a combination that works for the UCT Collection. At least for now and for my research needs.
The ‘artifical’ chronological order of Drawer 01 is already paying off by revealing groupings that the clinical categorisation of the images miss. Numbering systems, organising principles, and connections across cards are slowly starting to emerge, as are the possible meanings of the scattered numbers on the reverse of the cards. Some of these seem to speak of the patient’s admission into the hospital, some to their entry into a particular ward, some to the photographic department’s own system of numerical reference, while others simply attest to the patient’s age. However, it is the top left corner on the front of the photographic cards that remains the most difficult to decipher. It suggests shifting organising practices applied to the records, with alphanumerical codes stamped, written, scratched out, and replaced over time.
Various Numbers 
Shifting categories
There are documents that remain undated, some are old (19th-century old) while others have visual characteristics reminiscent of 1940s fellows in the collection. Many of the former demonstrate links to the UK – both in descriptive text and in visual content. Some of the cards are directly linked to Prof CFM Saint’s mentor in Newcastle-on-Tyne, Dr James Rutherford Morison who published ‘An Introduction to Surgery’ in 1911 that contains an image featured in the UCT Collection as both a reproduction and an ‘original’ unedited print.
Cards in the UCT Collection 
Rutherford Morison’s book
Evidence of publishing preparations abound in the latter (20th century) portion of the records – there is the use of a signature red pencil, there are series of crop-marks, as well as stamps suggesting images be ‘returned’ to the Department of Surgery. I am keeping these aside for when their doubles pop up in the other drawers so that they can be grouped together at a later stage. Indeed, this is one significant difference between how I am working with the photographic cards and how archivists would works with them: I am not ‘weeding’ the collection – removing and discarding excess material. Usually a trained archivist will deem some records historically irrelevant; for instance, they will discard individual receipts because overall expenditure might be better traced via ledgers or monthly/annual reports. Records may also be discarded if they are deemed to be redundant (often if they are duplicates) or heavily damaged (and thus unlikely to survive time’s endless march). But this is not my plan; indeed, the duplicates in the collection are revealing a tremendous amount, demonstrating contradictions in diagnosis, offering instances of more/less descriptive detail, tracing making and use including publication, education, storage, as well as divergent darkroom processes. Even damage speaks volumes – of imperfect printing, water leakage, ink transfer, or simply ageing. So, for now, I keep and will continue to keep everything.
Drawer 02 is well on its way to being numbered and (partially) described. I am one bottle of Bioplus down, I have sped up my logging time (from 100 to 130 cards per day) and soon its arrangement will begin. Then, on to the next.
Readings
- Bart Beaudin & Don Quick’s Experiential Learning (1995)
- Linda Candy’s ‘Practice-based Research’ (2006)
- Amanda Engineer’s ‘The Archivist’s first month PART 2’ (online)
- Graham Gibbs’s Learning by Doing (1988)
- Colin Harding’s ‘How to Spot a Cabinet Card’ (online)
- Asen Ognyanov Ivanov’s ‘Practice Theory’ (2017)
- Robin Nelson’s Practice as Research in the Arts (2013)
- Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner (1982)
- St Bartholomew’s Hospital Archives’s ‘A Study in Specialism’ (online)
- Samantha Thompson’s ‘What do archivists keep (or not)?’ (online)
- Petra Trnkova’s ‘Familial Relationships of Photographic Doubles’ (2019)
* South Africa does not locally make much archive-grade storage material, which means that most conservation supplies are largely imported. Considering the low value of our currency (not to mention the current pandemic) options are limited. I am grateful to the UCT Pathology Learning Centre for their continuing support in this process.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed are those of the author (Ms Michaela Clark) and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other parties or institutions mentioned. Comments made on this blog may be used for research purposes and be cited as part of the “Curating the Clinical” PhD project.
Curating the Clinical 